Indigenous Becoming: Genesis and Resonance of Selve, a Play co-written with Sylvana Opoya from Taluhwen, Guiana, Amazonia

Abstract

This article describes Sylvana Opoya's contribution to the writing and staging of Selve , a play performed and designed in France by Christophe Rulhes and the GdRA. In the text of the play, Sylvana, a 22-year-old Wayana woman in the French Guiana Amazon, talks about pollution and gold panning. Via video extracts from interviews, her uncle Aimawale Opoya, the tipatakem or village chief of Taluhwen, addresses the question of Wayana territorial sovereignty in relation to "white people’s" ecological thought. Selve is inspired by the Amazon rainforest of Sylvana and Aimawale, and the remote Occitan language and peasant traditions of Quercy Rouergue (in Aveyron, France), the homeland of author and director Christophe Rulhes. As a result, various ways of wanting to belong to earth are echoing in Selve . In this article, the artist Christophe Rulhes uses methods from anthropology (he graduated from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) to underline the direct influence of Wayana's native culture on Selve 's conception.