Geni Núñez: Indigenous thought questions monogamy – 01/14/2024 – Balance

Geni Núñez avoids the obvious. At 32 years old, the Guarani psychologist and academic divides her time between professional writing about sexuality and non-monogamous love and psychoanalytic listening sessions with groups of indigenous people.

His book “Decolonizando Afetos” was one of the ten best sellers in the last Flip, side by side with names like Itamar Vieira Junior and Socorro Acioli. Released in October by Planeta, the work combines reflections and poems with historical research on the Jesuit colonization of Brazil.

The prestige of seeing the work in shopping bags at the popular literary fair surprised Núñez, but less than Ailton Krenak’s response to the invitation to write two or three lines with his impressions for the book’s cover.

ABL’s new immortal returned the request with a complete preface, which exalts the author’s sensitivity to delving into the history of her people and presenting readers with an indigenous understanding of love, without strings attached or masters.

Anyone looking for truisms about sexual freedom or reaffirmation of the importance of self-love in the work will be disappointed. “We don’t need more hierarchy reinforcement, we just need acceptance of our smallness”, argues Núñez. “We are not in danger if the one we love kisses other people.”

What led you, as an Indigenous woman, to write about non-monogamy?
As a psychologist, I realize that people are very hurt, very hurt by the dominant way of relating and living. Most don’t even know there are other possibilities.

One of the objectives of my work is to say that other possible worlds already exist, and it is not a utopia. I have named this as reforestation of imagination.

It’s thinking that, just as the land when hit by monoculture has only one answer, we are also led to think of a single path. I insist that people’s lives go beyond this monoculture.

How have your most memorable romantic experiences influenced your views on monogamy?
Us [indígenas] we have a broader view of love and non-monogamy. The idea of ​​private property is not part of the cosmogony of our people.

This even includes the trial of the time frame, in which it is questioned who owns the land. It’s a question that is problematic in its own construction, because we don’t believe that it is possible to own it. Not from the river, not from the mountain, not from other people.

When I think about the personal relationships that inspired me, I think about relationships of support and support that I receive from my people, my family, my relatives [indígenas]. This is all very empowering. The path to decolonizing affections cannot be individual. All these relationships, for me, are loving relationships.

In sexual affective relationships I see that, for me, questioning a monoculture involved questioning several others, because I am not a heterosexual person, for example. And within evangelical spaces, which many of our people are forced to attend, we hear: “You have to choose whether you are a man or a woman, whether you want a man or a woman…”

Of course, we also have insecurities, fears and jealousy. But the invitation is not to not feel, but to feel all of this without it being something destructive for yourself and for others.

The pain of being overlooked, of being exchanged or replaced by another, is a source of anguish and suffering for most women at some point in their lives, especially when they are part of a minority. How do you see this?
In my clinical listening, I notice that it is very common for women to sometimes combine these questions without speaking up: “What does he want, what will he want?”.

Our own issues end up secondary. The invitation is not to have a life without pain, which is unlikely, but to rethink that some models produce this pain.

I analyze the etymology of the word “single”, which comes from “alone”. We often have several other relationships of affection, support, and love. But as they do not fit into this framework [do amor romântico], it seems like life was a failure. Or that what was transformed went wrong.

This is the influence of Christian logic on relationships. But the great inspiration for Christianity is Platonism, so talking about romantic love is also talking about this ideal of eternity, fixity and immutability. And these three criteria disqualify life, as it is precisely the opposite of that.

We should not understand transformation as a failure, but as the movement of life, it is a way of honoring our history and the time we live with people. We say that Guarani are a people on the move.

In the book, you talk about beauty as a place of power and the suffering that comes from the feeling of not belonging. Do you think that the openness to more diverse and less Eurocentric beauty standards has also effectively encompassed indigenous populations?
It is a double movement, in which racism persists and worsens, but there is also resistance to it. We see the construction of self-esteem in a different way: through the relationship with spirituality, sensuality, food, painting, dancing, singing. She goes through it all.

So it stops being something of individual work, almost a person’s duty to love and welcome themselves, to a task that is placed more on the collective.

You have 318 thousand followers on Instagram. What took you to social media?
Over the past three years, there has been increased interest in indigenous perspectives. On the networks, at the same time as I talk about the reforestation of the imagination, I am very interested in the fact that my work is strengthening the reforestation that takes place in villages, for example.

The debate on non-monogamy is also a way that I found to strengthen the struggle of our people, as perhaps many people would not approach our struggles in other ways.

You write about how Christian logic colonized affection with the idea of ​​monogamous union as the only alternative. But social networks have also colonized the imagination in a certain way, reinforcing stereotypes and unattainable ideals about beauty and love, for example. How do you see this contradiction?
It is complex, because these structures are heavily influenced by capitalism, the exploitation of nature and various groups. It is a very controversial relationship.

As an indigenous movement, we have tried to do the following: since hegemonic media have always been against us, and there was often no possibility of a counter-narrative, we have sought to occupy this space as part of this dispute.

I also highlight how recent this presence of several indigenous artists on the networks is. It’s a colonization space, but somehow we tried to hack it a little bit.

X-RAY

Geni Núñez, 32

Guarani writer and activist, she is a psychologist, with a master’s and doctorate in social psychology from the Federal University of Santa Catarina. In 2023, she published the children’s book “Jaxy Jaterê: O Saci É Guarani” (Harper Kids), and “Decolonizing Affections: Experimentations on Other Ways of Love” (Editora Planeta). She is a member of the Brazilian Articulation of Indigenous Psychologists and the Human Rights Commission of the Federal Psychology Council.