Bodies of Voices
by
kaimé guerrero valencia
How can the voices
from the past,
from the present,
and from the future
be listened to
and felt?
Those voices
contained
in unwritten books,
in books
whose words await
to be materialized
in books
whose sheets
are spacetimebodies,
emerging
when a story
is told and listened to.
In books
whose words
are dispersed,
incessantly circulating
in bodies,
in memories,
in desires
in some realities
then receding
into an unfathomable distance.
How could we listen
to the stories
of the mountains,
when we were mountains.
to the stories
of the islands,
when we were islands.
to the stories
of the plants,
when we were plants.
How can we learn
to listen
to the stories
of our bodies,
when we were water,
when we were
other animals.
To speak
and to be silent,
to listen
and to be silent,
to hear
the silence,
to listen
to the voices
that suspend
the silence
and the distances,
to relish
the profound pleasure
of connection.
A lingering feeling
that emerges
when separateness
turns out
to be a fiction.
To listen and
to hold
that moment
which allows us
to avoid
deceptive realities
and to write
books
through voices
Voices
that can be read
through encounters,
through listening,
through feeling.
ArtIST Statement
São Paulo, Bixiga, 27 February 2025, 5:25 p.m.
Today I had the privilege of attending the first session of a workshop titled História, afeto e imaginação: as cartas na escrita de mulheres negras at the Centro de Pesquisa e Formação of Sesc São Paulo. It was led by Dr. Luciana Martins Diogo. During this opening session, attention was directed to letters written or dictated by enslaved women. Two authors in particular: Esperança Garcia and Teodora Dias da Cunha, who after being dislocated from the African continent and relocated to the territory called Brazil, articulated their presence in writing. In Pindorama, within the confines of the plantation, even though their lives were subject to the dictates of their masters, their desires and longings enabled them to create a world of their own making, imbued with strength, emotion, and agency. They had families, children; they exercised freedom and resisted through ordinary acts, and by imagining possible routes that might lead to freedom beyond the plantation. This lived reality, which the master persistently sought to control, required recurrent transformation and reconstruction by these women. They employed unanticipated mechanisms that at times manifested in words, thought, spoken, narrated, and written words, that allowed desires to flow and circulate, and thus to come to matter.
Esperança and Teodora, having been sold and torn from their families once again, generated the unfolding of transformative mechanisms through the gesture of mobilizing words materialized in the form of letters. In doing so, they produced texts that rendered their desires intelligible and set in motion processes of transformation. Esperança wrote her letter, she likely acquired proficiency in Portuguese writing under the Jesuit missionaries, but after their expulsion she was forcibly relocated, separated from her husband and children around 1770, and resettled under new slaveholders. In contrast, Teodora dictated her letters. Initially enslaved near Limeira and later sold to Campinas and São Paulo around 1862, she was violently removed from her family and transferred into domestic service; unlike Garcia, she remained illiterate in Portuguese, and thus her words reached the page through dictation. The letters written and dictated in desperation and hope by Esperança and Teodora could not be heard or read in that particular spacetime by their intended recipients, their family members. Yet the longing for return that they contained was undoubtedly felt. It remains uncertain whether either woman was ever able to reunite with her family. In the case of Esperança, it is believed that she escaped back to her former plantation after a period of eight years, as her name appears in the records of workers there.
The letters constituted a method of tracing lines of connection with their families and of countering the forced distance from which they had been torn away. Concise, eloquent, and poetic, they were imbued with strategies that carved fissures into an imposed reality, gradually opening the (im)possibility of creating conditions for others to emerge.
“Those letters were a way to prepare for the return, even though it never happened. When a person departs from their territory, or is forcibly removed from it, they perpetually yearn for their return,” said one of the participants of the workshop. “Not me,” I thought. I have never experienced a longing to return to Quito, but rather to a place that may not yet exist. Perhaps there are multiple potential pathways for return, pathways that must be found or created. Perhaps one can yearn for a return to a place one has not yet arrived at, but will be.
By mobilizing their desire, Esperança and Teodora created fissures in the prevailing reality, thereby allowing their life forces to flow into a self-fashioned world with every gesture. Furrows were carved into this other world by the flow of desire, gradually forming a perennial rhizome that extended beyond the plantations. The uncontrollable currents coursing through each furrow meandered across other spacetimes, other bodies, other desires, other memories, and seeped through them. This perennial rhizome could only be continually renewed by the currents of unbridled life, lest it become clogged and sealed by the linear, one-dimensional, and violent white world.
Around two centuries later, these literary compositions were unearthed, read, and recited aloud, affecting listeners and readers across diverse temporal and spatial dimensions. They engaged a myriad of emotions, facilitating multiple forms of return, to memories, to futures. I wondered whether these words, written around 1770 and 1860, were also shaped in some way by our desires, our memories, our tears. I speculate on what (im)possible future spacetime-matterings might influence the words I write in the present moment. Above all, I reflect on the words that exist only as thoughts, feelings, and sounds, pondering the manifold desires, wishes, emotions, memories, and longings that inhabit them. I try to feel, to listen, and to envision an image of these rhizomes of voices, of forces, of life, to trace the trajectory of their furrows, and the bodies and memories they might yet infiltrate.
How can the voices
from the past,
from the present,
and from the future
be listened to
and felt?
Those voices
contained
in unwritten books,
in books
whose words await
to be materialized
in books
whose sheets
are spacetimebodies,
emerging
when a story
is told and listened to.
In books
whose words
are dispersed,
incessantly circulating
in bodies,
in memories,
in desires
in some realities
then receding
into an unfathomable distance.
São Paulo, Bixiga, 3 March 2025, 7:35 p.m.
Re-turnings
I have been thinking about the cacophony of voices that echoed through my grandmother’s house when I was a child. My parents, brother, and I lived there because we couldn't afford to pay rent elsewhere. The house was almost always overflowing with people and voices. I remember how their unbridled force affected me as a child, when I could only be touched by words.
Everyone in that house perceived me as an anomalous child. At the time, I had not yet received a medical diagnosis. Given my family’s financial constraints, which often left us without sufficient food, it would have been inconceivable for them to finance a private medical examination to confirm any abnormality. My mother persistently suggested, half in earnest and half in jest, that my “abnormality” was due to my nearly suffocating at birth. “She didn’t cry when she was born, so I thought she was dead. That may be the reason she is the way she is,” she often repeated. Because I did not cry at birth and was born with a vulva, I was deemed an abnormal female child. My difference manifested as an inability to allow direct contact with other human beings, children and adults alike, or to speak. I did not want, or perhaps could not, speak. My encounters with others were always directly or indirectly mediated through words. I consistently rejected physical contact and chose solitude instead. They could not have imagined that I always felt sheltered by words, even as I sometimes was frightened by them.
Before my father taught me to read at the age of four, my relationship with words was activated when I heard them, when I saw their contours on the pages of the books my grandmother and father used to read, and when I merged with them, with their countless possibilities of combination and with the worlds that emerged from those combinations, from those voices. Whenever they reached my ears, they coursed through my body. They surged like waves against every single cell, every single particle of me. When the forces inherent in those words, in those voices, encountered my body, they generated currents that manifested as colors, at times as twitches, at times as warmth, agitation, anger, serenity, or unbearable arousal. The process of translating these forces into spoken words was to me at that time unfeasible. This impossibility of speech has accompanied me to the present, thirty-eight years later. Although I am now able to speak, it still appears to me artificial and difficult. I prefer writing to speaking.
I spent my days at home, my grandmother’s home, until I had to go to school. From my child’s perspective, the house seemed immense, shabby, and filled with noise and words. The word dinero (money), or rather the phrase “no-hay-dinero”—“there is no money”—resonated through my body, through that house, as ceaselessly as the drops of rain that tried to inundate it. In my memory, it feels as though it rained endlessly. We would place as many pots on the floor as there were holes in the roof to catch the drips. There was no money to repair the roof or fill our stomachs. Yet that spacetime was saturated with innumerable sounds and voices: spoken words and raindrops clashing into pots of water, voices that unfolded an unexpected abundance and indulgently nourished my passions. Their malleability, their sounds, the meanings carried within them, and the possibility of extending and chaining them together to bring forth new worlds produced diverse effects in my body. Above all, it was their sound: how each letter, in its concatenation with others, how each syllable resonated. Pa-ja-ri-to —little bird— was, for instance, a word I greatly cherished. I would always sit or stand as if spellbound whenever I heard this word. I absorbed every sound of its utterance and, if the person was before me, I would watch, or, if not, I would imagine, how their mouth moved, how their lips opened, rounded, and closed again: paaa – jaaaa – riiiii – tooo. Time invariably slowed whenever I listened to this word, and a wave of warmth and tremors began to rise within me. My heart beat faster; goosebumps spread across my skin, while each syllable quivered like wings through my mind, shimmering in shades of red and purple, vibrating across my body. It felt as though I were dissolving into color and quivers, and then vanishing.
Apart from my father, directly, and my grandmother, indirectly, as she returned to her past by telling stories to my mother while I was present, I could not allow myself to be affected by any other human being. If I developed feelings for them, it was because beautiful chains of words, addressed to me or overheard in the case of my grandmother, flowed from their mouths, and because my father taught me to read and write before I ever went to school. Words thus became the vehicle through which I could establish connections, both with my own body, with realities not yet realized, and with others, with innumerable rhizomes of voices, of pain, and of desires from other spacetimes. When, for example, the outlines of a story began to take shape in a sentence, the flows of affect contained within gradually penetrated my body and simultaneously brought forth the beginnings of realities that unfolded within me, sometimes disconcerting, at other times illuminating.
These encounters between words and my body led to the materialization not only of colors and smells but also of worlds that I was compelled to inhabit and that, accordingly, intruded into present reality. Stories opened portals that drew me into them. I had to endure the inexorable, suffering that coursed through my grandmother. I was obliged to carry and to listen to the voices sedimented within her, listening as merely a secondary recipient of that world of words, which acted upon me inescapably and unintentionally. I became the girl who was sent to a convent at age five, where she was forced to work as a servant every day. This was deemed God’s will. She was only allowed to visit her mother once a year. Once I experienced her suffering in my own body, it was transformed into fury.
The stories my grandmother told were almost always marked by overlapping effects of naturalized power relations. Yet, at the same time, there existed another rhizome of voices that stretched (in-)between and beyond those stories, voices my body was able to listen to through hers, voices from other spacetimes: the dried leaves she had to burn as a child when visiting her mother so that the neighbors would believe they had cooked something that day; the voice of the fog, with which she had to merge in order to read the dried tree leaves; the voice of the wind and the humidity, through which she predicted the weather of the following day; and the voices of the Chaquiñanes—in Quichua, “path of hoof” or “animal path”— of the mountains that at times allowed human passage and at other times refused it.
How could we listen
to the stories
of the mountains,
when we were mountains.
to the stories
of the islands,
when we were islands.
to the stories
of the plants,
when we were plants.
São Paulo, Bixiga, 20 Mach 2025, 5:25 p.m.
I had to flee from Quito ten years ago in order to create distance between myself and that place where forces had been suffocated by erased connections and silenced voices, voices I had forgotten to listen to, or perhaps had become unable to hear and understand in that spacetime. I needed that physical, intercontinental distance in order to remember, to return, to face the past that had traveled with me, standing in front me, haunting me. I needed to allow my body to feel the past, to reconfigure it so that I might listen again. I had to establish distance from my Ecuadorian language in order to write once more, to reconfigure the past through every movement of touched, felt, spoken, and written words.
Ten years after my arrival, I also had to create distance from Berlin in order to once again feel the body of words. I began to sense life expressed in the form of words: to listen to the voices carried within them, to feel the forces of memory they transmitted, and to experience the particles of those forces clashing with me and transforming me, as I became-with them, in order to trans*form-with.
How can we learn
to listen
to the stories
of our bodies,
when we were water,
when we were
other animals.
São Paulo, Pompeia, 22 March 2025, 3:30 p.m.
Since I began taking testosterone, I have dreamt again and again that my body assumed different forms, different relations among its particles: I dream that I am an octopus, that I am water, that I am part of an infinite ocean, that I am a mountain. Today I dreamed I was water, the weather of the ocean. I could feel the beach, composed of diminutive stones of varying temperatures, and the sand beneath, the sand and the soil: we were eternal and profound, and the vitality of all beings was unbearable. The boundaries between wetness and dryness, liquid and solid, were incessantly drowned, blurred, and redrawn. Contours emerged and dissolved in the flow of the sea, the dry stones, and the shifting sand. Transformed into waves, I crashed against the shore, generating ripples that disseminated across every cell and particle of my body(ies). Rhizomes. The tension between breathing and suffocation permeated all living beings in that world, as well as its historical and future trajectories. When I awoke, the rippling histories continued to move within me. Throughout the day, I tried to find joy in breathing and strength in suffocation.
It feels as if I could breathe, feel, see, and listen with my entire body. I can still perceive every movement of the bodies of the corals, the octopuses, the whales, the algae, the fish, the sand, the stones, and the soil. I can still sense how they take on the forms of words, and I can still listen to their voices.
São Paulo, Liberdade, 22 March 2025, 3:30 p.m.
I had to learn how to speak. Literally, to speak: since moving within academia, I have had to transform my stuttering and stammering into sentences that are (still only half) fluent. Unfortunately, there are entanglements in which only a specific form of discursive practices can be listened to and read. Yet I prefer silence and poetry. In silence, I can perceive, feel, and listen to the encounters of different words with my body. Beyond the spacetime of academia, I try to remember how to speak and to listen with my body.
To speak
and to be silent,
to listen
and to be silent,
to hear
the silence,
to listen
to the voices
that suspend
the silence
and the distances,
to relish
the profound pleasure
of connection.
Since staying in Pindorama, I have begun once again to write poetry and to dance. Unintentionally, this allowed me to remember how to speak in silence and to listen to the voices of different actors, to return to “past” entanglements. And I could trace the vitality of life contained in those encounters, in those diffractions: when, beside Cotopaxi, I took mushrooms and was penetrated by a jaguar, as we slowly transformed into dust together and merged with every single particle of Cotopaxi; when I first allowed myself to be affected by the molecule made of 19 carbons, 28 hydrogens, and 2 oxygens; when I encountered Indigenous and Black ethic-onto-epistemologies; when I met the Universe Halfway; when I tried to imagine what tentacular thinking might feel like; when I tried to listen, as Beatriz Nascimento wrote, in order to “invoke/evoke/reveal” and to “write her invented truth.”
The movements that took shape in both poetry and dance allowed me, in silence, to speak with those forces incessantly circulating in my body—forces activated or gathered through innumerable encounters with bodies of words, with rhizomes of voices. Or perhaps it was those rhizomes of voices themselves that made perceptible a relation that at times cannot be sensed, obscured by the deceptive images produced through reflection, which conceal diffraction.
A lingering feeling
that emerges
when separateness
turns out
to be a fiction.
To listen and
to hold
that moment
which allows us
to avoid
deceptive realities
and to write
books
through voices
Voices
that can be read
through encounters,
through listening,
through feeling.
QUOTE AS:
Kaimé Guerrero Valencia. Bodies of Voices. The Living Commons Collective Magazine. N.3, September 2025. p. 118-129
