THE JAGUAR'S ROAR

A feverish condemnation of normalized Indigenous erasure, and an elegy to two Brazilian children forcibly taken by 19th-century explorers.

In 1817, real-life German naturalists Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius and Johann Baptist von Spix embarked on a three-year expedition to the Amazon River basin. They returned to Munich with a vast collection of specimens: “85 mammals, 350 birds, 2,700 insects, 6,500 plants, and 2 children.” These children were a Miranha girl named Iñe-e and a Juri boy. “This is the story of Iñe-e’s death,” the author writes. The narrative flits non-linearly between Indigenous life in Brazil, Iñe-e’s capture, and various accounts—including those of the scientists, the German nobility, and Iñe-e herself—of Iñe-e’s three months as a “living exhibition piece” before her death. This is Brazilian author Verunschk’s first work to be translated into English, and it reads like an exorcism; words of history, mythology, and imagery spill across the page, mournful, indignant, and carrying deep guilt over the actions of white people. Barbassa, the translator, explains in the introduction how Verunschk’s collage-like language includes “aggressively colloquial Portuguese” and “entirely made-up words” designed to induce the disorientation of violence and colonialism. The result is part archive and part folk tale, braided into an epic prose poem. Passages describing a mystical jaguar accompanying Iñe-e’s spirit are particularly entrancing: “A jaguar is all love, then a leap for the jugular.” However, the book’s lyricism scatters its own urgency. A parallel present-day account of a non-Indigenous woman named Josefa—disturbed by museum lithographs of the abducted children—reads like a cipher for Verunschk’s own process of discovery, unduly refocusing attention on the author’s presence. Although the medium and the message inconsistently cohere, the subject is essential, and the writing is ambitious and energetic.

A potent concoction of research and imagination, encouraging us to reexamine how we construct our own histories.