La Jornada: “We need to decolonize science”: Micheliny Verunschk

The novel The sound of the roar of the ounce expresses a “very strong concern about the formation and consequences of science” through the case of indigenous children who were taken to Europe in the 19th century as objects of study by two German naturalists. The author, Brazilian Micheliny Verunschk, explained that “those scientists thought they were doing something good, but it was a kidnapping.”

The writer, who was in Mexico to present the text edited by Elefanta Editorial, explained to The Day that the Bavarians Spix and Von Martius took a group of infants “from their land and their family. They were not for a human zoo in Europe, but it was not very different, since they were seen as exotic.”

In 1820 the scientists returned to Munich carrying a boy and a girl torn from their communities. The work contrasts Amazonian knowledge with the grandiloquence of European colonialism and develops a second plot in contemporary Brazil. The sound of the roar of the ounce won the Jabuti Prize, the most outstanding in Brazilian literature.

The historian also mentioned that although science “can be instrumentalized to do evil, we want it to be for everyone, more so for the child who lives in the streets or the old woman who is in her town and needs remedies.

“A universalization of science should have a more compassionate view not only for us, but for our brothers, the animals and plants, because this world is not only ours. We inhabit it together with other beings. We need to decolonize science and also decolonize the awards of scientists.”

Verunschk (Recife, 1972) stated that in the case of kidnapped children “there is an erasure of their history, a silencing of their voices. The girl spoke the Miranha language and the boy, Juri, and they could not communicate with each other, nor did they know Portuguese or German. They are taken as case studies, not as people.”

brutal experience

Two months after their arrival in Europe, the boy died and the girl after four months. It is said that they died of cold. “There is a process of fading, of dehumanization by not being able to communicate with anyone. It was very cold and they were young people who lived in the tropical jungle and the food was also different.”

The narrator argued that science “is based on this oppressive principle that there are beings that are possible to study. The colonial gaze on other cultures, people or territories is always violent, by placing them in different degrees of importance and humanity.”

Furthermore, he warned that “it has a very defined political outlook. There is no neutral science either yesterday or today. It always has a political agenda to fulfill. In its bases and foundations it is at the service of the powerful. I am not saying that science is bad per sebut we have to reveal these oppressive fantasies he adheres to.

“The more we investigate its underlying ideologies, we can have a science that is for everyone, a little more libertarian and not indebted to a less than egalitarian past, which claims to be the owner of all the truth. Yes, it is a way of reaching the truth, but one of its problems is wanting to be totalizing and the world and knowledge are plural. The more it has an opening for other ways of perceiving the world, the closer we can get to a libertarian science and less beholden to fascist ideologies.”

Verunschk commented that the second narrative line is starring a woman who traveled from the north of Brazil to Sao Paulo. “She has difficulties understanding who she is. I built her as a metaphor for the Brazilian who knows his European origins better and is very proud of them, but knows little about his indigenous ancestors and feels ashamed. This is reflected in his body, in his heart, and it will only be better understood when he sees himself reflected in the image of the girl, when he leaves Brazil and sees himself in perspective.”

As a historian, the author was moved by these young people. I knew his images, which I had seen in books, but I didn’t know about his life.

That’s where the book was born, from that moral conflict of not knowing its history. In the absence of bibliography on this case, the narrator dedicated herself to “searching for the cultural marks of their people, their cosmology, customs, myths and oral stories, in order to build an emotional landscape in which they could live.”

Regarding the title, he mentioned that the jaguar or the jaguar is the largest feline on our continent and is found from Texas to Tierra del Fuego, with its multitude of variants and names, and has been present since ancient history. “For our cultures, the jaguar is a figure that transits between the world of the living and the world of the dead. It is very important in various cosmologies, but also today because we have its symbolic power represented in many things.

“There are nearly 300 names in indigenous languages ​​to describe the ounce, because there are black ounces with dark spots, light ones with brown spots, some with longer or narrower heads. For each ounce there is a different name in Tupi, which is a branch of Guaraní.”

Micheliny Verunschk clarified that, in her novel, “the ounce emerges as the symbol of insubordination and rebellion and a certain historical revenge. We are a jaguar continent, an ounce continent, defending ourselves from those who want to subjugate us. This is more or less the role of the ounce in my book.”