"Before, there was no world. Darkness covered it all. While there was nothing, a woman came to be by herself. This happened amongst the darkness. She appeared sustained on her white quartz bench. While appearing, she covered herself with her ornaments and made a kind of room. This room is called Uhtãboho taribu, the “White Quartz Room”. Her name was Yebá Buró, the 'Grandmother of the World', or also 'Grandmother of the Earth'.”

These are the words that open the book Antes o Mundo não Existia, a collection of creation narratives (or mythology) of the indigenous Desana people, written by Firmiano and Luiz Lana (father and son), from the Kehíripõrã clan, or "sons of the drawings of the dream".

Sited in the Amazon's northwest, the Upper Rio Negro is the original territory of more than 23 indigenous peoples, organised in a unique multilingual system. The Desana are speakers of the Eastern Tukano language family.

Cultivated and passed on over time, these Desana narratives about the creation of our world speak of an unspeakable moment in space and time. It is from the dark that our planet and life emerge. They emerge from a drawing, a web of drawings, formulated in the thoughts and in the dream of an ancestral time.

ABOUT THE CYCLE

In the online cycle Before, There Was no World, we travel through the knowledge, memory and know-how of the Desana culture, getting to know some myths and their meanings, as well as the thinking linked to this narrative of the origin of the world.

Originally published in 1980, the creation narratives that make up Antes o Mundo Não Existia were a pioneering initiative in the publishing field, and inspired a series of publications in their region of origin in the following decade – which turned to be, from 1995 onwards, the Narradores Indígenas do Alto Rio Negro editions, volumes of ancestral narratives from the Upper Rio Negro Indigenous Land, in the municipality of São Gabriel da Cachoeira, in the state of Amazonas.

The cycle includes 4 recorded meetings, Notebooks Selvagem and other complementary materials, which can be accessed via the icons on this page.

The book Antes o Mundo Não Existia (Dantes, 2019) by Umusï Pãrõkumu (Firmiano Lana) and Tõrãmü Këhíri (Luiz Lana) is also part of the cycle.

BOOK AND NOTEBOOK

PROGRAMME