Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon (15 page)

NAMES OF ICAROS

It is important to note that most icaros do not have names; when don Roberto
or dona Maria spoke about their icaros, they would often, instead of providing
a name, whistle or sing a bit of the melody. Some appear to have names-for
example, don Roberto will speak of, say, the icaro de bellaquillo, where the bellaquillo is the spirit of the camalonga, yellow oleander; but there may be many
icaros of that particular plant spirit, each belonging to a different singer.

When required to give an icaro a name by a gringo investigator with a tape
recorder, a shaman will use such names as icaro para espantar brujeria, song to
scare away sorcery; arcana para defensa, protection for defense; icaro para botar
malos, song to expel evil; icaro de la medicina, song of the medicine; or icaro para la curacidn, song for healing. Every shaman, for example, has an icaro de ayahuasca taught by the plant, and a huarmi icaro, woman icaro, for use in love
magic, but all are different, and each is unique to the particular shaman.

ICAROS AS MUSIC

Icaros are a distinct musical genre; a mestizo icaro is instantly recognizable.
In addition, there is a difference between icaros and oraciones, prayer songs,
of the sort dona Maria produced as a child and continued to produce, even
though, as a child, she called these songs her icaros. In fact, there are rival
shamans, I am told, who claim that the songs she sang during her healings
are not icaros at all but, rather, oraciones, because of their musical style. And,
indeed, there is a discernible difference between dona Maria's icaros and
those of don Roberto. Don Roberto's rhythms contain many backbeats, with
one or two syllables per beat, and few syllables stretched out over more than
one beat; dona Maria's syllables, in contrast, tended to spread out over several beats, and the emphasized syllables in each word tended to fall on the
beat rather than off it. Her tunes were sweeter and more melodious, and her
rhythm was less syncopated and staccato than those in the icaros of other
more traditional mestizo shamans; she used fewer vocables and other unintelligible words attributed to Quechua, tribal languages, or the speech of animals but, rather, primarily words in intelligible Spanish. Some of her loveliest
songs, like the oracidn de picaflores, prayer of the hummingbirds, were for her
baflos de flores, flower baths and other limpias, cleansing baths. It is worth adding that, while don Roberto whistles his arcanas, the icaros of protection at
the start of an ayahuasca healing ceremony, dona Maria would sing them. One
of her principal arcanas, songs of protection, was the avemaria, the Ave Maria.

It may be worth mentioning that many icaros have such Latin-inflected
rhythms that one may wonder about the influence of popular Peruvian music,
especially the form known as chicha, and its variety called cumbia amazdnica,
which can be heard even deep in the jungle on transistor radios or on CDs
carried upriver by canoe. I remember don Romulo Magin playing an ancient
radio for me, barely bringing in the scratchy music of a station in Colombia.
The music was infectiously lively, and I asked him what it was. La musica de la
selva, he told me, grinning. Jungle music.

Just as mestizo shamans modulate their singing voice in the direction of
whispering, breathiness, and whistling, some indigenous shamans sing in
a penetrating falsetto. For the Shipibo, this voice is what the shaman hears
when the spirit is teaching its song; the spirit sounds sometimes like a choir, sometimes like a single voice, neither male nor female.73 Yagua apprentices
undertake special steps to achieve a high-pitched sound, scraping their
tongues with the sharp edge of the samatu seashell and doing exercises to
maintain their voices as long as possible at a high pitch, at the limits of audibility. The higher the pitch, they say, the harder it is for another shaman to
steal the song and its power to call the spirit.74

ICAROS AND IMPROVISATION

Any particular icaro provides a structure within which the singer can improvise; the extent of improvisation varies from singer to singer. At the most basic level, many icaros are pattern songs: the lyrics do not vary from verse to verse
or line to line except for a section in which replaceable words or phrases can
be inserted. Many of doh a Marfa's songs are of this type: she repeats the lyrics, except where she inserts the name of the plant she is calling, along with
a standardized description of its powers: "Come, come, patiquina, protection from sorcery, protection from witchcraft, help my brothers and sisters.
... Come, come, cariflito, protection from sorcery, protection from witchcraft,
help my brothers and sisters." Such pattern songs can go on for fifteen or
twenty minutes at the beginning of an ayahuasca healing session, naming and
calling scores of plant spirits.

Moreover, there are several reasons to believe that there is more improvisation in the singing of icaros generally-even those that are not pattern
songs-than might first appear. First, from time to time a line will run several
beats too long; in other words, an extemporized line turns out not to fit the
meter of the song. Second, the icaros contain a number of filler words, which
the singer will use to pad out extemporized lines that turn out to be too short,
sometimes using vocables, such as nonay nonay nonay, and sometimes inserting ordinary words in Spanish; dona Maria is fond of the word reina, queen,
for this purpose. Third, the icaros are often built up of words with similar metrical properties, making improvisation easier; dona Maria, again, is
fond of four-syllable words such as medicina, doctorcito, poderoso, picaflores, and
ayudarle, which she uses constantly and with whose metrical properties she is
familiar.

On occasion, when two healers are working together, they will sing simultaneously, each singing his or her own icaro. When I was living with don
Romulo Magin, I had several ayahuasca sessions in which don Romulo was
assisted by his adult son, don Winister, who had learned to be an ayahuasquero from his father, having drunk his first ayahuasca when he was eight years old. Both would sing together, but different icaros; because their icaros
had such similar rhythmic and even melodic structures, the two icaros sung
together sounded like a round, but they were sufficiently different to produce
a decidedly eerie effect.75 Shipibo shamans, who have traditionally sung without rhythmic accompaniment, also from time to time do the same thing.76

Jungle Music

Cumbia is a popular music of Colombia, especially along the northern Caribbean
coast. A form of cumbia is also found in Peru, called chicha, named after the popular fermented drink, usually made of maize. Peruvian chicha took Colombian
cumbia rhythms and instrumentation and added the Andean elements of popularhuayno music;, and in turn chicha spun off two variants-tecnocumbia, which
added synthesizers and other electronica to the mix, and cumbia amazonicajungle music.

Cumbia amazoniaa developed in the 196os in the larger Upper Amazonian
towns such as Iquitos, Moyobamba, and Pucallpa, where the accordions of chicha were replaced by cheap, loud, portable garage-band instruments such as
Farfisa organs and big-reverb guitars, and local bands played cumbias amazonicas for oil workers-what one commentator has called "eastern Peruvian wild
west Amazon mining town jump up music."3 They sang about partying, oil prospecting, and jungle life, often with wry tongue-in-cheek humor: "My grandfather
has died ayayay, drinking liquor ayayay, my grandfather has died ayayay, drinking fermented manioc ayayay." Their sense of their music's regional and ethnic
roots was encapsulated in the phrase poderverde, green power.

Two long-surviving groups, Juaneco y su Combo and Los Mirlos, are primarily
associated with this music. The original Juaneco y su Combo was formed in 1966
in Pucallpa. It consisted of singer Wilindoro Cacique; guitarist Noe Fachin, called
El brujo because, it was said, his melodies came to him during ayahuasca visions; and saxophonist Juan Wong Paredes, leader and principal composer, the
original Juaneco.4 When Paredes's son Juan Wong Popolizio took over the band,
he traded in his accordion for a Farfisa organ .5

The group put on their first public concert in Iquitos in 1967. The concert
spawned legends-that the crowd was so large the army had to be called in; that
the venue was too small, and the band played out in the street; that Fachin's guitar was so erotically charged that rioting broke out. Half of the group, including
Fachin, died in 1976 in a plane crash. Wong died in 2004, but the group continues under the leadership of Mao Wong Lopez, the founder's grandson. The only
survivor of the original trio, Wilindoro Cacique, lives in a taxi garage in Pucallpa
and does occasional all-night gigs under the name Wilindoro y la Leyenda Viva
de Juaneco, Wilindoro and the living legend of Juaneco.6

Most distinctive about J uaneco y Su Combo was their adoption of the symbols
of indigenous Amazonia. While band members were mostly poor mestizos, their
pride in local tradition led them to wear Shipibo cushmas and feather coronas
onstage. "They think of it as their culture, even though they are not Shipibo,"
says Olivier Conan, a New York musician who has been key to their revival. "It is
a very important part of their whole music." 7 Their song lyrics also embraced distinctively Amazonian themes and legends-"Vacilando con ayahuasca," floating
with ayahuasca; "Mujer hilandera," Woman Spinning; "El Ilanto deAyaimama,"
The Weeping of the Potoo Bird."

Los Mirlos was founded in 1973 by Jorge Rodriguez Grandez, who enlisted
two of his brothers and a cousin to form the group. Many of their songs"Sonido amazonico" (Amazonian Sound), "El milagro verde" (The Green Miracle), "Muchachita del oriente" (jungle Girl), "Fiesta en la selva" (Party in the
Jungle)-refer to the area of Moyobambo, in the departamento of San Martin, where Rodriguez was born, although he moved to Lima when he was very young.
Guitarist Danny Johnson gave the band a darker sound-music critic Francisco
Melgar Wong calls his guitar work "sinuous and reptilian"-which differentiated
the group from its more cheerful contemporaries9 Rodriguez has been outspoken about his regional roots. "I have spoken to my jungle," he has said, "to all
immigrants from Peru."'°

Both these groups have had a remarkable revival beginning in the 199os,
as their countercultural style appealed to a new generation of young people in
Lima. Despite its recent embrace by the middle class, chicha remains an outsider music-an expression of migrants, nostalgia for home, hope for a better
life." It is, above all, party music, a concept operationalized by the ubiquitous
scantily clad callipygian bailarinas who dance onstage while the band plays. The
term chicha, very much like the term hip-hop in the United States, has come to
refer to a broad range of (imeno underclass culture, including cheap architecture, tabloid newspapers, and outdoor concerts and dance parties in venues,
such as empty parking lots, called chichodromos.12

Cumbia amazonica brought an indigenous world to the attention of those
who had previously been only dimly aware of it. Juaneco y Su Combo and Los
Mirlos achieved their primary success in the mid-19705, the time of the Amazon
oil boom. Prior to that period, the axis of Peruvian indigenous discourse had run
between Lima and Cuzco and thus between Spanish and Inca culture. Indeed,
the term indigenismo traditionally had little to do with indigenous peoples of
the jungle; it was, instead, an identification that the upper-class light-brown
trigueno elite in Cuzco made of themselves in connection with their own purported Inca heritage.13 Jungle Indians were chunchos, not worth thinking about.

Although there undoubtedly have been culturally exploitative currents in
cumbia amazonica, it was, in fact, revelatory. As we will discuss, there had long
been a profound social divide between urbanized mestizos and indigenous peoples of the jungle. But, according to music critic Ricardo Leon Almenara, when
Juaneco y su Combo began to appear in Shipibo cushmas, it seemed for the first
time that there might besomething in common between the two worlds, if only a
species of good-time jump-up bar music; and for the first time, says anthropologist Cesar Ramos, mestizos and Shipibos would drink beer from the same glass
at a festival.14

NOTES

1. Canepa, 2008, p. 38.

2. For a collection of early chicha on CD, including classic cumbia amaz6nica tracks,
see Conan, 2007.

3. Camp, 2008; Gehr, 2008.

4. Almenara, 2008.

5. World Music News Wire, 2008.

6. Almenara, 2008; Gehr, 2008.

7. World Music News Wire, 2008.

8. Almenara, 2008; Wong, 2007; Yerba Mala, 2008.

9. Wong, 2007; Yerba Mala, 2008.

io. Quoted in Romero, 2002, pp. 227-228.

ii. Canepa, 2008, p. 38.

12. Bardales, 2oo8a, 2oo8b; Gehr, 2008.

13. De la Cadena, 2001, p. 5.

14. Almenara, 2008; Ramos, 2004

STRANGE LANGUAGES

Abstraction from conceptual meaning is a key feature of mestizo shamanic
music. The most powerful icaros, such as the protective arcanas, are vocally refined into silbando, breathy and almost inaudible whistles. Thus, when
learning icaros, doia Maria told me, I should first hum the melody, or whistle
it in the breathy whispering whistle of silbando; only then should I learn the
words, for the words are much less important than the melody. Another shaman has told his apprentices not to be overly concerned with trying to memorize the words; singing the icaros from the heart with the correct resonance
and vibration is more important.77

Here there is a relationship between sound and phlegm, made explicit in
the use of the term mariri, raised and purified phlegm, as a synonym for icaro.78 Just as the shaman's magical phlegm, stored in the chest, is raised and
rarefied into mariri in the throat in order to protect against magical attackbecoming intangible, less physical, just like air, as don Roberto puts it-in
the same way, the more abstract, less conceptual, less overtly intelligible the
icaro, the more powerful it is. Both mariri, purified phlegm, and icaro, purified song, ultimately converge upon the same condition-that of puro sonido,
pure sound, which is the language of the plants.