Natalia Escobar and Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau | Aribada / 2022

the voice of the rustle

by Douglas Messerli

Friederike Hirz (writer), Natalia Escobar and Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau (directors) Aribada / 2022 [30 minutes]

 

As Letterboxd commentator Stephen Gillespie has noted, Aribada might be best described as “a mood piece” on indigenous identity. Although it contains large elements of documentary, some concerns of fiction, and many elements of spiritual ceremony and costume design, none of these genres offer us a direct route in which to describe this multilayered work that at moments is utterly compelling as an entry into an indigenous cult and at other moments appears like a westernized aestheticization of the same hermetic group.

 

     Even the general description of this film on IMDb, Mubi, and elsewhere abruptly confuses the senses: “In the middle of the Colombian coffee region, Aribada, the resurrected monster, meets Las Traviesas, a group of indigenous transwomen from the Emberá tribes. The magical, the dreamlike and the performative coexist in their unique world.”

      Who is Aribada, and why has he come to this group of transwomen (that is, women who were assigned male gender at birth but identified as women) from the Emberá tribes? And why do such a large number (the film focuses on six women, Andrea Nembareyama, Bella Wuasorna, Beroniga Tascon, Emilce Aizama, Katy Tuave, and Zamanta Enevia, but the community is quite obviously larger) of these tribal individuals identify as transsexual?

     Even when we are permitted, in one small segment, to listen into a conversation that might enlighten us about this group, as Andrea speaks to an apparently new member of the community, Bella, her comments seem somewhat contradictory: although she makes clear that in their community any dress one chooses is appropriate, and observes that the trans community of Las Traviesas is mocked and often attacked by locals and former tribesmen, she still advises:  “Daughter, do not leave our culture behind, we can still fight for our own identity…we can still fight for our own identity…We can’t leave our culture behind even when wearing flip flops. I don’t mind walking barefoot even if white people gossip bad things about us.” It seems like an extraordinarily conservative piece of advice to give to a young trans girl who loves, as she tells Bella, to wear short dresses and show off her legs.

     Certainly, in Andrea’s comments we come to understand these women’s training in weaving and other tribal arts as being important to their community as not only a way to decoratively costume themselves, as does the shaman, but also to sell their goods to the outside world for the money on which they survive.

      Yet they seem to be financed mostly by the younger members, dressed in everyday female garments hiring out as laborers to pick coffee beans, corn, and other crops, some of which they keep for themselves.

       Las Traviesas also seem to own their own bar at which they entertain and themselves dance.  

     And then there is the ceremonial dance of the shaman who plays out the myth of the dangerous mythical jaguar who, rouses from his sleep through the shaking of the forest trees, and returns to community seeming to both threaten and protect its members, perhaps even entering their spirits. The film begins with just such a series of sudden shaking of trees, which one by one seem to become possessed of their own momentary motion which then dies down leaving another the possibility of tossing its fronds into the air rushing up from beneath. It seems as if the forest itself were alive, not just beings within it, but the trees themselves coming to life one by one before falling back into rest; somewhat poetically speaking: this shaking of each individual tree comes and leaves as if each itself were possessed with its own sense of difference from its sisters and brothers, expressing itself in the voice of its own rustle.

      Finally, we have no way of knowing just how much of the short film by the outsiders Paetau and Escoba is fact or fiction. At times, the directors appear more interested in presenting the shaman and other figures in slowly moving tableaux vivants (very much in the manner of filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov) than in presenting the figures within the context of an actively functioning community.

      Commenting on the directors’ juxtaposition of cinematic approaches, Gillespie suggests that it perhaps conveys the community’s juxtaposed existence, apart from their original tribe in so many ways and yet necessarily working alongside and sometimes within the surrounding society and the traditions of their tribal society. Yet, he continues, “One can analyse it well but the actual text doesn’t sell this as eloquently as it could. It feels associate more than cohesive. A clear case of throwing in every idea and approach.” 

      He admits, however, with which I certainly agree, that the work nonetheless “brims with vitality, expression, creativity and originality. Important voices say important things here, and they won’t flatten them out for a broader audience.”

        Perhaps the solution is just to sit back and let the films narrative (such as it is) and images wash over you before you return to this short (30 minutes) work and re-read it to explain its many open interstices. Even if such a community did not truly exist, it not only should but it must. Unlike the vast stretches of transgender behavior in places like the US between drag queens and trans women working every day within the normative society, there remains a gap for just such communities where trans women might gather together to support and sustain one another through work and ceremony, as in the end of this film bringing light to one another and by extension the world at large.

       Pat Mullen, writing in Point of View magazine, seems to best summarize the attempts of this community to “conjure a new and inclusive community and forge their place by fire,” describing the film as “an entrancing fever dream with touches of magical realism and traces of drag, all of which firmly celebrate the culture that Las Traviesas call their own while creating something refreshingly new.”

 

Los Angeles, September 3, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).