De(s)colonized memory – Antônio Fernando de Araújo Sá’s review of“Ideias to postpone the end of the world” and “Life is not useful”, by Ailton Krenak
Abstract: One possibility for discussing the inclusion of native peoples is to engage with the intellectual trajectory of Ailton Krenak, author of “Ideas to Postpone the End of the World” (2019) and “The Life is Not Useful” (2020). On the first book, Krenak gathers speeches given in Portugal from 2017-2019. The latter is also made up of speeches and interview transcriptions produced during the same period. In this review, I evaluate the author’s enterprise, initially highlighting the appeals in the same direction launched by John Monteiro – “rescuing those excluded from history” – and Victor Leonardi – telling the history of Brazil from an indigenous perspective.
Keywords: Indigenous Peoples, Ailton Krenak, End of the World.
Decolonized Memory – Antônio Fernando de Araújo Sá’s review of Ideas to Postpone the End of the World and Life is Not Useful, by Ailton Krenak
Even with the vogue, in the early 1990s, of “rescuing those excluded from history and giving a voice to the oppressed”, John Monteiro wrote that indigenous history remained poorly elaborated among us (1991, p.4). In the same decade, Victor Leonardi defended the awareness of Brazilians to the indigenous problem based on the proposal to tell the history of Brazil in a different way. For him, throughout the relationships “between whites and Indians, and between whites and blacks, destruction and intolerance have prevailed. However, what matters most to humanity is always the future” (1996: p.304). These unfinished questions are the guiding threads of Ideas to postpone the end of the world (2019) and Life is not useful (2020), by Ailton Krenak, bringing together, respectively, speeches given in Portugal, in the period 2017-2019, and speeches and transcription of interviews, produced in the same period 2017/2029.
This Krenak experience vocalizes the emergence of the Brazilian indigenous movement since the late 1970s, leading indigenous autonomy, in “their claims, cultures and singularities without tutelage or intermediaries” (Kadiweu; Cohn, 2019, p.6). The opposition to the dictatorship in Brazil and the international denouncement, in the late 1970s, put social actors on the scene – women, indigenous peoples, blacks, etc. – without visibility in the public sphere in Brazil. The incorporation of the key “violence to human rights” brought about a paradigmatic revolution, by conceiving the human being as “bearer of inalienable rights”. As E. Jelin observed, “the notions of human rights, the consideration of subjectivity and the processes of constitution of “subjects of law” (individual, but also collective, a particularly powerful demand among indigenous groups) are central” in the redemocratization of the 1980s in Latin America (Jelin, 2004: p.6 and 11).
As opposed to the so-called “discovery of Brazil” by the Portuguese in 1500, the Indians “discovered” Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s, through autonomous political organization and intervention in the constituent process, which led to the Federal Constitution of 1988 (Kadiwéu ; Cohn, 2019, p.21). In this sense, Ailton Krenak’s recently published books contribute to rethinking the Indian as a subject of history, highlighting the memory of the indigenous movement and its decisive presence in contemporary Brazilian history. Perhaps its greatest merit is the “decolonization of the formation of our memory”, valuing respect for differences with the visibility of indigenous struggles in contemporary Brazil (Kadiwéu; Cohn, 2019, p.5).
The concept of the West emerged as a “geographical metaphor for a narrative aimed at consolidating Europe’s claim to imperial (cultural and civilizing) dominance over the rest of the world”. This idea was reprized “by the elites of colonized peoples, who inadvertently present themselves as ‘Westerners'”. Therefore, we need a “decolonization that is at the same time ethical and epistemic” so that we can think of “new ethical and ontological perspectives, including for the very concept of ‘human’ and, consequently, for the academic disciplines that are classified by the pluralist label of ‘humanities’” (Sodré, 2017, p.9 and 15).
Within the process of de-westernization and appreciation of cultural diversity, present in the post-colonial problem and in the construction of epistemologies in the South that criticize the Western and Eurocentric references, Krenak’s books acquire a relevant dimension by showing that scientific knowledge is just one of the “many ways of knowing the world”, as stated by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2009, p.19). Non-scientific knowledge can also contribute to strengthening the paths of social emancipation, since the experiences of social activists “do not distinguish between theory and practice because they only exist in the social practices in which they occur” (Santos, 2009, p.21). Ailton Krenak elaborates his critique of modernity/coloniality through ancestry, bringing with him narratives about the origin of life by “peoples, tribes, constellations of people spread across the Earth with different memories of existence” (2020, p.56).
The resistance of the original peoples is anchored in this “memory of other perspectives of the world”, constituting a possibility of “cure for the fever of the planet”, based on a “different perception of life” that all beings are inhabitants of the planet. planet and can inhabit it “without surrendering to all this terrorism of modernity” (Krenak, 2020: p.73 and 72).
Victor Leonardi (1996, p.301) reminds us about the illusions of modern consciousness, stating that nothing effectively new has emerged with modernity, since the “greater dominance of nature has led to pollution and environmental destruction” and “ technology has not yet freed man from routine and oppression. And the wars go on.”
In the construction of modernity, we can identify two long-standing traditions in Brazilian society, which constitute a continuum, from the 16th century to the 21st century: the ideology of progress and the devastation of nature. Were it not for the utilitarianism of Homo economicus, we would realize that the empirical and philosophical knowledge of indigenous peoples demonstrate, in a complete way, that “spiritual energy is more constructive than all the disintegrating social forces that five hundred years ago were unleashed by modern man” ( Leonardi, 1996, p.300).
In their self-management proposals for communal organization, in defense of the common good (Kadiwéu; Cohn, 2019, p.42), indigenous peoples are present in the contemporary world because, in various regions of the planet, “they resisted with all their strength and courage to not be completely engulfed by this utilitarian world” (Krenack, 2020: p.112).
Krenak bets on “the institution of the dream not as a daily experience of sleeping and dreaming, but as a disciplined exercise in seeking guidance for our day-to-day choices in dreams”. In this proposal, the dream appears “as a discipline related to the formation, the cosmovision, the tradition of different peoples who see in the dream a path of learning, of self-knowledge about life, and the application of this knowledge in their interaction with the world and with others”. other people” (Krenak, 2019: p.51-52 and 52-53).
The creativity and poetry of the original peoples’ resistance to the imposition of the homo economicus way of life is based on the “deep memory of the earth, what Eduardo Galeano called the Memory of fire” (Krenak, 2019, p.29). It is the original peoples, quilombolas and aborigines who denounce the misunderstanding of civilization, criticizing “this embodied idea of homogeneous humanity in which consumption has long replaced what used to be citizenship” (Krenak, 2019, p.24).
“We are doped to such an extent by this nefarious reality of consumption and entertainment that we disconnect from the living organism of the Earth”, due to the conception of linear progress that defines our idea of time “like an arrow – always going somewhere”, this it is the “base of our deceit” (Krenak, 2020, p.18 and 70).
This statement can be associated with the change in the regime of historicity, in which the modern articulation between past, present and future is modified towards a relatively new historical consciousness, resulting from the decline of the notion of progress and the advent of the “consciousness of a catastrophe”. produced by man” (Bervenage, 2018, position 880).
In this last section, Ailton Krenak approaches the ideas of Walter Benjamin (1985, p.229), when, in his theses on the concept of history, he states that the “idea of a progress of humanity in history is inseparable from the idea of its marches within an empty and homogeneous time. The critique of the idea of progress presupposes the critique of the idea of this march.”
As Benjamin sent a “text in a bottle” to posterity, I think that Krenak’s books have the same function as testimonies and testaments to our dark times, like those texts by the German thinker. As Márcio Seligman-Silva pointed out about W. Benjamin (2020, p.8), “There is a short tunnel that connects us to his time of fascism and necropolitics. Its ‘actuality’ is absolute.”
Both realized that “the past contained other futures besides the one that actually occurred”, because by “rescuing from oblivion what could have made our history another history”. In this way, the “against the grain” history proposed by Benjamin is also defended by Krenak in the sense that writing “the history of the vanquished requires the acquisition of a memory that does not appear in the official history books” and, therefore, we have to “do the unfulfilled hopes of that past emerge, inscribe in our present its appeal for a different future” (Gagnebin, 1982, p.60 and 67).
Narratives, such as that of Ailton Krenak, by questioning national history, contribute to the strengthening of democracy, bringing contradictions and irrationalities in the past-present. The pluralization of subjects in the writing of history can constitute a libel “against the oblivion imposed by a hegemonic community, whose ideological horizons often prevented it from seeing or reading the difference of the Other” (Achugar, 2006, p.163 ).
As suggested by professors Leno Francisco Danner, Julie Dorrico and Fernando Danner (2020: p.72), I think that the critique of modernity, which is very much in vogue today, cannot focus only on the Eurocentric theoretical-political discourse on the very capacity of modernity correct itself internally by itself and from itself. The victims of colonization must speak. Their stories, their experiences, their practices and their values are fundamental in democracy. Its voice-praxis is irreplaceable in the maturation process of our national history, including for the correction of modernity in a more general way.
In times of memoricide and genocide, articulating Krenak’s ideas with those of W. Benjamin makes us think about alternative conceptions of history, placing memory as an inspiring source to see history in a new way, in the sense of liberation. However, this search for an “alternative is not a return to Neolithic survival strategies, but rather the end of the traditional marriage between ‘progress’ and destruction. Or between destruction and culture, as the West has been promoting it for more than five centuries”. As professor Victor Leonardi rightly pointed out (1996, p.292 and 305), “although he studies the past, nobody aspires so much for the new, for the future, as the professional historian.”
References
ACHUGAR, Hugo. Planetas sem boca: escritos efêmeros sobre Arte, Cultura e Literatura. Belo Horizonte: Editora da UFMG, 2006.
BENJAMIN, Walter. Obras Escolhidas: Magia e Técnica, Arte e Política. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1985. v.1.
BENJAMIN, Walter. Sobre o conceito de História [recurso eletrônico]. São Paulo: Alameda, 2020.
BERVENAGE, Berber. História, memória e violência do Estado: Tempo e Justiça. Vitória/ES: Milfontes, 2018. (e-book).
DANNER, Leno Francisco; DORRICO, Julie e DANNER, Fernando. Decolonialidade, lugar de fala e voz-práxis estético-literária: reflexões desde a literatura indígena brasileira. ALEA. Rio de Janeiro, v. 22/1, p.59-74, jan./abr. 2020.
GAGNEBIN, Jeanne Marie. Walter Benjamin: Os cacos da história. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1982. (Coleção Encanto Radical).
JELIN, Elizabeth. Los derechos humanos y la memoria de la violencia política y la represión: la construcción de un campo nuevo en las ciencias sociales. Estudios Sociales, n. 27, 2004. Disponível em <http://biblioteca.clacso.edu.ar/gsdl/collect/ar/ar-025/index/assoc/D4331.dir/cuaderno2_Jelin.pdf>.
KADIWÉU, Idjahure e COHN, Sérgio. Tembeta: Conversas com pensadores indígenas. Rio de Janeiro: Azougue Editorial, 2019.
LEONARDI, Victor. Entre Árvores e Esquecimentos: História Social nos Sertões do Brasil. Brasília: Editora da UnB/Paralelo 15, 1996.
MONTEIRO, John Manuel. Índio chega sem história ao século XXI. Folha de São Paulo. 12/10/1991, p.4 (especial América).
SANTOS, Boaventura de Sousa (org.). As vozes do mundo. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2009.
SELIGMAN-SILVA, Márcio. Apresentação: Sobre o Conceito de História de Walter Benjamin. In: BENJAMIN, Walter. Sobre o conceito de História [recurso eletrônico]. São Paulo: Alameda, 2020.
SODRÉ, Muniz. Pensar Nagô. Petrópolis: Vozes, 2017.
Summary of Ideias para acabar o fim do mundo
- Ideas to postpone the end of the world
From the dream and from the earth
The humanity we think we are
Thanks
References
Summary of Life Is Not Useful
- Summary of A vida não é útil
- Dreams to postpone the end of the world
- The machine to make things
- Tomorrow is not for sale
- life is not useful
- Thanks
- References
To broaden your literature review
- See book reviews on
- Direitos humanos | Ideia de | História dos | Internacionalização dos | Movimento de | Política de | Cultura de
- Humanidade | Origens da | História da Humanidade
- Índios | Conversão dos Índios | Confederação de Nacionalidades Indígenas | Cosmopolíticas Indígenas | Paneleiros | República dos
- Cultura Indígena | Educação | Genocídio | História da Educação | História | História dos povos | Identidade | Luta | Mobilizações | Movimentos | Mulheres | Nova História | Poder | Poesia | Populações | Povo | Revista de História | Sociedades | Sociodiversidade | Tecnologias | Trabalho Indígena
- Indígena | Indígenas | Abipones | Apache | Baniwa | Guarani | Kaingang | Potiguara
- Povos Ameríndios
- Relações entre Índios e Brancos
- Terra | Função Social da Terra
- Consult dossiers of articles on
- Direitos Humanos | História dos | Declaração Universal dos
- Indígenas | Coletivos Indígenas | Filosofias Indígenas | Identidades | Pensamentos | Políticas | Povos | Protagonismos | Questões | Sociedades
- Indígena | Cultura Indígena Dança | Educação Escolar | Ensino de História | Etno-história | História | História dos Povos | Historiografia
- Índios | Diretório | História
- Terra| Povos da Terra
Resenhista
Antônio Fernando de Araújo Sá – PhD in History from the University of Brasília (UnB), professor at the Department of History and the Masters in History at the Federal University of Sergipe and editor of Ponta de Lança– Revista Eletrônica de História, Memória & Cultura. PPublished, among other titles, Rio Sem História? Leituras sobre o Rio São Francisco (2018) end Entre sertões e representações: ensaios e estudos (2021). ID LATTES: http://lattes.cnpq.br/4761668150681726; ID ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6496-4456; E-mail: fernandosa1965@gmail.com.
Para citar esta resenha
KRENAK, Ailton. KRENAK, Ailton. A vida não é útil. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2020. 128p.; Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2019. 104p. Resenha de: SÁ, Antônio Fernando de Araújo. Por uma memória de(s)colonizada. Crítica Historiográfica. Natal, v.3, n.9, jan./fev., 2023. Disponível em <https://www.criticahistoriografica.com.br/por-uma-memoria-descolonizada-resenha-de-ideias-para-adiar-o-fim-do-mundo-e-a-vida-nao-e-util-de-ailton-krenak/>. DOI: 10.29327/254374.3.9-9
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