Mia Couto

Transcription

I chose to write a text called “To rethink thought” Because we believe that thought has no frontiers. Thought was made to overcome these frontiers, these limits. It was made to rival with the dream, in this visit we give the impossible. Reality, however, is that this very thought while living entity, it is born to dress up in frontiers. This invention is some kind of addiction to architecture, because there is no infinity with no thought line. With no horizon line, forgive me. From the smallest cell to the superior organisms, each creature requests cover some kind of casing which is a separator from the world. The truth is this, life is hungry for frontiers. That’s how it goes by, there shouldn’t be anything to do or to regret, because these natural frontiers never close. They are organic entities. They were made as entities that are alive, permeable. The problem is that our thought, unlike these living entities, it easily shuts inside itself, and we don’t know how to make living and permeable walls. We raise whole walls as if we were blind toucans. We raise fortresses where bridges should have been. And we learn to demarcate from one another and from the strange as if it were threats to our integrity, even if we don’t know Exactly what this Integrity is. We are afraid of change, we are afraid of disorder, we are afraid of complexity. We need models to understand the universe, and yet the word universe is already in question. We believe there is a plural universe, a multiverse. And this plural universe, this multiverse was built with the logic of change, with the logic o chaos, with the logic of the unpredictable, also. So, we are afraid that they think differently from us, we are afraid from those who, look like they think like us We believe they end up being so different that they don’t even speak. And we live in a state of war agains this otherness that exists inside us and the others. It’s curious because… What I’m trying to get to is that the word frontiers is loaded, and thought, itself, they were built exactly like the word was born. The word was born as a military concept the word frontier. And it comes from a type of French warfare language, from the “front”, that meant this exaclym the front, the battle front. But even this same place, to see how those things used to work always like two sides, a curious case took place, because a young French army officer invented a recording code for embossed messages. This code was created so that during combat nights soldiers could communicate in silence and in the dark. This small invention would bring enormous consequences that would overcome that circumstance of space and time. Because it was through this code that the Braille reading system was invented, and for millions of people this frontier was won, I’m always talking about frontiers, between the wish for light and the condemnation of the dark. In the same place where the word frontier was born followed the denial of its limitation sense. All of that has to do with the way we think and live our own identity. This identity lives today in a private condominium, an invisible security company forbids the other to enter this space we call intimacy. For those who travel to get lost from themselves and reencounter themselves in others, Brazil is the best destination that I know of. George Bush validate wars with the phantom of weapons of mass destruction. Well Brazil holds a weapon of mass construction that is the sympathy and willingness of Brazilians. That’s not about a sympathy in the sense of being pleasant, but the capacity of each one of being everyone else. That’s what sympathy is, to allow others to live within ourselves. Brazilians aren’t like that by nature or because they are biologically superior. This capacity was historically created by building a nation that had to be sewn and had to sew cultures and races and ethnicities and different times. What makes me feel at home here it is not what seems to me more immediate and more evident, that is the fact we share the same language, despite my accent. But… Even because in this language we find things that bring us together but suddenly there is there a frontier mark, especially Brazilians had to build, because of that which was the history of their independence, they had to build inside the Portuguese language itself something that would differentiate themselves from the Portuguese, they had to say “We are not like that and we made this differential mark in our own language”. I really like the way in which in Brazil lands are named after rivers. There is the Rio Grande do Norte, do Sul, Rio de Janeiro, etc. It’s as if the water ruled the ground and as if the rivers were like frontiers that would not separate, but bring together. In the city of Natal I stayed at a hotel, a small hotel that was located on the threshold of a poor periphery… Now I’ve learned that it is not politically correct to say “favela”… I find it strange those rules of vocabulary transit, what for me would be the right thing would not be exactly the word, but the right thing would be if the favelas themselves did not exist. So, from the window of that hotel I’d see streets going up and down the hill, and I’d see front porches, like the poet used to say, “The joy seemed to be not having a place to lean against”, and I would see, above all, advertising posters in front of small shops that would announce beauty parlors. And on those posters, invariably, there would be a blue-eyed blonde… I’m not talking about the south of Brazil, I’m talking about the north. A thin blue-eyed blonde… I’ve walked for days around town and I did not find the blonde, of course… So, for me it was a wonderful thing, because what I saw through that window wasn’t exactly a place, but the lifes and dreams that would cross that place. So, I was witnessing something that seemed to be from my own country, which is this ambivalence born from colonized societies, this frontier between richness and poorness, a frontier between the ideal dream body and the reality of life. But during those vacations not everything went well. So, there were moments I god angry, and I’m not competent enough to be angry, but when I’m angry I want to take advantage of the moment, I want to go to the end of it, I want to speak roughly and complain and etc. and see solutions. But here in Brazil, this exercise of being angry was never possible for me. Because this irritation that I felt would dissolve instantly, immediately, in this sea of affection, of affability that the Brazilians have. So, it was a great frustration, I wanted to be angry but I couldn’t. One fact took place at the airport where there was a misunderstanding about excess luggage. We’d walk from counter to counter, from information to information, and, in a certain moment, Patrícia told me: “You should be angry”. I think that one of the few conveniences, of having a husband, which is something weird for me, someone having a husband, is to evocate the presence of a man, that looks like a brave man. Above all, when this bravery is completely false and invented. So, there I went, like a brave man, like an angry man, to a last counter, where some lady answered me, she said “darling… do not fret, no,” she said, “you’re a writer, well then I’m a singer, I’ve even recorded a cd,” she said. “Tell me the name of a Brazilian singer, one that you like.” - “Marisa Monte” - “Then, listen: “Deixa eu dizer que eu te amo…” She started singing. Well, in that moment, Patrícia, who was 6 or 7 ft. away, gave an astonished look over that romantic scene, and asked: “After all, do you know this lady?” Truth is, the woman had a surprisingly good voice, the truth is that unexpected exhibition made me forget all that annoyance. As a result: I paid happily what I thought I shouldn’t have to pay. And me and Patrícia spent the rest of the day humming that Marisa Monte song. I speak of a Brazil without the naivety of romanticizing a nation that I know is made of contrasts, of ambivalences, of inequalities. I do not intent to promote some sort of sympathy campaign, I will not run for mayor in Brazil. Therefore, I speak of this passionate way of Brazil and the Brazilians because I want to say that Mozambique and Brazil suffer from the same diseases and share the same remedies in different degrees. We are not made to fit into a puritan recipe commissioned to domesticate and standardize the world. The politically correct discourse is a crime against our nations against the originality and the diversity of both our people. Brazilians have this happy, this healthy difficulty of not belonging to a single identity. Each Brazilian is more than himself, more than his race, more than his gender, than his ethnicity. Each Brazilian is Brazil as a whole. And, thus, it’s impossible to define what a typical Brazilian is like. This search of a mirage by looking for a pure or representative Brazilian. I’m going back to talking about frontiers and I want to bring here a story that the frontiers have. It feels like they were born this way, they are unchangeable, are natural in any way. So, in our own history, one of the first frontiers we’ve created was the one that separated us from animals. And we made this sort of ontological demarcation through fables, that throughout centuries, inhabited children’s fantasies. animal pictures adorn cave walls, book pages, videos, songs, movies… and they did it all to bring us lessons of humanity. Animals made us more human. When we become adults, we think it’s ridiculous to believe in this thing that is the time in which the animals spoke. So, we are already converted, already invested, in the quality of kings of existence, we are the exclusive inhabitants of speech and reason. And then we decree that nature exists only outside of ourselves, it’s there where it begins, and we see ourselves as purely humans, center of the universe, a species at the top of the evolutionary scale. But I live in a country which, fortunately has another way to draw frontiers, these frontiers between animals and people is less rigid, is less definitive. So, it is allowed to have transits between animalism and humanity. I’ve lived, recently, one of those transits when I, as a biologist working in a village on the north of Mozambique, I was in a tent, with my colleagues, and then came up the case of someone who was devoured by a lion came up, and I thought it was an isolated case, and another one followed, two or three days later, and then already on the third case, I changed from the tent to a house, a brick house, but, still on the second case, which, therefore, was the second unforeseen, I realized something, because I was completely numb with fear… but it wasn’t only the fear that got to me, There was a demonstration, because you could hear… Who among you has this experience knows what I’m about to say. The lion inside that village wasn’t roaring anymore, but you could hear him breathing. And this was something that told me that this territory Wasn’t ruled by men anymore. There was there some sort of time in which, on the contrary, it was the men, I was there badly representing men, who could not speak. And this was a lesson on the condition of fragility that we should learn, of great importance to me. On the following days, when I had to take some resolution so that the matter would be solved, I understood that for those peasants this division line between human and non-human was much more fluid, more plastic, almost osmotic. A man can be a lion and a lion can be a man, and there was no proof whatsoever that those lions weren’t something else. So, this change of identities made me soon remember this jaguar and the uncle on the famous short story by Guimarães Rosa. But even we, who have a foot in this modernity world, We founded what we are and think about scientific knowledge, we cannot imagine how much science doesn’t know. It doesn’t know who we are. I’m a biologist and I can tell you something that you probably must know already, but the papers don’t like to talk much about it. Papers like to talk about things that give an apocalyptic vision of the world greenhouse effect, global warming, those terrible things that threaten us. It sells. This news, probably, Doesn’t sell very well But now it was found that we, humans, are made, above all, of non-human cells. For every ten of our cells, nine are non-human, They are bacteria, they are micro-organisms that live inside us, that are part of us. So, if there was some sort of election in that level, we’d be such a minority that we’d be ruled by a bacteria, for certain. What I want to say is that, even in this universe that we believe in, distant from all of this, the frontier between animal and human should be redesigned. Because this frontier goes through, after all, within ourselves, and we aren’t so far away from that village in Mozambique. So, it is as if we needed new fables to reconcile with those living within us. The truth is that we possess a fantastic time, a time in which we have instant access to the most varied and infinite information. But we have the tendency of confusing new ideas with recent information, it isn’t the same thing, And many times the ideas we already have stop new ideas to come up. Ideas function like jealous wives That shut the windows and lock the husband with a key. Or the contrary also works, husbands. And those ideas look like married entities that sleep in the memory bed. And something dramatic occurs with us, that each time we become more who we have already been. So, I spoke of the trip as some sort of guerrilla where it is possible to win it, but we need something more systematic, more systemic to win against this wall, this prison. We need to critically question the world they say it’s ours, but doesn’t belong to us. They say we now live in a global village, but what was globalized in fact was a world with no villages. A world without places. We had the landless, now we have the village-less. Village in the sense of this small place where we invent ourselves. So, we need, a radical way, and I don’t mean violent with this, of rethinking thought itself. Adam and Eve were expelled from paradise for their sins of disobedience. But we have to disobey in order to return to paradise. And we have to reinvent these other frontiers, closer to life, more open, more permeable. With the presence of another light, I spoke of this light on the “Tales from the Earth’s birth”, it’s terrible to quote myself, but I cannot put it in a better way. “It’s not the sunlight we lack…” This book wasn’t published in Brazil, as far as I know. “It is not the sunlight we lack, for millennia the great star illuminated the Earth and, after all, we learned little of how to see, a world that needs to be seen by another light, the moonlight, this clarity that shines respectfully and delicately. Only the moonlight reveals the feminine side of beings. Only the moon reveals the intimacy of our terrestrial home. We do not need the sunrise, what we do need, is the Earth to rise”.