Tomorrow is not for sale (2020), by Ailton Krenak
Translated by Henrique Salema Maschk Darlim
PDF version available here.
I stopped walking around the world, canceled commitments. I'm with my family at the Krenak village, on medium Doce river. Our indigenous reserve is isolated for about a month. The absent regressed — and we know well the risk of welcoming outsiders. We know it's dangerous to contact asymptomatic people. We're all here and until now we haven't had any cases.
Truth is for a long time we've been living cornered and exiled on our own territory, a four thousand hectares reserve — which should be much larger, if justice were to be done — and this involuntary confinement has given us resilience; it made us more resistant. How can I explain my isolation to someone closed for a month in an apartment, on a large metropolis? Excuse me, but today I already have planted corn, and also planted a tree…
We in Krenak village have been mourning our Doce river for some time now. I wasn't expecting the world to bring upon us another mourning. When engineers told me they would recover the Doce river using technology, they also asked my opinion. I answered: “My suggestion is too hard to be useful. We would have to stop all human activity across the river for about a hundred kilometres on the right and left banks until it came back to life”. Then one of them told me: “But that's impossible”. The world can't stop. And still it stopped.
We live today this so-called social isolation experience in which all people need to withdraw. If for a time it were us, indigenous people, that felt threatened by the rupture or extinction of our way of life, nowadays we all are at the imminence of Earth not supporting anymore our demand. We watch this tragedy of people dying across the planet at such a level that, in Italy, bodies are being transported in trucks towards incineration.
This pain can maybe help people understand if we are in fact a humanity. We have become familiarized to this idea, that was naturalized, but nobody pays attention anymore to the true sense of what being human means. It's as if we have many children playing and by imagining this childhood fantasy, they continue to play indefinitely. But we became adults, we are devastating the planet, we are digging an enormous grave of inequalities between peoples and societies, in such a way that there is a subhumanity living in great misery, with no chance of getting out of it — and this was also naturalized.
The Brazilian president said recently that Brazilians dive in the sewers and nothing happens. What we see regarding this man is the exercise of necropolitics, an option for death. It's a diseased mentality dominating the world. And now we have the virus, an Earth's organism, responding to this diseased human thinking by attacking the unsustainable way of life adopted freely by us; the fantastic freedom everybody loves to vindicate without asking its price.
This virus is discriminating humanity. Just look around. The bitter melon [Momordica charantia] continues to grow here. Nature goes on. The virus doesn't kill birds, bears, any beings besides humans. Only humans. The human peoples and their artificial world going into crisis are the ones alarmed.
It's terrible what's happening, but society needs to understand we are not the salt of the earth. We must abandon anthropocentrism — there's so much life beyond us, biodiversity won't miss us. On the contrary. Since we are little, we learn about species entering extinction. While this process increases its pace, humans proliferate, destroying forests, rivers and animals. We are worse than COVID-19. The package named humanity is separating itself from the organism named Earth by living in a civilizing abstraction, that suppress diversity, denies plurality of ways of life, of life forms, of existences and of habits.
The only centers still considering being attached to this Earth are ones nearly forgotten, staying on the edges of the planet, on banks of the rivers, on the shores of the oceans, on Africa, Asia or Latin America. This is the subhumanity: caiçaras, the indigenous, quilombolas, the aborigines. There are, then, a humanity participating in a restrict club which doesn't accepts new members; and the subhumanity, a more rustic and organic stratum still linked to the Earth. I don't feel like I'm part of humanity. I feel excluded from it.
We've been for a long time cradled by the story: we are the humanity who became alienated from this organism we belong to, the Earth. We started to think these are separate things: Earth and humanity. I don't perceive something existing which is not nature — everything is nature, the cosmos is nature, all I can think about is nature.
We will live in artificial environments produced by the big corporations, the money owners. Now this living organism, the virus, seems like it has got tired of us and wants to divorce us the way humanity wanted to divorce nature. It wants to turn us off by taking away our oxygen. When COVID-19 attacks the lungs, its owner needs a ventilator, an oxygen supply device. Otherwise, he dies. How many machines like that will we need to build for Earth's 7 billion people population?
Our Mother Earth give us oxygen free of charge, put us to sleep, awakens us with the sun, lets the birds sing, the breezes and currents flow; it creates this wonderful world to share and what we do to it? What we are living can be the work of a loving mother deciding to shut her son up for a moment. Not because she doesn't love him, but because she wants to teach him something. “Silence, son”, Earth's tells humanity. And she is so wonderful she orders us. She is simply asking for silence. This is also the meaning of our retreat.
I wish I could magically take us out of this confinement, making everyone feel the rain falling. It's time to tell stories to our children, to explain they should not be afraid. I'm not a preacher of the apocalypse, what I try to do is to share the message of another possible world. To fight this monster, we must take care and then take courage.
We see some people defending the maintenance of economic activity, saying that “some people will die” and it's inevitable. This approach affects people who love the elderly, people who are grandparents, parents, children, and siblings. It's an insensitive declaration. It doesn't make sense someone with a good conscience saying “some will die” in a public communication. It's the trivialization of life while being also the trivialization of the power of the word — for anyone speaking such things is proclaiming a condemnation, both of the elderly, both of its children, grandchildren, and all the people affected by one another. Just think if I can remain peaceful while thinking my mother or my father can be so easily discarded: they are why I'm alive: if they can be discarded, so can I.
Stupid governments think economy can't stop, but it is a human activity, invented and dependent on us. If humans are at risk, any human activity loses importance. Saying the economy is the most important is like saying the ship matters more than its crew, such a thing is for people who think life is based on meritocracy and struggle for power. We can't pay the price we are paying and keep insisting in errors.
Michel Foucault has a wonderful work, Discipline and Punish. In it, he affirms the market society we live in only considers humans useful when they are producing. With capitalism advancement, letting live or letting die instruments were created: when the individual stops producing, he begins being an expenditure. Or you produce the conditions for the maintenance of your life or you produce the conditions of your death. What we know as Social Security, existing in every market economy nation, has a cost. Governments are thinking “if everyone representing an expenditure died, it would be great” — meaning they can let die everybody pertaining to risk groups. It's not a Freudian slip coming from them: they are not crazy, they are lucid, they know what they are talking about.
For about some time my communion with everything called nature is an experience I do not see being valued by a lot of people living in towns. I have seen people mocking: “he talks with trees, he hugs trees, he talks with river, he contemplates mountains”, as if this were a kind of alienation. This is my living experience; if it is alienation, then I am alienated. For a long time now, I don't schedule activities for “after”. We need to stop being so full of ourselves, we don't know if we will be alive tomorrow. We need to stop selling the tomorrow.
I reflect on Carlos Drummond de Andrade's verses: “Stop. / A vida parou / ou foi o automóvel?” [Stop. / Did life stop / or did the automobile?]. This is a full-on stop. Today's rhythm is not the same from last week's nor the new year's, summer's, January's or February's. The world is now in suspension. And I don't know if we will get out of this experience in the same way we entered. It's like a hook pulling us towards conscience, a jolt to look at what really matters.
A lot of people have suspended projects and activities. They think it's enough to just change their calendar. Postponing obligations as if everything would come back to normal is living in the past. The future is here and now, and there may not be a next year. Nobody escapes, not even the people with imported cars telling their employees to go back to work like slaves. If the virus catches them, they can die like all of us, with or without Land Rovers.
The cities are an abyss of energy: if there's a blackout, people will die enclosed in their apartments with no way of getting down. We haven't had the critical capability to imagine the consequences of a sanitary crisis happening in the big urban centers — and I must confess I feel pity for those living in metropolises. Many people live by themselves in these places. We have ceased to be social because we are in a place with 2 million people.
In an article I read about the pandemic, the Italian sociologist Domenico de Masi cites the prophetic work The Plague, by Albert Camus: the plague can come and go without the heart of men being modified. He cites a long excerpt of the romance in which the character says something like this: the bacillus that brought such mortality, apparently already dominated, could be still hidden in some fold, some handrail, window, armchair, just waiting the day the plague will wake up its rats — whether by misfortune or to teach men a lesson — to send them die in a happy city.
I hope we don't return to normality for, if we do, the death of thousands of people was worthless. After all this people won't want to dispute again their oxygen with dozens of colleagues in a tiny workspace. The changes are already in the making. It doesn't make sense that a woman must leave her children with someone else in order to work. We can't go back to that rhythm, turning on all the cars, and all the machines at the same time.
It would be like converting to denial, accepting the Earth is flat and thinking we should keep devouring ourselves. Then we will have proved humanity is a lie.