Mandinga de Aleijado – Part 3: Dam
Behold, the monstrous body finds its counterpoint. Beyond the abyss, it gathers itself in a basket of dendê and lavender, carried by the rain, spilling into the depths of a dam.
This aleijado (crippled) body of mine, long in its steeping, slowly transforms, learning the trade of the dam.
What is a dam, if not a river in a state of monstrosity?
Then we understand: a dam is an aleijado river.
All that remains for the dammed body is the memory of river, towards which its waters converge.
It is a prayer cast into the time of the future and the past, a prayer steeped in the taste of blood from the mouths of jaguars who become women who wage war. A prayer that carries the longing for the sound of maracás, for the scent of tobacco. It is the memory of the old woman who sews pieces of flesh together and leaves scars as offerings.
Each scar etched on the skin of my aleijado body is a mark on the surface, a fragment of information. It is a technology of return, a trail that maps my way back to the river.
The map says: silence!
And I return.
I return because silence stirs the knowledge that once danced in the whispers of the wind when I was a child.
I would close my eyes and hear Aracati’s whisper in my ear:
Remember! Your mandinga is that of the aleijado! Your being was shaped by the wound!”And she would explain:
Mandinga de aleijado is to dance at the bottom of the water to awaken the ancestors.
Mandinga de aleijado is to swallow teeth and sprout seeds that spring from the earth.
Mandinga de aleijado is to turn cane into decorated spear to pierce and draw blood from the dams.
Mandinga de aleijado is to sing like a nightingale with a broken beak.
Mandinga de aleijado is to ignite a lantern that lights up the murky waters and haunted basements of the imagination, revealing the colours that dance in the shadows of the sacred place of the mind.
Mandinga de aleijado is to dwell in the gut of the crossroads between Mistress Madness and the Jaguaribe River.
Mandinga de aleijado is to spin skirts stitched from jaguar-grandmother skin.
Mandinga de aleijado is to embroider names onto ceremonial cloaks, using red threads dyed with urucum.
Mandinga de aleijado is to heed the counsel of the stuffed coral snake that slept with you in the cradle, to ask your mother about it as an adult only for her to swear such a toy never existed.
Mandinga de aleijado is to be made of ritual, of fury, of claws capable of cracking skulls.
Mandinga de aleijado is to carry water in gourds, in infinite attempts to revive the mirror-hearts, so crazed and full of pain from inhabiting the same space of deformation.
Mandinga de aleijado is to shoot arrows into the chests of white men in white coats.
Mandinga de aleijado is to offer pearls and rosaries to invented saints.
Mandinga de aleijado is to spend sleepless nights plotting escapes from asylums and psychiatric wards, so infinite and dreamlike.
Mandinga de aleijado is to decorate wooden legs and steel shins.
Mandinga de aleijado is to stretch the limits of humanity, pushing beyond the foolish ideas held by symmetrical bodies about what it means to be human.
Mandinga de aleijado is to push the gurney that carries your own new-born body, while soothing your mother’s weeping chest and your father’s urge to tear down the hospital walls.
Mandinga de aleijado is to flood the bathroom after filling the shower pan with water in an attempt to drown yourself in a river forged in the green bathtub of childhood.
Mandinga de aleijado is to speak with the man in the black coat and top hat who can be seen on the left-hand side of operating rooms, asking why there are so many wires attached to the body, why there is so much noise.
Mandinga de aleijado is to use delirium and sedation as portals for astral voyages.
Mandinga de aleijado is to feel saudade for the village, without ever having set foot there.
Mandinga de aleijado is to make the body a dam, returning to the river.
Mandinga de aleijado is to be enchanted by the memory of water and earth, knowing when to become a person again.
And become a dam again — a river screaming out, a river in a state of deformation.
To become humans again.
To play at being a dam, which is the cry of the river in its maimed state, numbed by so much longing to feel.
And to become a river again, understanding its language, singing its song.
And once more a dam, overflowing with tears, bursting with the desire to break.
To be bewitched by a sacred jaguar, and dance with her.
And again, to become a dam, like the sacred water washing the weary heads.
And so I learn.
My dam-body bleeds in cosmo-agony, still conjuring its spells, because everything remains abyss.
My aleijado body is a wrecked vessel lying at the bottom of the water.
My mandinga de aleijado is to rest within the dam, awaiting the time to become river once again, while dreaming of visions of enchanted serpents.
Lua Cavalcante
Notes:
- Cosmo-agonyrefers to a concept developed by Glicéria Tupinambá — Brazilian artist and Indigenous leader — evoking the pain and creation of worlds from within.
- Aleijaduis a term used to describe someone who is disabled, crippled, or physically marked by difference.
- Mandinga de aleijadomeans the ritual of the crippled one