O SOL HÁ DE BRILHAR MAIS UMA VEZ
Veronica Pinheiro
13 de agosto de 2024
“The only safe way to store data long term, like proper long term, is in intergenerational relationships, where data is stored in narratives, intergenerational narratives. That can last for forty, fifty, sixty thousand years. That can last as long as relations are continued—that data will last. It’s the only safe way to store data in the long term”
Tyson Junkaporta¹
One day I heard from the master Nego Bispo: ‘We're not decolonial, we're countercolonial. You don't need the academy to talk about the things your grandmother taught you. It's the things your grandmother taught you that have kept you alive.’ Every day teachers, educators and students ask me about bibliographical references. We were raised to trust what books say. However, before there were books on medicinal plants, herbalists, shamans and praying women shared medicines and therapies with their communities. Intergenerational knowledge continues to flow and confluence. They don't flow back. Academic knowledge flows back: for example, eugenics once had scientific validity. Today, eugenics has no proof or validity for science. When there's no circularity, you have to go back the way you came.
Intergenerational narratives are circular: while something goes, something stays; while something stays, it goes. An education that aims to awaken memories seeks to strengthen children's connections with the territory, strengthening bonds, knowledge and life practices that exist there. In circularity, what once was, what is now and what is to come are sensitively connected. The narrative is the thread that structures this fabric of life. Narratives hold the consciousness of what we are. Generational narratives are not just for awakening socio-historical awareness, they hold pillars that make it possible to read oneself through one's own eyes.
Contamos histórias para pensar mundos possíveis. Mundos onde caibam os diversos, os cosmológicos, os naturais, os orgânicos. No mundo Bakongo, por exemplo, a palavra Ubuntu, não traduzível diretamente, exprime a consciência da relação entre o indivíduo, a comunidade e tudo o que existe. Segundo a filosofia africana Bakongo, quando nasce um ser humano (untu), nasce um sol. E o bem viver é alcançado quando todos os sóis estiverem acesos.
In a certain way, stories make it possible for the suns to keep shining. When Kauê Karai Tataendy, a Guarani child, asks me how I organise my workshops and if he can bring the materials to recreate the drawings with Flávio, his friend, in the village, I think that, somehow, we are animating each other once again. Kauê's love for Flávio, plus his desire to share everything he has learnt with his friend, keep each other's suns burning. Kauê moves so that Flávio's sun continues to shine.
Sharing is the energy that drives us. As long as there are confluences and sharing, the sun shall shine once again.
Once again, let's get animated. We are children of the sacred.
Daily we re-exist under the sun.
¹Tradução de Gerrie Schrik – A fala de Tyson Junkaporta pode ser acessada aqui https://emergencemagazine.org/interview/deep-time-diligence/