by Will Forest
The fact is that today we still face imprisonment for daring to glow. We must continue to brave the jail cell and the lash for revealing truths that are natural, yet that few want to face: that our bodies age, that they are sexual, that they have scars and flab and don’t conform to impossibly ideal proportions but are wondrously beautiful all the same, and even that many cultural and societal traditions exist in order to deny these facts. It is for these reasons that we are—collectively, gloriously—humanity.
Don’t let your light extinguish. Who knows what further truths are yet to be discovered, or rediscovered, from the healthy shine of our bodies?
Keep yourself fully aglow!
Afterword
Few places hold my fascination as strongly as Mexico and Brazil. I’ve experienced their inexhaustibly rich cultures and landscapes, and the exceptional warmth and passion of their peoples. I decided to set a novel in both countries with a plot about lost documents from the time of the European ‘conquest.’ As I became more immersed in background research for Aglow, I realized I wanted to incorporate several myths, like El Dorado and Tamoanchan, the Fountain of Youth and the Iara, alongside historical figures like Palafox and Anchieta. But the crux of it, I realized, would involve plausible conjecture about indigenous forms of knowledge that the Spaniards and Portuguese either would not have understood, or would have condemned outright as barbarities. Such knowledge base, moreover, needed to include, or even depend on, the particular range of possibilities open to the human body when nude.
In all of the Americas before European contact, a writing system had only been invented once that we know of, in Mesoamerica. Since the Europeans had already developed relatively widespread writing practices centuries earlier, and even adopted the printing press during the time of colonization of the Americas, the written word held, in their esteem, a special and even sacred place in the construction and safekeeping of knowledge. But for many preliterate cultures, knowledge was mostly stored in bodies. People transmitted memories of important facts or practices through a repertoire of bodily productions such as dance, cooking and hunting procedures, initiation ceremonies, rhythmic chanting, the rhymes and epithets of storytelling and song, etc. The Europeans almost uniformly viewed these practices as primitive, or ignorant, or even demonic—we now know, of course, that had the Europeans been a bit more curious and less quick to condemn, there is much more native knowledge that could have been retained about plants, agriculture, the landscape, etc.—knowledge that had been accumulated and passed on over centuries.
Novelists who have richly rendered the world of pre-Conquest Mexico, and whose works have inspired me, include Larry Baxter, who wrote The Mayan Glyph. His speculative novel posits that the solution to an international epidemic depends on deciphering an ancient Mayan scientist’s glyph-like drawing, which turns out to be his rendition of the beginnings of the periodic table of the elements. In a series of mystery novels starting with Demon of the Air, Simon Levack depicts pre-Conquest Tenochtitlan, the Mexica (Aztec) capital, through the eyes of a wily slave/detective. Most stunning of all is Gary Jennings’ Aztec (which became a series of novels). It opens up the Mexica worldview to readers in English in spectacular and wide-ranging detail that weds history to imagination very successfully. Its narrative structure influenced the way I conceived of Amana’s story as a testimony. All of these novels engage the reader in what fiction does so well: the transport to another world, worldview, or set of circumstances, in which we nonetheless develop empathy for characters perhaps very unlike ourselves. Another marvelous work that influenced me, especially in the tone of the passages from the life of Sun Prince, is Kahlil Gibran’s outstanding prose poem, The Prophet.
I find intriguing the rarely considered idea that there would have been people who did not believe the Mexica dogma. We tend to teach and learn generalizations, asserting, for example, that the Aztecs believed human sacrifice was necessary for the sun to continue crossing the sky every day. Certainly the Mexica power structure endorsed and reinforced this belief, though we cannot even be sure that all of the political stakeholders in this article of faith truly believed it, let alone common citizens struggling to live their lives and make ends meet. Despotic regimes prefer to regard dissidents as sacrificial victims; it is no surprise that little if any evidence remains of individuals we might call “conscientious objectors” to the Mexica theocracy. What little information is known about any such people after the Iberians arrived can be found, tellingly, in records of the Inquisition.
Tonatiuhpilli—imagined as a Huastec man among the Mexica—and Amana—a woman from one of the Tupi-speaking Amazonian cultures living among the Inca and then the Muisca—not only embody the voices of dissent in their respective adopted cultures, but also they do so through what can be seen as a kind of proto-naturism originating in their own, more nude-friendly, home cultures. “Naturism” is a modern term coined in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Europe and used worldwide today. As a philosophy, naturism is defined by the INF (International Naturist Federation) as “a way of life in harmony with nature characterized by the practice of communal nudity with the intention of encouraging self-respect, respect for others and for the environment.” All human societies have contexts for social nudity. My interest in this novel is to complicate the European stereotype of the naked “savage” by exploring ways in which indigenous iconoclasts such as Amana and Tonatiuhpilli, who lived their lives against the grain of established textile social structures, could be considered as proto-naturists, and the objectives they might have had for doing so.
These objectives could have included knowledge about our bodies and its specific applications, such as the idea that there could have been an essential understanding of how vibrations could ease the labor of giving birth. Pamela Erens’ novel Eleven Hours explores the logistics of childbirth and includes the act of humming. Some indigenous languages, such as Pirahã in central Amazonas state, Brazil, are documented as using humming tones, or a kind of alternate humming speech. Furthermore, even with the prevalence of hospital births today, there are still many documented cases of orgasmic birth, and also documented methods of inducing orgasm during childbirth. But this novel’s particular details related to the humming pitches and the eye positions come from my own imagination.
Historical aspects of the tempestuous 1642 viceregal succession in New Spain are accurate as presented: Palafox ousted López Pacheco, who was under suspicion of collaborating with the Portuguese, and he ordered the destruction of López Pacheco’s collection of Mesoamerican antiquities. What I invented are the letter and note in Palafox’s hand, and the existence of a letter from Mascarenhas to López Pacheco. I also invented the brief introduction by José de Anchieta to Natupari’s testimony, but the existence of such testimonies collected by the Jesuits in Brazil and other areas is a historical fact. Regarding the Amazon region and its folklore, Candace Slater’s Dance of the Dolphin and Entangled Edens provide great background.
Some of the characters in Aglow incorporate contemporary sources. The character of Jônatas Bandeirante is an avatar of my ever-inspiring, ever-amazing friend and colleague Jorge Bandeira—director, playwright, actor and activist, bookstore owner/operator, and founder of the affiliated naturist group GRAUNA in Manaus. The animal lottery and America allegory plays depicted in the novel are my own conceptions, but they are similar to, and follow the lead of, the kinds of work Jorge creates with his group, Teatro Êden, and associated actors/naturists I had the honor of meeting (Iran, Jacyene, Victor, Ruan). Through Jorge’s materials documenting indigenous practices and attitudes regarding clothing, I became aware of the speech known as “Natupari,” meaning “I Refuse” in the Parintins language of southeastern Amazonas state in Brazil. The speech was delivered by a Parintintins leader upon initial contact with modern Western customs, which may have been as recently as the 1940s. In Aglow, the character Natupari, who is named for the source, gives a version of this speech in the final six paragraphs of her testimony.
The “Sr. Ribeiro” mentioned at the nude beach is a nod to Pedro Ribeiro, founder of the Abricó association, editor of the online naturist magazine Olho Nu, and one of Brazil’s most indefatigable defenders of naturism. Bill’s “They Came from Outer Spain” riff is my own invention, but his list of shiny objects for which many indigenous groups held reverence derives from several comprehensive publications on brilliance in pre-Columbian cultures by anthropologist Nicholas J. Saunders.
The snippets of Spanish and Portuguese that I have included in dialogue throughout the text are authentic and correct. I’ve tried to make them clear, for readers who don’t know those languages, either through context or through translation shortly afterward. A few times I deliberately withheld translation for purposes of suspense. Isolated words in Nahuatl and Tupi are accurate as far as my limited but enthusiastic understanding of those languages.
I extend my gratitude to several beta readers, especially Martin Jensen, for their feedback, prompts, and dedication. Thanks to cover artist Bernard Perroud for his attention to detail, his wonderful aesthetic, and for providing initial renderings of the cover art early on—these became a source of inspiration for me, as did the works of my fellow naturist writers Robert Longpré and Paul Walker. Many thanks as always to my patient and indulgent family.
A final note on identity: I share neither the sex nor the ethnicity of the protagonist and first-person narrator, Marisol Aguilar, but I have spent more than half my life in daily interaction with people who do. Fiction is always an exercise in imagination, anchored by experience and by inspiration. If we are not free to imagine ourselves as others, then we have fallen to the oppression of the tyrant. Frank and intimate respect for the art, culture, and language of others’ traditions and viewpoints is what can allow us all to strive together, always, toward a more complete understanding of our own shared humanity.