Omama/Yoasi — The First Shaman

In the beginning, no human beings lived there yet. Omama and his brother Yoasi lived there alone. There were no women yet. The two brothers met the first woman much later, when Omama fished Tëpërësiki’s daughter out of a big river. In the beginning, Omama copulated in the fold of his brother Yoasi’s knee. With time, the latter’s calf became pregnant and this is how Omama first had a son. Yet we, the inhabitants of the forest, were not born this way. We came later, from the vagina of Omama’s wife, Thuëyoma, the woman he pulled out of the water. The shamans have brought her image down since the beginning of time. They also refer to her as Paonakare. This was a fish being that let itself be captured in the appearance of a woman. It is so. If Omama hadn’t fished her out of the river, perhaps human beings would still copulate behind their knees!

Later Omama got angry at his brother Yoasi, for Yoasi had furtively made appear the evil beings of disease we call në wãri, as well as those of the xawara epidemic, who are also eaters of human flesh. Yoasi was bad and his thought full of oblivion. As for Omama, he had created the sun being who never dies and whom the shamans call Mothokari. I am not speaking here of the sun whose warmth settles on the forest and which ordinary people see, but of the image of the sun. It is so. The sun and the moon possess images that only the shamans can bring down and make dance. They have a human appearance, like us, but the white people cannot know them.

Omama wanted us to be as immortal as the sun. He wanted to do things handsomely and put a truly solid breath of life in us. So he searched the forest to cut a piece of hardwood to stand up and imitate his wife’s shape with. He chose a pore hi ghost tree whose skin is constantly renewed. He wanted to introduce the image of this tree into our breath of life so it remained long and resistant. This way, when we became old, our skin could have sloughed off and remained smooth and new forever. We could have constantly become young again and never died. This is what Omama wanted.

But Yoasi took advantage of his absence and placed the bark of a tree we call kotopori usihi in Omama’s wife’s hammock. This soft bark folded back on the side and hung from the hammock to the ground. The toucan spirits immediately broke into pained wails of mourning. Omama heard them and got angry at his brother. But it was too late, the damage was done. Yoasi had taught us how to die once and for all. He had introduced death, that evil being, into our mind and our breath, making them so fragile. Since then, human beings have always been close to death. This is why we also sometimes refer to white people as Yoasi thëri, People of Yoasi. We see their merchandise, machines, and the epidemics that constantly bring us death as traces of Omama’s bad brother.