By Juliana Barbassa.
Thie following is Juliana Barbassa’s introduction to The Jaguar’s Roar (Dead Ink Books, 2026) by Micheliny Verunschk.
On the white wall of a cultural centre in São Paulo, as part of an exhibition showcasing five hundred years of Brazilian history, are lithographs of two Indigenous children, a boy and a girl. Their images were part of a book by two German naturalists, Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius and Johann Baptist von Spix. After landing in Rio de Janeiro in 1817, they travelled across the country over the course of three years, observing, cataloguing, and collecting hundreds of specimens of flora and fauna for later analysis and display in Europe.
Despite the naturalists’ painstaking notes on so much else they observed during their trip, they recorded very little information about the children other than their people of origin. And that is how they’re identified in the book: the girl a Miranha, and the boy a Juri. The images themselves are well known in Brazil; schoolchildren might come across them in textbooks, or, as was the case with the author Micheliny Verunschk, in an exhibition such as the one in São Paulo, alongside other illustrations of the country’s exuberant natural landscape and cultural diversity.
What is not widely known: that these children, shorn of their names and their history, were among the samples the scientists carried with them back to Europe for further study. Their lives, and their deaths a few months after their arrival in Germany, have been largely erased. It is from that absence that The Jaguar’s Roar, originally published as O Som do Rugido da Onça, was born: from Verunschk’s visit to the lithographs in the exhibition, and from her search for the story not told. Images of the children became widespread even during their lifetime. Martius, Spix, and their party were among the first European scientists to explore Brazil’s vast interior. The Portuguese had kept the country closed to other foreigners until 1808, a policy that had hindered, among others, the well-known German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who had reached Spanish-speaking South America several years earlier, in 1799, and written extensively of his discoveries. Brazil’s relative isolation had helped feed a great interest in Germany and elsewhere for Spix’s and Martius’s findings; the dissemination of portraits of the children and other Indigenous people helped satisfy that curiosity.
For Verunschk, the images in the São Paulo exhibition became an obsession. ‘The figures were very familiar to me,’ she said in a 2021 interview, ‘but finding them there, in the original, their faces looking at me, it was disturbing.’ She visited the exhibition countless times over several years, trying to understand the nature of this disturbance, its origin. As a trained historian, she said, her first impulse was to conduct research, to dig for whatever information might be available about the children. But she’s also a poet and a novelist. Not finding much recorded about the two, she began to write their story, weaving together the fictional and the archival to shape one version – her version – of what might have been.
The novel takes as its starting point the historical journey of a girl and a boy who were taken from the Amazon River basin, in Brazil, to the Bavarian court, in Germany, by Spix and Martius in 1820. Into this narrative, Verunschk weaves another story, set in present-day Brazil and centred on Josefa, a young woman in São Paulo who comes across a portrait of the Indigenous children in an exhibition. The encounter, particularly with the image of the girl, leaves Josefa shaken. She begins to reflect on the child’s fate and on her own identity, eventually setting off for Germany in search of answers.
In Verunschk’s novel, the girl believes she had been taken under the protection of a jaguar entity when she was very young. The jaguar’s presence serves as a connecting thread in the story. As the largest predator on the continent, the jaguar has long been a source of fascination and terror. It is a mythical figure in Indigenous mythologies and Brazilian folklore, often appearing as an archetype of power and knowledge, willing at times to lend its skills to humans, for good or evil. Stories of people shapeshifting into jaguars to seek revenge, wreak violence, or act out in ways humans can’t (or won’t) appear in songs and stories, and have been incorporated into literature and even a popular soap opera. During the girl’s months of grief and alienation in Europe, the recurring figure of the jaguar serves as a source of strength and a connection to home. Ultimately, the jaguar becomes an instrument of her revenge, lending the child its voice and its strength, shattering the passivity she’d been reduced to – a girl without a name, an image on a wall.
In her approach, Verunschk is confronting perspectives on Brazil’s nature and society that have their roots, in part, in Spix and Martius. Their gaze, even now, helps define Brazil, even for Brazilians.
Upon their return to Europe, the naturalists published an account of the journey, Travels in Brazil, that included the images of the children. It also included the scientists’ reflections on the Indigenous people they encountered: ‘The temperament of the Indian is almost wholly undeveloped, and appears as phlegm. All the powers of the soul, nay, even the more refined pleasures of the senses, seem to be in a state of lethargy,’ they wrote. ‘Strangers to complaisance, gratitude, friendship, humility, ambition, and, in general, to all delicate and noble emotions which adorn human society; obtuse, reserved, sunk in indifference to everything, the Indian employs nothing but his naturally acute senses, his cunning, and his retentive memory.’
Following Spix’s early death in 1826, Martius continued to publish extensively, writing up their zoological and botanical finds and coming to be regarded as an authority on the country. In 1840, as the Brazilian elite struggled to shape the identity of the newly independent country, its Historical and Geographic Institute offered a prize for the best essay setting out guidelines for how to approach its history. The winner was none other than Martius.
His essay framed an early view of Brazil as a country defined by a ‘peculiar racial harmony’, drawing on the metaphor of a single river forming from mixed racial waters, albeit one in which a hierarchy remained, since the ‘powerful river of Portuguese blood ought to absorb the small tributaries of the Indian and the Ethiopian races’. The idea of Brazil as a country in which ‘three human races live side by side, in a manner unheard-of,’ as Martius wrote, would be developed and embraced in the decades to come as part of a national image that shrugged off the terrible cost of the Portuguese colonial project, the slaughter of the continent’s Indigenous people, and the slave trade that was the backbone of the economy.
To this day, Spix and Martius’s voyage through the country continues to be celebrated as one of the most important scientific explorations of its time. Their work continues to appear regularly in Brazil’s most esteemed cultural institutions: beyond the inclusion of some prints in the permanent exhibition in São Paulo, there was an exhibition in Rio de Janeiro in 2017 and another in 2021, to mention some of the most recent. And to this day, their perspective on Brazil, its people, its landscapes – and a Western, Eurocentric perspective, more broadly – continues to hold sway in the country.
Verunschk uses the novel as a prism through which to view aspects of Brazil’s culture and history, particularly elements that reveal attitudes toward the Indigenous and their treatment by the state and other actors over the centuries. Into her writing she folds research on Indigenous lore, folk traditions, and snippets of this history: a massacre of hundreds of Paiacu in 1699 by troops representing the crown; an episode when the Portuguese royal family offered another Indigenous group protection for their lands in exchange for help fighting a war, only to fail to deliver on that promise. She later brings in headlines and quotes from contemporary newspapers speaking of present-day killings of Indigenous people in Brazil, reflecting how much has not changed.
Although the backdrop of the novel is historical, there is a palpable urgency to Verunschk’s prose. She experienced the lithographs in the museum exhibition, presented as they were with little added context, as part of an enduring, ongoing erasure. She had a visceral reaction to them, and her writing bears traces of it. To counterbalance this erasure, the novel centres the points of view of people still so frequently rendered as objects of discovery, description, and study. It introduces the children’s voices alongside the voices of the explorers, of members of the royal family that funded the expedition, of others who worked in the palace where the children were taken – and even of geographic features like rivers.
The Jaguar’s Roar touches often on the importance of storytelling and of language as essential to identity. The question of how a present-day, non-Indigenous writer can presume to inhabit the perspectives of two Indigenous children born in the Amazon in the early nineteenth century is acknowledged early in the novel. Isn’t writing a novel about these children another theft, another erasure of sorts? Early on, the narrator addresses this tension: ‘This is the voice of the dead, the language of the dead, in the writing of the dead. All of it is riven with faults, true, but what can I do except tell this story through the cracks? Like a plant that breaks through the imperviousness of brick, its roots prowling the dark, the vigour of its leaves imposing a new landscape, this story reaches for the sun.’
Verunschk approached the novel with a clear intention that this narrative not be told in only one voice, rooted in one particular place, time, and world view. To fold in additional perspectives, she did extensive research and approached the creative process as an act of careful listening, acknowledging and folding in the many, variegated myths, ways of understanding the world, and shared tales that might have made up the world of the boy and the girl at the centre of the novel. What she aimed for is a sort of overtly acknowledged collective authorship, she said in the 2021 interview.
‘
I’m a storyteller,’ she said, but, ‘no story is told in isolation. Every story has a story that precedes it. It has strands, connecting it to what came before, to the people who came before, to other voices.’ As a translator, I was drawn to the challenge of doing justice to Verunschk’s richly polyphonic work. The world of The Jaguar’s Roar is one in which destruction is the flip side of scientific enquiry, where cultures collide, frequently amid bloodshed. Her prose allows vocabulary from multiple languages, European and Indigenous, to exist alongside variations of an aggressively colloquial Portuguese peppered with regionalisms and anachronisms, and even entirely made-up words, such as some used by the figure of the jaguar. Rivers speak, and their narratives eddy and swirl and loop through time. At times, lists of words tumble across the page, such as types of animals in a forest, or the many names used to refer to jaguars and their kin in Brazil, in a sort of verbal rendering of a natural and cultural abundance:
Call me and I’ll come in my many pelts, in the guise of stars, suaçurana, I’ll come. Spotted leopard, cougar, black panther. I’ll come, jaguaretê, I will. Acanguassú, I’ll come. Acanjaruna, I’ll come. Ianovare, I’ll come. Jaguapinima, I’ll come. Ñanguarichã, I’ll come. Niguciédo-senjo, I’ll come. Pacová-sororoca, I’ll come. Mingoêdo-sengue, I’ll come. Jagoareté-apiaba, I’ll come. Tigre, I’ll come. Canguçuzinho-do-campo, I’ll come. Maracajá, I’ll come. Jagoaracucu, I’ll come. Jaguatirica, I’ll come. Jaguapitangussu, I’ll come. Iaguar, iauaretê, I’ll come. Tipai uu, I’ll come. I’ll come and I’ll give you what’s yours by right, your jaguar skin.
Throughout the novel, archival extracts from letters or diaries, scientific or artistic treatises from centuries past, and quotes from Goethe or Schiller, co-exist with elements of Brazilian folklore and dreamlike fugues that help chronicle lives in which violence and a profound dislocation have blurred the lines of reality. This clash of languages, registers, and perspectives, at once productive and destructive, reflects something of Brazil, then and now; in Verunschk’s writing, the fractures are exposed.
The text is so multilingual that even Brazilian readers of the Portuguese version wouldn’t have understood every word. So I opted to leave a select few words as I found them. I hope this allows some of the fecundity and the intentional disorientation of Verunschk’s prose to show through. For example, when a Miranha woman prepares to give birth to the girl who will be at the centre of the story in a ‘maloca’, a rustic hut, I left the word untranslated; and when a river in Germany first introduces itself to the young girl by whispering ‘fluss-fluss-fluss’ – the wonderfully onomatopoeic German word for river – I left that too. When a future Bavarian king writes a letter asking his cousin for her daughter’s hand in marriage, he peppers his plea with French. I let that stand as well: ‘I love the princess Karoline, dear cousin, better yet, j’en suis fou.’ When translating sections in a strongly regional dialect that would have been recognisable to a Brazilian reader, but has no equivalent in English, I leaned into cadence and at times word order to convey the shift, but eschewed alternate spellings and contractions that might read as parody. In The Jaguar’s Roar, Verunschk creates a narrative that returns dissonance and alienation, as well as a measure of beauty, to the story of a girl reduced for more than two hundred years to a silent portrait on a wall. As Verunschk acknowledges, this is not her story; it is one version, her version, of a quintessentially Brazilian story. May there be others.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Juliana Barbassa is an award-winning journalist, a nonfiction author and editor, and a literary translator. Born in Brazil, she covered the country as a correspondent, then as the Latin America editor for the New York Times. Later, she became a deputy editor at the New York Times Book Review. She lives in Rome, New York, and Rio de Janeiro.
