Etiê Apuã

Helena Iara has been speaking a lot of new words recently, if "words" is the right term.  She repeats the same sound again and again, as if they were words, but without a clear meaning or a connection to sounds we can understand.  And her favorite of these repeated sounds is "etiê apuã," together with some variations like eteteiê, abuã, ebwa...  And then, of course, there is the ever-present mamama, which may or may not refer to Rita, though she does seem to us it in the right context from time to time, meaning something like, "Mom, I need you."

It's the repetition of etiê apuã that's been fascinating, though.  She's used the words for the last two weeks, and they seem to be important to her, even if not in the conventional sense of meaning, of connecting a sound to a thing to which it refers.  I'd love to think that apuã is a real word for her, because it means both mountain and head in Guaraní, the native language that used to be spoken in this part of Brazil (and the origin of Iara, Helena's middle name), and given my love of both mountain climbing and intellectualism, what could be a better first word for my daughter?  Unfortunately, though, I don't think there is any way in the world I get to make that argument.  Besides the Guaraní loan words common in Portuguese, Helena has never heard the language spoken.

It's the variations on the words that strike me as perhaps a more honest way to think about etiê apuã.  She'll sometimes drag out the vowels, other times repeat the consonants, other times almost sing the words as if they came from a tonal language.  Sometimes the nasal vowels (ê, ã) are more defined, other times those same sounds seem more flat and English.  She is experimenting and playing with sound, but in a way that reminds me of what John Coltrane did to well-known melodies: she takes them, tears them apart, puts them back together.

The traditional definition of the human being was as a logicon zoon, an animal with reason or language (logos means both in Greek), but Hannah Arent famously turned this idea on its head, showing that many animals use sounds as a way to convey symbols, while some people cannot.  Art, she says, is the aspect that makes us human: no other animal makes art.  Helena's game of theme and variation on etiê apuã makes me think she may be right: before language is meaning, it is art, an attempt to play with sounds in order to create beauty.