Memories of Afro-Ecuadorian Cimarronaje and Tupi Guarani Indigenous Peoples:

Childhoods by the Shore

To draw coordinates between the origin and the mouth of pleasures, or events that brought me closer to it, I first expand the possibilities of the self. I cross that threshold as a shell-less experience. A shedding of dead skin, as if the self were a transparent and even unbreakable membrane, which, when permeated, brings about a collective body. This way of conceiving oneself as a multiple body, a herd body, a populous mass of beings running through the bloodstream, panting behind my cells, is for me the closest thing to the first perception of pleasure in my small child’s body from the beach.

As if two legs were not enough, I ran manically from my mother’s car to the beach; with a desperation that my body could hardly contain. A force that caused me to smash my legs when I fell. An untamed force that my anatomy could not process. So much entanglement couldn’t fit in a small body; to protect itself, it aborted the mission of running. It was fading away.

Everything that gave me pleasure was outside my body and in relation to other bodies. The burning of stepping on the boiling sand and then digging a small hole with my feet until I found myself relieved by the wet sand at the bottom of the beach. A core of cold sand inhabiting the soles of my feet. The sting of opening my eyes under the salty water, to then come out to cry a microscopic sea lying face up on the shore. The miracle of observing up close and, for the first time, the corpse of a whale stranded on the beach of Las Palmas.

Although without knowing how to give a name to what I felt, to the touch and the encounter of the body with other bodies, there was the certainty that those bodies were mine as much as I was theirs. A mutual belonging and a way of acquiring different forms. The sand passing through my dermis was also my dermis making way for the inert particles/cells of the beach. Because I have no rational memory of the first time I saw the sea, however, I never stopped looking at it with amazement. It never ceased to move me, with the unspeakable intensity of one who becomes a girl in the jaws of a giant animal.

The skin is the largest organ of the body, but the skin attached to our bones is not just skin alone. I could never understand or feel the process of loneliness as something valid. I was never alone, the objects were exerting their oblique gaze on me in the night. The books in filial relationship of hatred with dust and lint waiting to be taken. The porcelain cups for playing house also penetrated my eyes to the point of making them scream inside. And the trunks in my grandmother's house with fabrics that made the fingers of my hands desperate. Sometimes it was not me looking for them but them demanding to be touched.

The question of the shores is, in turn, about taking my pleasure seriously; my mind does nothing but lead me back to childhood, which, for me, is still the age of imperceptible joy. In the house where I spent my early years, there was a guava tree, another custard apple tree, and countless plant beings imposing their presence in the yard. But the guava and custard apple trees were the gods of that green and brown kingdom. My body moved involuntarily towards them with such force that sometimes I didn’t know who was climbing whom. Sometimes I dreamed I was a tree and saw how from my hands, from my fingers, from my hair, guavas fell singing like moons full of little white worms that I still devoured urgently.

Those trees were my other selves, I thought. They were brown and shiny, their trunks sometimes turning green. Sometimes they were swarming with ants; other times the leaves fell to the ground, while from the back door leading to the yard, I let out a high-pitched scream. I thought: the falling of a leaf is the falling of a strand of hair, like the ones I pull out when I detangle in the shower, so I would pick up the leaves and bury them in the same secret hole where I buried my hair. Together, both bundles of hair and little leaves formed a greener and more disintegrated me.

I also spent endless hours perched on their branches, talking to myself. The trees would respond by shedding their skins onto my body or the ground. There was a whole array of encounters between the earth around the trees, my thin, almost vegetal body, and the other plants. Sometimes I wanted to stretch to embrace both trees against my chest. I tried with all my might, opening my legs and arms, attempting to expand to bring them closer to me. The pain after the ritual of trying to be one with them was also a precious encounter with joy. A crab walk until my legs returned to their natural state again.

If I speak of pleasure, I return to childhood, to the never innocent encounter of the first ways of exploring my body in relation to the living bodies that surrounded me. In relation also to the non-acting bodies, which for me were so present that breathing and beating would have been an unnecessary scandal. Things were born and lived from my eye to my tongue. My tongue also lived with those things to which it adhered to recognize them, to know they existed. Childhood is the excessive touch of the world, and excessive touch is: the eye touching the water, the water closely watching the iris; the iris tormented by the entering salt; the earth entering the crevice between my nails and my skin, making my cracks and hollows an infinite home; the worm-ridden fruit filling the inside of my throat. The invertebrate body of a slug sliding its moisture between my fingers; my fingers giving small spasms at the moisture; a worm the color of a split tamarillo digging a hole in the top of the leaf, my nose breathing in the sound of the insect. The sound of a coconut shell splitting open at the dry blow of a machete, pouring its water like a woman whose water breaks; the skin peeling from the tender, translucent coconut that adheres little by little to the palate.

The smell of wood as it broke, moved by the hands of large men, the earth that served as home to the splinters of the tree trunk, releasing a new scent of earth with cut wood. The sea trying to enter whole through my legs, through my mouth; the sand that populated my hair and never wanted to leave; the water resting greenish in an empty flowerpot, a living and invisible ecosystem; a green stain crying out to be looked at, to be breathed. All that, palpable in the past that is my most latent self, is still, the pleasure unfolded before the bodies.

To write, I place the body in geography, I unfold it in my mind as a map unfolds, that is to say, the abstraction of geography. I am not sure if I access reality through what the maps show me. As a child, I thought the maps were a tactile truth. I accessed the world, or filled my head with acoustic images of what I believed the world was, through the maps in the Atlases. I grew up with teachers who trusted books as a possibility of the real.

Perhaps it was at eighteen years old, almost late when I realized that Limones, La Tolita de los Ruano, and Canchimalero were not on the maps I had access to until then. I had walked along the shore of Canchimalero on more than one occasion. I had crossed from its shore to the dock in Limones; I had also slept at my grandfather's farm in La Tolita de los Ruano. Where were those shores, subsumed by non-existence on the maps?, mapping —I thought—, it also means excluding, beyond the need for time by those who make the maps, or territorial ignorance, beyond good or bad intentions, mapping is exclusion, and the shores where I had felt life were not in the maps or the books

To write, I place my body on the shore, a shore that changes because what is near the sea is always subject to rapid and radical transformation, this ever-changing shore, which my infant body perceived as infinite. 

In childhood, the shore was the closest thing to freedom, at the edge of the sea, you could do anything: build absurd constructions to watch them fall swallowed by the water, swim naked while watching giant manta rays jump in the distance from which you had to flee, find flattened sea urchins that I would later discover in a marine biology book were called five-holed sand dollars, Mellita quinquiesperforata, and that it is only found in the Atlantic. But I was sure those were the urchins my feet experienced when I was a child.

What were the books telling me again?

The shore was the space of celebration, of running without limits from end to end, and the boundary of the sea could be crossed by submerging the body, becoming one with the creatures that inhabit the water. But to think of the shore is also to remember that in colonial cities, the powerful were not near this space bordering the sea for fear of being invaded by pirates; how is it that now, the daughters of Black women and pirates have been displaced from the shore?

To reach the shore, we had to walk many kilometers under the sun and the shade of the trees because even though it was close, the shore was not entirely accessible to us. From the beach, you could see the houses of the owners of the shore, who secretly dreamed of closing it off forever, preventing the passage of the daughters of the abusive Black proletariat from invading their landscape.

But, to my infant self, guided by the herd of aunts and ñañas (sisters), we cared little or nothing about what those eyes from the comfort of the balconies thought of us. We would take the bikinis, the sunglasses, straw and chonta bags, and embark on the journey on foot toward the shore.

The first public photos of me as a baby were taken on the shore of Las Palmas. My naked body, which had just learned to sit, rested on a soccer jersey, with a bottle of Pilsener on either side of the shirt, holding it down to prevent it from flying away in the wind. In the background, many semi-naked bodies danced, enjoying the sovereignty of the shore.

I speak of a self in relation to other non-humans, because being born on an island and living near the shore does not create an inherent filial bond with it. Some of the people in the neighborhood where I grew up hated the sand and detested going into the sea. Others even feared it. There were also those who couldn’t stand the festivities, the noise, and the commotion that the shore provoked. Maybe that’s why in the 2000s, there were private beaches in the province of Esmeraldas where people who had lived there all their lives couldn’t enter or even dream of settling down to enjoy their beach.

My infant self felt that I belonged to that space bordering the water and the mollusks. That there had to be some way to stay on the shore, a territory that felt like a home, a place of shelter and fun, but also of event, with all that events imply: that which is difficult to grasp with words. Everything that empties us of language. 

From my personal conception, perhaps influenced by my border condition, being an Afro-descendant, Black, palenquera woman, is to have no country but to fluctuate between shores, to make possible non-verbal encounters with everything that composes it. That shore that, many times burned my feet, that sea that on more than one occasion wanted to swallow me and returned my panting body to the sand full of exoskeletons. 

It is from this territory that is being taken away from us by the narco, violence, but also tourism, that Ainhoa's voice was born. My girl who has emerged from the shipwreck of the sea inside me, to reactivate a possible way of existing from literature. 

A girl who overflows and changes like the sea constantly, who knows she comes from the depths of the ocean, from those temperatures and atmospheric pressure that a human body cannot withstand. That is why she always claims to return to it. On the shore, I am always another, I de-face myself, I re-signify, and I even lose my identity... from that loss, from that not-knowing, from that groping, like walking on hot sand at noon, from that constant doubt of language as a liberating device, I write.

I write filled with questions and sinuosities. Dreaming, perhaps, of inventing another language.

To learn more… 

Catarina Nimbopyruá Delfina dos Santos: https://www.instagram.com/catarina_tupiguarani/

Ivan Zambrano: https://www.ivanzartist.com/

Daniela Balanzátegui, Andrea Chávez, Barbarita Lara, Génesis Delgado: https://lahalab.com/ 

Yuliana Ortiz: https://www.instagram.com/yuliana_ortiz_ruano/

Darwin Minda: https://www.youtube.com/user/sonero4 

Amanda Takuapu: https://www.instagram.com/activatedliving/

Cleberson H. Moura: http://lattes.cnpq.br/8343007497758405

Marianne Sallum: https://www.uniarq.net/mariannesallum.html

Fabiana Leite: https://br.linkedin.com/in/fabiana-leite-560806147

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the editors of Etnográfica, especially Humberto Martins, Renata de Sá Gonçalves, and Mafalda Melo Sousa. Thanks to Ping-Ann Addo (UMass Boston) and Francisco S. Noelli (ULisboa). M. Sallum: FAPESP – São Paulo Research Foundation (2019/17868-0, 2021/09619-0, 2019/18664-9, 2024/04746-1).