The Jaguar’s Roar, Brazilian writer Micheliny Verunschk’s first book translated into English, is more of an experience than a standard-issue novel. That experience is sometimes disorienting and sometimes didactic but, ultimately, quite haunting.
The book’s seed are the real portraits of two anonymous Indigenous children, one a boy from the Juri people and the other a preteen girl from the Miranha people. Created in the 1820s, the portraits are well known to Brazilians; the two unnamed youths they depict were taken from the Amazon River basin by German naturalists Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius and Johann Baptist von Spix, and brought to the Bavarian court as specimens, essentially, for exhibition.
Verunschk’s novel gives names and inner lives to these children as they are torn from their families and forced on a bewildering and terrifying journey. The children do not speak a common language, nor do they speak the language of their captors. Their separateness is profound. The girl, Iñe-e, believes that she communes with a fabled jaguar, which is the reason her father has given her to the scientists. This jaguar’s roar eventually signifies a kind of cosmic reordering, forecasting both revenge and redemption. Verunschk, who is also a historian, embeds the children’s experiences in the fabric of Indigenous myth and cosmology, subtly contrasting the rich culture of the Amazon with the frozen winterscape of Bavaria, where the children arrive nameless and voiceless.
Another thread of the story follows Josefa, a contemporary woman struggling through a crisis of identity who, perhaps like the author herself, is mystified and outraged by the children’s—particularly Iñe-e’s—erasure. Through Josefa, readers face questions of personal and cultural histories and are moved toward a more critical view of the colonial project, even when the colonizers are naturalists in search of knowledge and scientific advancement.
Verunschk’s language is often poetic. Translator Juliana Barbassa calls the book “richly polyphonic” and notes that “the text is so multilingual that even Brazilian readers of the Portuguese version wouldn’t have understood every word.” The Jaguar’s Roar progresses in short episodes that are often sharply illuminating, like lightning strikes. Though occasionally more abstract than emotional, this novel offers a profound reckoning with a tragic and troublesome past.