“The ear is the organ of fear,” Nietzsche writes.
And with a little development of the phrase we find the echo of some of the most suggestive myths of modernity: those that take as their model the two divinities of the delirious celebration, of a wild nature, Dionysus and Pan. First of all, the fear loses its negative character;
It is, rather, “initiatory” fear prior to growth or overcoming personal limits.
Secondly, this reality that overwhelms us is perceived by an organ that is both cerebral and physical: the ear.
And, finally, it is music, the “panic” dance, the vehicle that dynamits the autonomy of the rational self.
In simpler terms: we do not listen to music, as this would mean assimilating it from a distance.
Music “possesses” us.
We are lived by music.
Nietzsche's is the first sentence
of Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun
, the new novel by Mónica Ojeda.
And it synthesizes her poetics very well, because in this novel the bodies seek their transcendence in the orgy of dance.
In the same way, nature is understood as a superior and wild body, a terrible mother.
And, in this sense, it is interesting to compare it with some novels of literary modernism, for example with those of Thomas Mann, which abound in scenes of Dionysian abductions as a trigger for dissatisfaction with the rationalist bourgeois world.
But it is also interesting to compare these
Shamans
with so many novels of our time that delve into the myths of purity in the ancestral, the corporal, the monstrous, the sublime, etc.
I think that in both comparisons Ojeda wins.
Firstly, because she is never innocent in the use of such popular materials;
Secondly, because it is never topical or pamphleteering either.
In the novel there is a search for the connection with nature understood as a terrible mother body.
Let's tell something about the plot: several young people come to celebrate Inti Raymi, the festival of the Sun, on the slopes of the Chimborazo volcano.
They take drugs, listen to experimental music and practice ancestral rites.
The characters experience a psychedelic journey: the self is diluted in a collective body, identities metamorphose and the rhythm of the drum, like that of the bass drum in a disco, becomes a giant beat.
In the background, the protective and terrible presence of the volcano, compared to a female sex.
A chorus of characters makes up the story: Nicole, reluctant to be carried away by the siren charms of music;
Mario, the dancer transformed into Devil with the Diabluma mask;
Pamela, the young pregnant woman and shrewd musical theorist;
Pedro, who divines the rhythm of the universe in the stones;
and the Singers, who fulfill a function in the novel similar to that of the coryphaeus in Greek tragedy, but in a lyrical and Andean key, and more discreet.
They tell and recompose the story of Noa, the protagonist of the novel.
Noa condenses the initiatory terror that defines
Shamanes
: to grow, to
be
her
,
she has to abandon herself.
That's why she looks for her father.
A father who, precisely, abandoned her when she was ten years old.
The father now lives in the mountains, like a hermit.
And she Noa finds him, but only so she can abandon him.
She must contest her immediate origins and link herself to a deeper genealogy of shamans.
This brief synopsis serves as a simple anchor to the ground, but evidently
Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun
cannot be summarized in a plot.
Could we tell what
The Waves
by Virginia Woolf is about, with which she shares a chorus of voices and poetic flight?
Ojeda returns to the analysis of family and friendship relationships, urban violence or the power of sects
Because this joyful novel puts at your service, at the service of the novel as a literary genre, the virtues of poetry: its ability to encompass the richness of the world without dissecting it, the memorable phrase and the displaced point of view.
But he does it in such a way that, at no time, the “prosaic” vision of things is lost.
For example, in one shot Noa transforms into a ghost mare, marked by lightning: the electric mare.
On another level, Noa is simply a girl with psychotic delirium at a
rave
that lasts too long.
The same duality is manifested in each of the characters in this chorus, both archetypal and realistic.
Neither plane contests the other.
And perhaps that's why
Shamanes
never sounds like a cliché, nor like overly abstract concepts.
But he doesn't opt for the “ fast-paced
thriller
” or the morality either.
A difficult balance for a great writer.
Many things are left up in the air in this review: the precision in the analysis of family and friendship relationships;
the echo of urban violence as a backdrop;
the constructions of power in the “secret” worlds, in the sects.
Favorite themes in Ojeda's literature.
And I do not want to fail to note some of his innumerable verbal flashes: “By dancing I make my flesh think”, “being safe is different from being alive”, “conservatory musicians do not feel the death of the instrument”, “what a voice is capable of doing to a body”, “writing about someone is putting a weight on the being”.
We already knew that Ojeda is one of the most fascinating Latin American writers today from her novels
Nefando
(2016) and
Mandíbula
(2018).
But
Electric Shamans at the Sun Festival
is even more ambitious and dazzling.
Look for it in your bookstore
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