Great River

The Amazon world literature has been in five centuries a long dialogue of mythologies. The ten millions of natives that inhabited its banks to the arrival of Europeans, and that brought the Spanish and the Portuguese, who were then consolidated and that with the American adventure became large planetary languages which conceived in hundreds of languages. You have to read the talkative one of Mario Vargas Llosa, or Macunaima, by Mario de Andrade, to feel the complexity of indigenous myths and how free, daring and poignant as the mestizo sensitivity interrogates them and transforms them into disturbing parables of modernity. A language, wrote Jorge Luis Borges, is a tradition, a way of feeling reality, not an arbitrary repertoire of symbols. The major native languages of the region are the ticuna, the shipibo-conibo, the guahibo and the warao, but, although decreasing in demographic terms, there are the tupi-guarani, the mbya, the kaiwa, the pai tavytera, the chiripa, omagua, the nengatu, tongues boras as the muinane and Mirana, and the Witoto as the ocaina ethnic groups, the nipode, the meneca, the murui, the nonuya and the koihoma.