A study of the Ailton Krenak case

Carlos Zilio, Ignored Identity, 1974
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By MARIA SILVIA CINTRA MARTINS*

I prefer to dream with Krenak of kinship with nature and stones than embark on the naturalization of genocide

This article or essay – in the indecision that is present today – discusses, based on a recent case, the article posted on the website the earth is round, the difference between politically revolutionary positions and retrograde ones.

Professor Filipe de Freitas Gonçalves – who we know is a teacher from the mention he makes to his students, who seem to try to dissuade the ideas defended by Ailton Krenak, considered by him to be regressive – refers to him as being the author of three little books – certainly knowing very well the derogatory value of the diminutive in the Portuguese language in this case. According to him, these little books have a strong power of persuasion, arising from a certain indigenous orality that they carry. But they would not be endowed with cohesion or systematicity, which would make them averse to all criticism.

The author of these little books – the emeritus Brazilian writer, journalist and philosopher Ailton Krenak – would be someone who knows Western culture only as someone who suffered its consequences, and not because of intellectual merit. In fact, his recognition and entry into the Brazilian Academy of Letters would only have occurred due to the retrograde nature of his thinking. 

From the depths of his resentment and ignorance, Filipe does not know Krenak as an intellectual (or is not willing to attribute this attribute to him), and does not seem to know that the emeritus indigenous writer and environmentalist received the title of doctor. Honorary from UnB. When he finds out, he will probably say that this was due to his intoxicating charm, and not because of genuine merit.

Strangely, however, from a certain point in his text (published here in The Earth is Round in July, with the title “The essay production of Ailton Krenak”), Filipe begins to use certain colloquial language, without knowing it in depth (despite understanding himself as a Marxist), which gives his language a hybrid and imitative quality, which we soon notice when we see his lack of command of proverbs, by forgetting that the baby is thrown in with the water from the bathtub – and not, of course, from the bucket!

And speaking of proverbs, we see that the monkey cannot see its own tail – or cultivates the Avestroutrem complex, if we want to be more sophisticated. 

The problem, perhaps, is actually deeper down – if not, where would so much fear come from? Certainly from his religiously mystical and idealizing Marxism, from which he extracts his barbs. After all, accepting Krenak's defense of the return to mother nature would cause a huge shock to his convictions, since he comes to believe that the indigenous people are actually facing extinction, and that they need to be that way, by the evolutionary logic foreseen in the mystifying – and retrograde – thinking at the time. which one adheres.

Racism and ethnocentrism, this is the reactionary trap with which we still align ourselves, certainly without realizing it.

We would live in a society in continuous evolution, with crises also being part of this evolution, as well as the separation from nature. We just need to better pace ourselves on this path, in order to avoid greater disasters – but never, ever, imagine a return to nature or the delays of indigenous culture. After all, who would be willing to give up dipyrone or contemporary cancer treatments?

This is the cohesive and systematic thought that Filipe offers us, denying the mystical possibility of talking to a stone, or of having the river as a grandfather. 

It is true that the two thoughts cannot, in principle, cohere – the analytical and rational thought and the mystical thought – it is just not so certain that both do not have their passionate content, or that both do not intersect, dynamically, in the evolutionary path of History.

Not even if Filipe's argument is as coherent and systematic as he claims. Note that, on the one hand, he scathingly criticizes Krenak's statement that everything would be nature; but, on the other hand, it is he himself who naturalizes genocide! It seems, after all, that there would be a certain limit to avoid, so that we are all not destroyed and extinct, but that this limit would not fit the indigenous people with their mystical episteme – which must necessarily be overcome, in the only negative sense of that term. At this point, his thinking – which he believes to be cohesive and systematic – begins to remind me of a certain national socialism.

I think to myself: I prefer to dream with Krenak of kinship with nature and stones – a dream that foresees our human fraternity with everything and everyone – than embark on the naturalization of genocide – within a Marxism that could only have been poorly read and poorly digested, as it does not seem to fit with what we learn from dialectical materialism.

For this reason, his thinking is retrograde, and has not yet reached even the thresholds of the 20th century, let alone the 21st century, in which the words well spoken and written by Ailton Krenak are inserted, as a revolutionary vanguard.

It insists on a (poorly digested) Marxism of the 19th century, and considers – so it seems – that this limited and mechanical form of thought would account for contemporary phenomena; it focuses on mechanistic binaries – savage/civilized, orality/writing – and ignores the complex thinking that we have been building since the end of the 20th century, or even before that; he is unaware of the contemporary indigenous movement, he still calls our indigenous people Indians and throws them into the past, reserving contemporary time and space for what he calls Brazilians (who by his mention would be indigenous people who are already integrated and acculturated). Therefore, in his opinion, Ailton's voice would be a dead voice, coming from an irrecoverable past. In his racism, he kidnaps indigenous people's right to contemporaneity. 

It is clear that one of the important movements for it to emerge from this markedly retrograde position in which it finds itself would need to involve a genuine desire to know more about our indigenous people, particularly in everything that they have been building since the 1988 Constitution in the cultural, artistic, cinematographic, academic. In fact, due to his petulance and ignorance of the cause, he refers to the paintings made on his face by Ailton Krenak in 1988 as being made from black clay. Another sign of his lack of knowledge of indigenous causes and cultures that he believes he can criticize.

From error to error, his position reveals itself to be retrograde – but the main one lies in his structuralist reading of Marxism, structuralist and therefore non-dialectical, which compromises his own notion of History, which becomes linear and mechanistic. It is not what Marxism postulates, and for this reason it ends up burying the indigenous people (which it still calls Indians) in the past. For Filipe – in his unfounded argument, which aims to be cohesive and systematic within a mistaken reading of Marxism – they are and need to be dead. Where were the assimilations – ie ruptures and continuities – foreseen in dialectical materialism in your reading? For him, would our indigenous people be dead along with all their mystical ballast, with only remains of their material culture remaining? 

According to him, Krenak's voice would be a voice already destined to die, even because it would come from the dead. This line of thought foresees assimilationism to hegemonic culture and, therefore, the surrender of cultures understood as subaltern, within a notably reactionary perspective.

The study of this case – which is presented to us by the mistaken and presumptuous article by professor and doctoral student Filipe – is worthy of note for reflection on the contrast between assimilationism (i.e., the movements of assimilation and acculturation to hegemonic culture, with markedly oppressive, retrograde and reactionary) and assimilation as repeal (which predicts destruction/overcoming and continuity). The latter – predicted by dialectical materialism (and of a markedly revolutionary nature) – necessarily implies the survival of the legacy arising from the subaltern layers – and not its death, as Filipe's misreading suggests to us.

*Maria Silvia Cintra Martins is a senior professor at the Department of Letters at UFSCar and editor of LEETRA Indigenous Magazine. Author of, among other books, Between words and things (Unesp). [https://amzn.to/4bNdQ0E]


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