The return of 'Eisejuaz': Sara Gallardo's novel that gave voice to a Wichí and that was untraceable

Women and Aborigines have been linked since the beginning of Argentine literature in the voices of its writers. Juana Manuela Gorriti, Eduarda Mansilla, and Rosa Guerra , in the 19th century, explored the real and possible links between these two "collectives," the generic and the ethnic, which in our national imagination appear disturbingly associated with forms of "otherness." In the 20th century, Sara Gallardo 's perspective took up this approach, both in the psychological map of her characters and in the particular ventriloquism of her writing that resulted in a unique and essential work: Eisejuaz (1971), told from the perspective of an indigenous Wichí person with the tools of a dazzling linguistic and poetic invention.

In Gallardo 's stories, women and aborigines are often placed side by side with the figures of the artist and, occasionally, the shaman , in the same semantic constellation marked by beauty , by rebellion (as the impossibility of being appropriated, domesticated, apprehended), by the supposed " uselessness ".

When this arrangement occurs, woman, aborigine, artist, shaman (sometimes these categories coincide in the same person) appear, from the rationalist perspective and social normativity, as "monsters" : unclassifiable beings, of duplicity or multiple nature, hybrids that break the tables of the Law, or that do not submit to the laws of any of its various forms or identities.

Foreignness is another sign of estrangement that is often associated with these beings, whether they are immigrants arriving from the most distant destinations to relocate to a new order, or “foreigners in their own land” (the case of Aboriginal people), internal migrants dispossessed of their geographical habitat, as well as of a human and cultural place in the dominant imagination.

But the most notable “monster” or hybrid in all of Gallardo’s work is, surely, Eisejuaz , the true (sacred) name of Lisandro Vega , denied both by his own people and by the Christians of the Mission where he was educated.

Centered on the singular and at times ineffable religious experience of a subject, Gallardo's novel is set in a very specific historical and social context: the desperate situation of abandonment and poverty suffered by the aboriginal communities of the Gran Chaco in Argentina in the 1960s. Decimated by military campaigns, their ways of life and cultural habits disrupted, they have no other option than a precarious subsistence on the fringes of the world of the victors.

Eisejuaz is a product of this state of affairs . A child predestined to be a leader, he has convinced his people that they must move to the Mission, since the forest cannot provide, as it once did, for the community's subsistence. In exchange for adopting other moral and religious values, the missions ensure basic subsistence in a relatively protected environment . Catholics, Anglicans, and various Pentecostal denominations vie for new indigenous parishioners.

The son of a shaman who is forced to cease being one when he accepts baptism, Eisejuaz also possesses exceptional gifts for communication with the sacred , prophetic vision, and healing. His tragic problem is that he remains in the interstice between his worlds: an outcast in both, misunderstood and rejected by both.

Although he confronts the divine from the symbolic grid of his ancestral culture: a Lord who multiplies his angels or messengers among the natural elements and who can be accessed in the mystical trance provoked by the cevil, his conduct responds to Judeo-Christian guidelines, above all, those of the Gospel.

At times it is Job who rebels against the incomprehensible divine demands, but almost always it is Abraham , and above all it is someone who is never explicitly named: Jesus, the Christ, the Son of Man, the one who sacrifices himself for all humanity. Imitating him in another register, he renounces warrior values, abjures revenge, and also the legitimate political demands of his people , to submit to Paqui, an abject being, from the group of dominators, only because he believes that God himself has entrusted him with this as a mission.

Lisandro Vega has a worthy counterpart in a female character who embodies the victim among victims, but is also the one who can rise above that condition. This is another Wichí woman whom he unwittingly heals in the hospital where he is interned . By healing the girl, he also regains his health. He never forgets this event, and the two meet again in the final stage of the hero's degradation, when she works cleaning the brothel, unpaid, only in exchange for food.

Eisejuaz will manage to get the girl out of the brothel , and with her he will find the end of his path: "Because of you the world has not broken, and it will not break," he says. These are his last words to the one who has unwittingly given him the poison sent by the enemy (the old woman of the chahuancos, who represents the hatred and violence left behind), but she has also been the instrument of obtaining the crown of glory for Agua que Corre, the immortal spirit who can only rise and be freed with the death of Eisejuaz.

Also, by the woman's hand, a child is freed and saved, symbolically named Felix Monte : a name that is almost an oxymoron: the happy mountain, the happiness or plenitude that can still be found in the wild mountain that was once the motherland, but which has now been emptied of its goods and expels its children. The girl, poor among the poor, takes in this absolute outcast, whom her own father had wanted to kill, and takes him into her care.

At the lowest rung of society, or even just outside it, Eisejuaz and the girl perhaps represent the extreme of unattainable otherness . It is no coincidence that this otherness is so closely related to the Otherness of the sacred: the monstrous par excellence, resistant to understanding, and that these other monsters, the artists, besiege us with a language similar to the magical chant of shamans.

Eisejuaz , by Sara Gallardo (Fiordo).