My
ENAUENÊ
Family
Rita Carelli illustrations
Anabella López
My
ENAUENÊ
Family
Rita Carelli illustrations
Anabella López
Rita Carelli, 2018 All rights reserved to E DI TOR A F TD S .A . Rua Rui Barbosa, 156 — Bela Vista — São Paulo — SP CEP 01326-010 — Tel. (0-55-11) 3598-6000 Caixa Postal 65149 — CEP da Caixa Postal 01390-970 www.ftd.com.br CONTACTS Director Ricardo Tavares de Oliveira Publisher Isabel Lopes Coelho Foreign rights Tassia Oliveira foreignrights@ftd.com.br
To both my mothers: Virginia and Kawenero To both my fathers: Vincent and Ataina
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I will tell you how I became a boy and then went back to being a girl. Let us start at the beginning. I had a childhood... that was, well, a little different. I spent part of it in an indigenous village, in Mato Grosso state, with people who are called
Who can repeat that?
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The Enauenê-Nauê, even though they live in Brazil, speak a language that is different from Portuguese. At the village, the walls of the homes are made from straw and our bed was a hammock. Baths are taken in the river, and soccer is only played with the head. There are no sofas or televisions, but what a good thing life in the village is! 8
When it rains in the city, fathers and mothers quickly call the children in: “Come in quickly or you will get sick!”. In the village, the exact opposite happens: we run out and getting wet turns into a party. 9
When I arrived in the village, I got another father and another mother. That is because the Indians had “married” my mother to old Ataina, the village shaman, and my father to Kawenero, Ataina’s wife. Therefore, my brother and I came to have a second mother, a second father, and all of our new parents’ children became our siblings. Do you have a brother or a sister? Well, starting on that day, we had fourteen more of them!
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We would spend the days with our siblings swimming in the river and with smoked fish, between bow and arrow games and flocks of parrots... Oops, wait a little, we are moving ahead too quickly. In the beginning, things were not exactly like that; there was a slight issue: I was a girl. And over there, you know, being a girl is a little less fun. Well, at least that was what I was thought many years ago, at the time this story took place.
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I would watch my sisters stay indoors all day inside the large shaded straw houses. They would help prepare food, watch the fire, take care of babies and a slew of other tasks. Meanwhile, outdoors the sun was shining, the boys were playing, the water ran in the river, and the trees stretched their branches out to whomever wanted to climb them. In the village, from early on, girls hang with girls and boys with boys, there is no mingling, it is like water and oil, cats and dogs, alligators and tortoise. So, faced with this situation, I decided... to be a boy!
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In the village, as in all places, there were rules. Women, for example, are forbidden from walking through the center of the village. They are forced to go around behind the houses. On the flip side, they reign there: that is where they catch up on their conversation, cut hair, pick out lice, tell stories... It is like two sides of the same coin: the courtyard and the public life are reserved for the men, while the intimacy of the village belongs to the women.
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