Decolonial encounters in Ciro Guerra’s El abrazo de la serpiente: indigeneity, coevalness and intercultural dialogue

Abstract

This article analyses the politics and aesthetics of the depiction of the encounter between the West and the non-West in Ciro Guerra's film El abrazo de la serpiente, examining the ways in which the film deconstructs colonialist imagery and discourses and engages with the notion and cinematic representation of indigeneity. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the article identifies and discusses the strategies employed by the film to decolonize the category of the 'Indian': the challenge of colonial linguistic of domination, the undermining of the tropes of imperialist representations, the staging and re-enacting of colonial encounters and the subversion of the power relations embedded in colonialist ethnography. The article posits that El abrazo de la serpiente acts as an instrument of political and cultural enquiry into the past and the present, and that it proposes as well as enacts multiculturalism and intercultural dialogue as cinematic approaches to native culture. While the notion of indigeneity at play is not exempt from problematics, the film succeeds in foregrounding indigenous points of view and 'points of hearing' challenging Eurocentric politics of recognition and evolutionary epistemology in favour of a 'coevalness' of the native.

Traveling Narratives, Neorealism, and Marginalization: Ciro Guerra’s Cinema of Denunciation and Resistance

“…El abrazo de la serpiente is framed within postcolonial discourses of denunciation against the imposition of dominant practices and knowledge. María Chiara D’Argenio (2018: 133), for example, suggests that this movie “manages to deconstruct the racial hierarchies and structures of dominance that belong to imperialist practices and discourses.” She analyzes some of the film’s strategies for challenging Eurocentrism, such as the depiction of the scientists as dependent on indigenous knowledge, the centrality of native languages, and the deconstruction of the conceptual and linguistic impossibility, typical of the discourses of European travelers from the colonial era to the early twentieth century, of describing, among other things, nature. El abrazo de la serpiente falls into the category that Nadia Lie, in her analysis of Latin American road movies different from those of Guerra (quoted in Garibotto and Pérez [2016: 11–12]), identifies as “counter-conquest road movies” that “trace continental journeys to invert the historical route of the conquest.” Films in this category, as she explains, “evoke journeys of conquest to challenge hero-like characters, stress the ongoing struggle of indigenous populations, and establish an explicit distance from the image of the road as a realm of freedom and self-discovery.” In the Colombian director’s film, the historical dynamic of the conquest is inverted, as Karamakate leads the journeys through the forest in which we see the struggles of its indigenous inhabitants.…”

“… 16. In several scenes, Karamakate mentions the chullachaqui , an empty roving body comparable to a ghost. María Chiara D’Argenio (2018: 139) writes that “the chullachaki, able to transform into different creatures and to deceive, is a feared mythical figure. The transformational element is reformulated in the film as ‘empty body.’ This figure is given an allegorical meaning in the story.” She explains that Guerra avoids using the real names of indigenous sacred elements in order to provide a respectful portrayal of the cultures involved (138). …”

“… 18. D’Argenio (2018: 148) notes that numerous researchers see the approach to the indigenous subject as anachronistic because of its lack of awareness of the current evolution of indigenous movements. In the two productions that I study, the re-creation of stories from the past is effective because it shows both the persistence of problems such as poverty and social exclusion and the resilience of oppressed groups.…”

Filmic Disciples and Indigenous Knowledges: The Pedagogical Imperative in El abrazo de la serpiente (Ciro Guerra, 2015)

“…The film's critique of colonialism, of extractive forms of science, and of the heretofore neglected perspective of Indigenous cultures in such processes is conveyed through an act of translation. ), d'Argenio (2018 and Mutis (2018) all refer to the work as a form of cultural translation, and to the use of explicit decoding for the audience in the dialogue. According to d'Argenio, Karamakate's 'linguistic operation can be understood as an act of translation: he renders the non-verbal signs of the jungle into verbal signs; moreover, these are communicated to the Westerner as a condition of granting the latter access to the native world ' (2018: 137).…”