‘There is no blue sky anymore, we covered the country with ashes,’ says Brazilian Indigenous intellectual

Brasil de Fato

For the Indigenous thinker and intellectual Ailton Krenak, the “apocalyptic” scenario Brazil has faced in recent weeks due to the cloud of smoke covering most of the country is the result of a culture spread during the administration of Jair Bolsonaro (Liberal Party).

A member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters (ABL, in Portuguese) since May, the writer says that the dismantling of environmental regulations coupled with the discourse of the former president gave birth to a “mentality that you can set fires [to forests], that you can steal the forest, that you can wipe out the Pantanal biome. All this becomes a deleterious culture, a poor culture, and people end up embracing it,” he says in an interview with the Bem Viver TV show on Wednesday (11).

“There is no blue sky anymore. We covered the country with ashes, a smoke that’s throwing a kind of acid rain over Paulista Avenue [in the city of São Paulo].”

On Saturday (14), Krenak is taking part in the São Paulo International Book Fair, where he will launch his latest book, Kuján e os Meninos Sabidos (Kuján and the Smart Boys, in a rough translation), in partnership with illustrator Rita Carelli. The children’s book tells the story of the “surprising reunion between the creator and his human children.”

The story is already known to the public because it was recorded by Brazilian music icon Gilberto Gil in the song Tudo é Pra Ontem, by Emicida.

“I told Emicida [a Brazilian rapper] this story about anteaters, and he kept the story with him. Then, he invited Gilberto Gil to sing that line… Gil’s voice is unique, isn’t it?” recalls Krenak.

Asked if the Lula administration can reverse the culture inherited from Bolsonaro, Krenak believes the country is still politically divided, preventing a change in the scenario.

“Brazilian reality is still divided. There are many people who don’t have the slightest respect for the transition we made between the threat of a dictatorship and the effort to redemocratize Brazilian life. And we’re a long way from peace. We can’t evaluate anything for now.”

In the interview, Krenak talks about his meeting with singer Lia de Itamaracá, on September 7 – Brazil’s Independence Day –, and also comments on the trivialization of the term “ancestral future.”

Check out the full interview

On September 7, you were at the Mátria Amada [a pun on Pátria Amada – Beloved Nation – which is part of the Brazilian national anthem] event and performed alongside Lia de Itamaracá. How was that meeting?

For me, being with Lia de Itamaracá was already a gift and even more so with the possibility of having the audience we had. An impressive audience in Sorocaba [in the state of São Paulo].

It was a deeply poetic experience outside of the institutional framework.

There were other events in Sorocaba on the same day. We were competing for the public, but there were a lot of people. It was a great experience to do Mátria Amada.

And people talked a lot about our duo, there are still a lot of people listening to Lia, singing her cirandas [the kind of music Lia is known for].

Was it your first meeting with Lia de Itamaracá?

It was my first face-to-face encounter with Lia, this entity, she is an entity. Can you imagine this? She’s over 80 years old and ciranda is almost a synonym for her.

And she sang a song that has a Brazilian version and a Spanish version, which is the one Mercedes Sousa sings, Duerme negrito.

Lia sings the Brazilian version, which is Dorme pretinha and she talks about a mother who is a fisherwoman.

But at the time, Lia changed the last stanza to say ‘dorme indinho’ [Sleep, Indigenous boy, in a rough translation], so the people laughed a lot at the joke she played on me on stage and I had the privilege of dancing with her.

You were also recently in Minas Gerais at the Paracatu International Literary Festival. There, you spoke a little about the importance of literature, which can help us propose other ways of living on Earth. Do you feel that since you took over a seat at the Brazilian Academy of Letters, people have started to look at you not only as a philosopher, an Indigenous intellectual, but also as a writer?

I didn’t imagine that joining the Brazilian Academy of Letters would uncover this kind of revelation for a public that had already seen me talking around.

But I don’t think they related it much to literature. I think the tribute that the Paracatu Literary Festival paid to the writer, to the author Ailton Krenak, highlighted the importance of this kind of literature we’ve been doing for the last… ten years, I don’t know… It is as if we hadn’t written or published anything before.

Does this have to do with the understanding that in the Indigenous world, orality is a way of transmitting knowledge? Is there any prejudice about it?

Indigenous literature is very recent in Brazil. In Latin America and North America, people have been writing since the 1960s and 1970s.

Here in Brazil, it’s a recent event. [It started] Maybe 20, 30 years ago. Eliane Potiguara and Daniel Munduruku are the authors who published most frequently in the 1990s.

So, let’s imagine 25 years of literature. It’s a very short time, the Indigenous authors are all alive. I mean, in the past there were no authors talking about literature written in books.

There was an idea that they were short stories, fables, but that they weren’t literature, that nobody wrote novels, nobody wrote chronicles, essays, short novels. And now there’s this understanding that all these forms of writing are possible and can be done in any context by Indigenous authors, in the Amazon, in northeastern Brazil, southern Brazil… This is expanding.

There’s still a long way to go. In fact, Millôr Fernandes used to say that Brazil has a huge past ahead of it.

At the São Paulo International Book Fair, you’ll be launching your first children’s book, Kuján e os meninos sabidos. This is a story that has already been presented in Emicida’s work with Gilberto Gil, right?

I told Emicida [a Brazilian rapper] this story about anteaters, and he kept the story with him. Then, he invited Gilberto Gil to sing that line… Gil’s voice is unique, isn’t it?

In fact, I had already prepared this text for a dossier for the Minas Gerais Academy of Letters, a dossier on Indigenous poetry and literature in Minas Gerais. That was a year before I took a seat at ABL.

On Saturday (14), you will be at the São Paulo International Book Fair with the theme “What is the Ancestral Future? Is it still possible to get there?” This term, ‘ancestral future’, is becoming more and more popular. Do you feel that?

Yes, I’m impressed by the scale of the whole thing. When Alok, who made his album called Futuro Ancestral (Ancestral Future), went to launch it in New York, recorded it in Amazon… and got all this repercussion, I said: “Damn, I thought I was the only guy who was looking at this narrative about the idea of a perspectival future”…

But the statement caught on. Everyone now wants to relate it in some way to the idea of ancestry. 

Even other ethnic groups that aren’t Indigenous. You start to see people talking about this ancestry as a common heritage. It is not linked to any specific identity.

As my grandmother used to say: Nobody was born from the hollow of a stick. 

Faced with all this that we’re experiencing in relation to the environmental disaster, do you think it’s possible to think about this ancestral future?

There is no blue sky anymore. We covered the country with ashes, a smoke that’s throwing a kind of acid rain over Paulista Avenue [in the city of São Paulo].

I told you that the three days I stayed in Sorocaba I didn’t see the sky, and when the sun goes down, you see fire in the sky. It looks like we’re witnessing some kind of apocalypse.

It’s a horror that we’ve come to this conclusion. The global climate is hot, but we don’t need to set fire to the forest the way people are doing, do we? 

So, isn’t it possible to reach an ancestral future?

The very idea of getting there is nonsense. The ancestral future doesn’t point in any direction like the idea of the future that has historically been understood, the Cartesian idea of the future.

The ancestral future is not a prospect in space, in time. Ancestral future is a spiral, as [Brazilian writer] Conceição Evaristo says, or as other narratives from peoples who were not totally colonized. 

The idea of an ancestral future is above all counter-colonial, as Nego Bispo used to say.

It’s another epistemology, another narrative and sometimes it bothers me how people repeat it in a way that almost doesn’t understand what they’re talking about.

Getting there, in the ancestral future, has to do with that phrase I told you about Millôr Fernandes: the history of our country has a huge past ahead of it.

We must know our past. Ancestry is not something we’re going to look for in the future, in the prospective future. It’s something that we have to be able to rescue from everything we have in terms of knowledge, technology, and understanding of life, so that we can inhabit the land that we’ve already talked about: it’s getting warmer, it’s not going to offer the same climatic conditions for our children.

Imagining the future as a place where we are heading prospectively is a mistake. We will continue to “eat” the Earth if we think we are going somewhere else.

We must think about decreasing, about degrowth. We have to think about getting involved with the biosphere of planet Earth, and not developing. The idea of a prospective future comes from the idea of development. It’s a machine in motion. We are not machines. 

Do you think the fire spreading across the country – with evidence of being criminal and ordered by groups of people – is a new phenomenon in Brazil or has it always existed and we just didn’t realize how it was taking on such proportions?

No, it hasn’t always existed. We’ve always been welcomed by a country with many forests, the Atlantic Forest, the Cerrado biome, the Amazon rainforest…

Now we have several biomes being destroyed. And we can thank this to a guy who took over the Ministry of the Environment who said it was time to “let the cattle through” [a reference to Bolsonaro’s minister of environment Ricardo Salles].

Is it impossible to separate what is happening now from what has been promoted over the four years of the Bolsonaro government?

Of course, because when you propose something, it doesn’t happen immediately. It hangs around, reverberates, people spread it little by little, and it becomes a kind of local culture, a mentality that says it’s ok to set fire, that you can steal the forest, that you can wipe out the Pantanal biome. All this becomes a deleterious culture, a poor culture and people end up embracing it.

And that happened in addition to dismantling the entire environmental surveillance and control service. ICMBio [Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation] was practically dismantled, Ibama [Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources], the control agencies, they were all dismantled, creating a vacuum. Now, this fire is spreading in the vacuum created by this predatory culture.

And do you believe that the current Lula administration with Marina Silva [minister of the environment and climate change], Sônia Guajajara [minister of Indigenous peoples] and other exponents of the environmental struggle has managed to combat this culture you were referring to, or is it still too little to assess?

I prefer to think in other terms. I prefer to think that Brazilian reality is still divided, many people don’t have the slightest respect for the transition we made between the threat of a dictatorship and the effort to redemocratize Brazilian life.

And we’re a long way from peace, so we can’t evaluate anything for now.