Opinion Sur
Brazilian shaman, philosopher, indigenous leader and writer, he is one of the most revealing voices of contemporary Latin American thought. The founder of the Union of Indigenous Nations (UNI), author of Ideas to postpone the end of the world and Ancestral future, among other books, objects to current utilitarianism and states that “governments ceased to exist.”
“There is much more life beyond us; biodiversity does not need us,” says the author of Life is not useful.
“We are the plague of the planet, a kind of giant amoeba. Throughout history, humans, or rather, that exclusive club of humanity, devastated everything around them, “warns Ailton Krenak in “No se comer dinero” (I don´t know how to eat money), one of the texts that form the extraordinary booklet, Life is not useful, published by Eterna Cadencia, with translation by Cecilia Palmeiro and prologue by Natalia Brizuela. The Brazilian shaman, philosopher, indigenous leader and writer, one of the most revealing voices of contemporary Latin American thought, was the son of Krenak’s first generation to live “in captivity.” The ancestral land of the Krenak in the Doce River region was occupied by the Brazilian state in 1922. Like many other indigenous people in Brazil in the early twentieth century, he was forced to live on an indigenous reservation. In 1968 his family was forced into exile again. He arrived in São Paulo in 1975, attended Western schools, studied graphic arts, and quickly became involved in the then-emerging awakening of indigenous peoples that led to the creation of the Union of Indigenous Nations (UNI) in 1983.
Government by corporations
Krenak is the name of the indigenous people to which he belongs; it is not a surname in the sense in which it is commonly used in the legal system. Ailton, who was born in 1953 in Minas Gerais, proposes to establish contact with the experience of being alive. “It may be a fiction to say that if the economy does not work fully, we will die. We could put all the leaders of the Central Bank in a giant safe and leave them living there, with their economy. “Nobody eats money,” he emphasizes and to expand this thematic constellation he mentions the words of an ancestor of an American Indian of the council of elders of the Lakota people, Wakya Un Manee, also known as Vernon Foster. “When only the last fish remains in the waters and the last tree is removed from the earth, then man will realize that he cannot eat his money.” The idea of concentration of wealth, from the perspective of the shaman and philosopher, reached its climax. “Power and capital entered such a degree of accumulation that there is no longer a separation between the political and financial management of the world,” he says. “Governments ceased to exist, we are governed by large corporations. Who is going to make the revolution against the corporations? It would be like fighting ghosts. Power, today, is an abstraction concentrated in brands, agglutinated in corporations and represented by some humanoids. I have no doubt that these humanoids, focused on the power of money, will also suffer saturation.”
The book preserves the charm of what might be called the “method of construction.” Most of Ailton’s texts emerge from conversations, lectures, and debates, held in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, which were then transcribed and edited. The research and organization of the book was in charge of Rita Carelli. “Ideas develop in and through conversation, in a brilliant glow of conceptual thought produced in motion,” says Natalia Brizuela in the prologue of Life is not useful. “We could think of all of Ailton’s public presentations, interviews, conversations and texts as ways to build alliances through a policy of reciprocity, which articulate and flesh out a new relationality between indigenous and non-indigenous. Orality at the origin of Ailton’s text is the form chosen for a radical notion of relationality that it offers to non-indigenous people. Dialogue, exchange, relationship and reciprocity are key notions in Ailton’s thought and, in oral form, become the structure of a praxis based on listening.”
“Dreams to postpone the end of the world”
The disconnection with the living organism that is the Earth alarms Ailton. The evidence is in plain sight: melting glaciers, garbage-filled oceans, lists of species in extinction on the rise. “Could it be that the only way to prove to deniers that the Earth is a living organism is to butcher it? Chopping her into pieces and saying, ‘Look, she’s alive’? It is of an absurd stupidity, “he says in one of the texts that could inscribe a part of the thought of the shaman and philosopher in decrecionismo[i], that political, economic and social movement that emphasizes the need to reduce global consumption and production. “We have to stop developing and start getting involved,” he proposes and suggests that when everything goes into a tailspin he invokes the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987), especially the poem “El hombre; los viajes” (The men; the journeys) because it is “a poem about what we are living”: “There are other systems outside / the plot to colonize./ When they are all finished/ only man remains / (will he be equipped?) / the most difficult and dangerous journey/ from self to oneself:/ to set foot on the ground/ of his heart/ to experiment/ colonize / civilize / humanize / man / discovering in his own unexplored bowels / the perennial, unsuspected joy / of living together”.
Reading Ailton implies entering into another mode, a mode that expands experiences and senses, anesthetized by the excess of rationality of Western culture. In “Dreams to Postpone the End of the World,” he postulates the centrality of dreams. “Dreaming is a practice that can be understood as a cultural regime in which, early in the morning, people tell the dream they had. Not as a public activity, but of an intimate nature. You don’t tell your dream in a square, but to the people you have a relationship with. Which also suggests that sleep is a place for the transmission of affections.” Ailton’s awakening came from a dream shared in the late 70s by a shaman who told him about the devastation of the Earth by white projects. He shared that dream with other indigenous relatives when he began traveling around Brazil to build UNI. He realized that “there was something in the perspective of indigenous peoples, in our way of seeing and thinking, that could open a window of understanding in the environment that is the world of knowledge.” After the creation of UNI, he co-founded the Centro de Cultura Indígena (Center for Indigenous Culture) in 1985, and within this organization he launched the first radio program produced by indigenous people, Programa del Indio (Indian Program), which aired between 1985 and 1990.
“What the political and economic sciences call capitalism metastasized, occupied the entire planet and infiltrated life in an uncontrollable way, reflects the shaman. Our collective dream of the world and the insertion of humanity into the biosphere will have to happen differently. We can inhabit this planet, but it must be otherwise. We will have to radically reconfigure ourselves to be here.” Ailton recognizes that some peoples understand that their bodies are related to all that is life; that the cycles of the Earth are also the cycles of their bodies. “We look at the earth, the sky and feel that we are not dissociated from other beings. My people, as well as other relatives, have this tradition of suspending heaven.” Then he explains what that tradition consists of. “To suspend the sky is to expand the horizons of everyone, not just humans. It is a memory, a cultural heritage of the time when our ancestors were so harmonized with the rhythm of nature that they only needed to work a few hours a day to provide themselves with everything they needed to live. All the rest of the time one could sing, dance, dream: the everyday was an extension of the dream. And relationships, the contracts woven into the dream world, continued to make sense after waking up.”
Ailton’s narrative is like an affectivity mantra. A key year in his life was 1987 for the speech he gave to the members of the Constituent Assembly, in charged with drafting a democratic Constitution for Brazil, after 21 years of military dictatorship. Dressed from head to toe in a white suit, while slowly painting his face with black jenipapo plant, he said: “The indigenous people have a way of thinking, a way of life, that never put any animal or human being at risk.” As spokesperson for UNI, he deployed four demands that were included in the 1988 Constitution: the recognition of the historical rights of indigenous peoples, the demarcation of indigenous lands, the guarantee that indigenous collectives would be the only users of natural resources in the demarcated territories and the fulfillment by the Brazilian State of the future projects of indigenous populations. “Instead of being ’emancipated’ and, therefore, disappeared, the indigenous people delivered a demand that Ailton expressed and realized in his performance: the demand to be recognized as citizens as indigenous people,” Brizuela states in the book’s prologue.
Consuming worlds
“The capitalist system has such a power of cooptation that any crap it advertises immediately becomes a mania,” confirms Ailton. “We are all addicted to the new: a new car, a new machine, new clothes, something new. It was already said: ‘Ah, but we can make an electric car without gasoline, which will not pollute’. But it will be so expensive, so sophisticated, that it will become a new object of desire,” he describes how consumption works and his analysis expands beyond that mania. “Capitalism even wants to sell us the idea that we can reproduce life. That you can even reproduce nature. We finish everything and then we do another, we run out of fresh water and then a lot of money is made desalinating the sea, and if it is not enough for everyone, we eliminate a part of humanity and leave it alone to consumers. A kind of Big Brother who rules the world to the taste of capitalism”, defines the author of Ideas to postpone the end of the world and Ancestral future, among other books.
The psychoanalyst and critic of Brazilian culture Suely Rolnik points out that capitalism has undergone such a great transformation that it became necro-capitalism. “Such capitalism that no longer needs the materiality of things, it can transform everything into a financial fantasy and pretend that the world is operational, active, even if everything is wrong,” interprets Ailton and points out that this is a “dystopia” because “instead of imagining worlds, we consume them” and that “after eating the Earth, we will eat the Moon, Mars, and the other planets.” We must abandon anthropocentrism because “there is much more life beyond us; biodiversity does not need us,” says the author of Life is not useful. “For a long time, my communion with everything they call nature is an experience that I don’t see being valued by many people who live in the city. I’ve seen people ridicule me: ‘He talks to a tree, hugs a tree, talks to the river, looks at the mountain,’ as if that’s some kind of alienation. This is my life experience. If it is alienation, I am alienated. It’s been a long time since I scheduled activities for ‘later’. We don’t know if we’ll be alive tomorrow. We have to stop selling tomorrow,” advises one of the most revealing voices of contemporary Latin American thought.
Ailton’s proposal objects to utilitarianism. “Life has no use. Life is so wonderful that our mind tries to give it a utility, but that is stupid. Life is fruition, it’s a dance, it’s just a cosmic dance, and we want to reduce it to a ridiculous and utilitarian choreography. We have to have the courage to be radically alive, and not to be haggling over survival,” he insists and recalls that indigenous peoples are still present in this world “not because they were excluded, but because they escaped.” “Native peoples resist this onslaught of white people because they know they are wrong, and, more often than not, they are treated like crazy. Escaping from that capture, to experience an existence that did not surrender to the utilitarian sense of life, creates a place of inner silence.” An example serves to broaden his worldview and, in addition, question political correctness. “When indigenous people say, ‘The Earth is our mother,’ the others say, ‘They are so poetic, what a beautiful image!’ That is not poetry, it is our life, he clarifies. We are glued to the body of the Earth, when someone punctures it, hurts it, or scratches it, it disorganizes our world.”
Reading the shaman, philosopher, and indigenous leader is like talking to all humans: “Either you listen to the voices of all the other beings that inhabit the planet next to you, or you make war on life on Earth,” says the author of Life is not useful. The conversation with Ailton is a path to the cosmic meaning of life.
Published in Pagina 12 on February 6, 2023
[i] . TN: neologism form with the word decrease, thus, decrecionism as a movement to reduce global consumption and production
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