{"id":46997,"date":"2021-12-07T17:55:31","date_gmt":"2021-12-07T20:55:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/revistazum.com.br\/uncategorized\/a-visao-do-manto\/"},"modified":"2022-06-02T14:34:51","modified_gmt":"2022-06-02T17:34:51","slug":"a-visao-do-manto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistazum.com.br\/en\/revista-zum-21-en\/a-visao-do-manto\/","title":{"rendered":"The vision of the cloak"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Glic\u00e9ria (C\u00e9lia) Tupinamb\u00e1 veste um dos mantos tecidos por ela, ainda inacabado, no territ\u00f3rio ind\u00edgena de Oliven\u00e7a, em Serra do Padeiro, no sul da Bahia. Foto: Fernanda Liberti<\/p><\/div>\n

The story of the Tupinamb\u00e1 cloak is marked by images. I see our culture as a pot thrown to the ground, the pieces scattered all over the place. Now we have to reassemble it as if it were a jigsaw puzzle.<\/p>\n

The memory of the cloak is in our songs. Through them, we have succeeded in rebuilding our identity, understanding our history a little, and looking to the future. One song goes like this:<\/p>\n

The indian* climbed the mountain entirely covered in feathers
\n<\/em>The indian climbed the mountain entirely covered in feathers
\n<\/em>He was, but he is
\n<\/em>He is the king of the jurema.** Then everyone sings loudly:<\/em><\/p>\n

The Tupinamb\u00e1 climbed the mountain entirely covered in feathers
\n<\/em>The Tupinamb\u00e1 climbed the mountain entirely covered in feathers
\n<\/em>He was, but he is
\n<\/em>He is the king of the jurema.<\/em><\/p>\n

We understand from this song that the Tupinamb\u00e1 man is entirely covered in feathers. But how? Only with the cloak. I began to understand that the cloak is alive in our memory. We have always heard about it. The cloak has never ceased to exist in us.<\/p>\n

In 2000, the Tupinamb\u00e1 people agitated for the lands of Oliven\u00e7a to be recognized, which coincided with the arrival of a cloak from Denmark for the Rediscovery Exhibition<\/em> in S\u00e3o Paulo. Dona Nivalda (her indigenous name is Amotara, the mother of Chief Valdelice), who was 67 years old, walked through the exhibition, without a guide, until she stopped before an artifact: \u201cThis is the Tupinamb\u00e1 cloak.\u201d Shortly afterwards, dona Nivalda asked for the cloak to be returned to the village. This had repercussed widely. It gave visibility to our people and triggered the process to mark out the limits to our lands legally. We are still fighting for that.<\/p>\n

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Nivalda Amaral de Jesus observa o manto tupinamb\u00e1 na Mostra do redescobrimento, realizada em S\u00e3o Paulo, em 2000. Foto: Flavio Florido\/Folhapress<\/p><\/div>\n

Every year we celebrate the Feast of S\u00e3o Sebasti\u00e3o, our religious New Year\u2019s eve, in which the encantado [non-human beings, akin to spirits] appears and says how the sea- sons, the plantings, our lives on the land will be that year. In 2006, I decided to make the cloak to give it as gift to the Tupinamb\u00e1 encantados. But how? I had not seen the image yet, but I imagined it, and I had spoken to my father, who was a master of the art of weaving fishing nets, cast nets, the twine, the spindle, the shuttle and everything else. He knew how to make things, and I told him my idea. So he made the shuttle, then the twine.<\/p>\n

At the time, professor Patr\u00edcia Navarro, from the State University of Bahia, came to the village to give talks about history and anthropology and brought along a very old overhead projector. She had some photographs of the cloak and projected them on the wall. I fell in love with that image, savouring the wonderful and beautiful object, and tried to look at the weaves. The image was really bad, but I understood the weave. So, I took some twine, took the measurements and we knocked in the nails. We started weaving, but we didn\u2019t widen the material as we went, so it didn\u2019t spread out as it should.<\/p>\n

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Ory veste uma carapu\u00e7a feita pela m\u00e3e, C\u00e9lia, a partir da fotografia de um artefato encontrado no Museu Nacional da Dinamarca. Foto: C\u00e9lia Tupinamb\u00e1<\/p><\/div>\n

We went out into the yard and pursued the ducks and geese, plucking out the feathers that were mature. And we went about putting together this first cloak. The professor had explained that a cloak had about 10,000 guar\u00e1<\/em> [scarlet ibis] feathers, and ours didn\u2019t have even a thousand. Since we didn\u2019t have enough feathers, we made the cloak in the form of a cocar<\/em> [headdress]. In the photo, there were some things hanging down. I counted seven pendants and applied them to the cloak. We finished it in time for the Feast of S\u00e3o Sebasti\u00e3o.<\/p>\n

The encantado received the gift, and the celebration was really nice. Then we got an invitation from Jo\u00e3o Pacheco at the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, who was organizing the exhibition The First Brazilians<\/em> in Fortaleza, Cear\u00e1, in 2007. They were collecting pieces from indigenous communities and found the cloak issue interesting. The encantado allowed them to take the cloak, provided I made three more for the village. I got worried, but he said that everything has its time, that I was not to hurry.<\/p>\n

So, the cloak went to the exhibition and the encantado left me with the mission to make three more. I didn\u2019t know how to do it, as I would need a lot of feathers. The exhibition took place, but I didn\u2019t manage to produce any more cloaks. I wanted to, the desire was alive within me, but I did not have the means. So, I stopped.<\/p>\n

In 2019, a researcher from the Federal University of Bahia, Nathalie Le Bouler, invited us to give a lecture in France on the non-humans, the encantados. Jessica, my niece, was to present a work on photographs. I still didn\u2019t know that there was a Tupinamb\u00e1 cloak in Europe, it didn\u2019t occur to me, the internet here is a problem. Anyway, Nathalie told me that there was a cloak in the collection of the Quai Branly Museum and they had a borduna<\/em> [stabbing spear] as well, so she requested authorization for our visit. Two Tupinamb\u00e1s in Europe, they had to see the cloak!<\/p>\n

Arriving at the museum, at the door, we were searched and passed through a metal detector. We descended by elevator, passed through another door, another elevator, then someone had a look at the documents, checked in the system, we passed through another security guard and another door until we reached the object. Finally, we had arrived.<\/p>\n

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Manto tupinamb\u00e1 na reserva t\u00e9cnica do Museu do Quai Branly, em Paris, na Fran\u00e7a. Foto: L\u00edvia Melzi<\/p><\/div>\n

I entered a dimension in which I was in the present and in the past, I was on fire. Do you know when your hands get numb, and you feel a tingling sensation? My whole body was like that. My body was present, but my soul was absent. Nathalie was photographing me. If I closed my eyes at that moment, I saw the women sitting there, people with feathers all around them. I saw someone weaving the cloak. What most caught my attention was that they were women. I was in that place, but at the same time, in another. It was confusing. I was in a cosmic agony. My body tingled, and when I closed my eyes, I returned to that time. Three images came to me: one of the woman in the village sitting, making the cloak; another of the cloak on a ship; and a third of the cloak leaving the ship, passing over the quays and going toward an alley, and in this dark street it vanished, disappeared. I had these three images in my cosmic agony.<\/p>\n

But I was there to see the cloak, how the feathers were fixed, the colors and the different types \u2013 of lobos-guar\u00e1s<\/em> [maned wolves], araras<\/em> [macaws], and periquitos<\/em> [parakeets]. The weave is complex, there is no way to see the main structure, it is erased. But you could make it out in the hood because it had lost more feathers there. It was possible to see that it was made of handmade cotton, and on top of it, there was another weave, which reminded me a lot of tucum<\/em> [a species of Palm, Bactris setosa] twine, which is made of the thatch, with twine coming from the leaf, and not from the cotton of the fruit, which makes that wool. I realized all this information and came to notice that these materials were to be found in my community, that this twine had lasted that long because it was sealed with the wax of the jata\u00ed, ti\u00faba<\/em>, and uru\u00e7u<\/em> bees [stingless South American bees].<\/p>\n

It felt very good to be with the cloak. I stayed with it for almost an hour, and decided that when I got home, I would copy it. I left and kept trying to develop the idea.<\/p>\n

In 2019, when it was announced that our cacique, Chief Babau, was to receive an Honorary Doctorate from the State University of Bahia for his knowledge of the indigenous peoples, they started to discuss how he should be dressed for the ceremony. Nothing would be fairer than him going dressed according to his culture. But there was the university protocol, he had to receive the degree dressed in a gown and cap, so they asked for his measurements so they could get them made. Our people kept negotiating the use of a headdress at least, but they only wanted him to be dressed in their way, nothing of our clothing, of our identity. So I said to Agnaldo Patax\u00f3: \u201cWe let them follow their protocol and when he leaves the ceremony, we\u2019ll make a corridor with our fellow Native Brazilians and put the cloak on him. Then we\u2019ll see which photograph is more interesting for the newspapers \u2013 one of our Chief in a gown and cap or one of him wearing the Tupinamb\u00e1 cloak.\u201d He asked for permission from the Chief, who granted it, and I got down to work.<\/p>\n

I waxed the cord, stretched the twine, and threaded the frame, but it was already late at night, and I had to give a class. I searched for scissors to cut the twine and couldn\u2019t find them, so I broke them all with my hand, I stretched half of them and went off to teach. My boy, Ory, who was about two or three at the time, stayed at home. He never got up to mischief or messed with things. When I arrived, I went straight to the frame and saw that there was something strange about the twines \u2013 everything was cut. When Ory woke up, I asked him who had cut the twine. \u201cDid you find the scissors, Ory?\u201d \u201cI didn\u2019t, Mummy, the scissors spoke to me, and they cut the cloak, it wasn\u2019t me, no way, the scissors did it themselves.\u201d I didn\u2019t tell him off, we just had that talk.<\/p>\n

I lay on the couch and kept thinking about it, that the scissors had spoken to him. I went there and stretched all the twine out and while I was weaving, I saw that I was wrong, because I wasn\u2019t knotting, it was all smooth, looking like a sieve. I stopped, not thinking, without knowing where to go. I wanted to make it in the same proportions as the cloak I had seen there in the museum, I didn\u2019t want to make it the way I had done before.<\/p>\n

In March 2020, Professor Augustin de Tugny invited me to speak about indigenous artifacts at a seminar at the Federal University of Southern Bahia, because I had made the cloak for the exhibition The First Brazilians<\/em>. Using Hans Staden\u2019s images of the cloak, I had already recovered the enduape<\/em> [thong], that pink feather of the ema<\/em> [greater rhea] which would be the ara\u00e7oia<\/em> [petticoat] and had also managed to make the tiara. I took this material and went to the university to give the class.<\/p>\n

When Professor Augustin began to show the images of the cloak \u2013 I did not know that there were eleven Tupinamb\u00e1 cloaks in Europe; the only one I knew was the one at the Quai Branly Museum \u2013, one which most interested me was the one in Basel. It was a black-and-white photo that showed the weave in more detail because it no longer had the feathers. It allows you to see perfectly that the knotting is diamond-shaped. It was falling apart, and we suffer for that, but it was the solution to my problem! Augustin told me that researcher L\u00edvia Melzi was taking pictures of the cloaks at all these exhibitions and museums. He showed me one that is in Germany, one in Denmark \u2013 it seems that there are five in Copenhagen. He kept showing me these beautiful cloaks. Unlike 2006, when we saw the image through the overhead projector, the images were now digital: I could zoom in and see the knotting perfectly!<\/p>\n

When I returned to the village, I took a very large roll of twine to my godmother so she could teach me how to knot the jerer\u00ea<\/em> [a kind of fishing net], because I don\u2019t even know how to crochet. She is about 90 years old and still does this it very well. I showed her the images of a princess wearing a lined cloak that Professor Augustin had left on my computer \u2013 my godmother even thought she was a saint. She looked at me and asked if I had already dreamed. \u201cHave you already seen it?\u201d Then she said to me: \u201cI won\u2019t teach you because you already know, you can go and do it!\u201d And what now? The person who was going to teach me, take me by the hand and explain the whole process, just told me: \u201cGo home and do it.\u201d But as she said it, I had to believe it.<\/p>\n\n