Good Speech Drinks from Its Source

Chonon Bensho carries two names. On her civil registration in Yarinacocha, she is Astrith Gonzales Agustín. But in her own language, Shipibo-Konibo, she is Chonon Bensho—“the swallow of the medicine orchards.” An artist and descendant of the Onanya sage-healers, she writes with her husband Pedro Favaron to pass on, openly, what she has inherited from her grandmothers. And the first thing she says about thought is that it possesses a quality—like water, which can be fresh or stagnant.

English

Our thinking is strong, koshi shina; our thinking is great, ani shina; our thinking is good, jakon shina; and our thinking is beautiful, metsa shina. Our word is strong, koshi joi, because it drinks from the same aerial and vegetal spring that fed the ancient Onanya.

English

Our thought is strong, koshi shina; our thought is vast, ani shina; our thought is good, jakon shina; and our thought is beautiful, metsa shina. Our speech is strong, koshi joi, because it drinks from the same aerial and vegetal source that nourished the ancient Onanya.

Our language classifies thought among the faculties: to think is an operation I perform alone, within my own mind. Chonon Bensho does not describe a faculty. She describes a substance that can be strong—koshi—vast—ani—good—jakon—beautiful—metsa—and which possesses these qualities for one precise reason: it drinks. Speech is strong, she says, because it drinks from the source that nourished the ancient Onanya. Good speech—jakon joi, the phrase she gives as the title of her text—is therefore not speech with edifying content. It is speech that has remained connected to its source: ancestors, the world of plants. It is not manufactured; it is watered.

To speak in this way is to speak from within a particular world. A woman who knows her grandmothers’ customs and walks barefoot on the soil her parents once trod, Chonon Bensho says, is not lost in the world. She is not a mahua yoxin ghost, with no relationships or attachments—a ghost without ties or bonds. And the one who comes from outside, the stranger, she calls by a word: nawa. Her husband ceased to be a nawa not because he learned a doctrine, but because he entered a network of living beings who share an origin and a present. To be someone here is to be bound to others.

English

No one is in solitude. Rather, we all are in relationship, in bond.

English

No one is in solitude. On the contrary, we are all in relation, in connection.

This same world gives meaning to another of her words, akinananti—work done together, with love and joy, for the good of all. Speech and labor share the same condition: they are only worthwhile when they connect. A speech that no longer connects, a labor that seeks only profit, are the gestures of a nawa—correct, perhaps, but severed from the source.

We, too, have a discipline of “good thought.” But we understand it in reverse. Positive thinking, for us, is a technique: I adjust my mood alone, I optimize through an act of will an interior that is mine, and the judge of this thought is my own well-being. Good thought here is a product I manufacture. Jakon shina takes the opposite path. Thought is not mine: it is good when it remains connected—to ancestors, to plants, to living beings regarded as subjects—not when it makes me content. And a thought cut off from all this is not, for Chonon Bensho, a “negative” thought to be corrected: it is the thought of a ghost, of a being without attachments. Where we strive to think better to feel better, she keeps her speech alive by never letting go of the root that waters it. The question she leaves us, barefoot on her parents’ soil, remains: does a speech derive its worth from what it states—or from what it still holds onto?