acabei de chegar de um pub aqui em Highland Park, o Charlie Brown's, gastando o que resta de meus dólares, ainda sobre o impacto da surpresa da vitória da seleção norteamericana sobre a sempre meio favorita e sempre toda morta na praia Espanha. A retranca dos caras deu certo, além de contar com a sorte ou a falha bisonha da defesa espanhola no segundo gol.

Aliás, futebol passa aqui em um canal voltado para os imigrantes mexicanos... vergonhoso... os caras aqui são tratados como o cocô do cavalo do zorro e ficam torcendo e tomando os EUA (las barras e las estrelas) como sua nação... triste. Ponto.

Nada foi escrito depois de meu texto sobre minha avó, eu estou cheio de assuntos e temas e postagens que não se realizaram... vou fazer o seguinte: escreverei sobre um assunto apenas, sem elaborar grandes crônicas ou reflexões, até porque amanhã vou pra NY e aí é que eu não vou escrever mesmo...

antes, pra dar um gostinho, uma breve indicação do que me aguarda:

quinta: jogo do Brasil em algum pub de Manhattan (tem um que é ponto de turistas ingleses, deve passar) e show do Femi Kuti de graça no Prospect Park, no Brooklyn.

sexta: jazzzzzzzzzz no Saint Knick's, pub no Harlem!!!!!

sábado: poesia e microfone aberto no Bluestokings, café literário intelectcaô de East Village que, segundo reza a lenda, é frequentado por Woody Allen...

domingo: acordar 6 da manhã no Brooklyn e ir pro Harlem ver o tal do culto gospel da Absynnian Church!!!!!!!! Depois ver a final (se tudo der certo contra Joel Santana) e olhar de cima pra baixo o futebol e o povo americano... queria muito ter uma camisa do Brasil para vestir... quem sabe eu acho em Manhattan...

depois é voltar pra Springfield, arrumar as malas, ver os filmes que chegarem do Netflix, ler parte dos inúmeros textos que faltam ser lidos, passar dois dias viajando com escala em miami até o Rio, dar uns amassos gostosos na minha gatinha que me proporcionou tudo isso - tem volta hein, também vou fazer doutorado... ; ) - e... cair no samba e rever a família e os amigos e comer feijão com arroz e tomar muitas brahmas e antarcticas e...

voltar aos trabalhos...

*******

então, por conta disso mesmo, eis meu assunto: trabalho.

outro dia conversei no gtalk com a Clê e externei um certo tédio de estar aqui vagabundeando esse tempo todo. Ela me sacaneou dizendo que ia imprimir e espalhar essa explanação vinda logo de mim, um grande defensor da vagabundagem e do ócio...

Fiquei pensando nisso...

Não sei o quanto eu boto na conta do Marx - opa, corrijo-me a tempo, nas leituras do próprio e de intelectuais marxistas - nem quanto eu boto na conta da minha condição financeira precária ou no meu hábito de acompanhar o que acontece e ver o quanto deve ser feito na luta contra as elites do pensamento pequeno-burguês-escravo-com-complexo-de-inferioridade-tupiniquim-do-leblon-e-adjacências-escrotas...

O fato é que eu descortinei uma possibilidade de sentido positivo ao trabalho... Sentido que inclusive eu já vivenciei...

Falo de arte e incidência política!

Fico olhando essa experiência em NY e penso que jamais trabalharia nesse país em que as pessoas são peças de engrenagens fordistas imperiais!!!

Aqui, só a estudo - que aliás, segundo me conta Amana é absurdamente ´valoroso, tamanha é a facilidade de acesso a autores e textos contemporâneos - ou a vagabundagem turística - que é aceita e bem tratada na medida em que rende lucros!!!

Mas tenho que admitir que essa viagem e o contato com gente pensante e que estuda e faz artes me fez ferver nesse desejo, de retomar minha produção textual no site da ONG que trabalho, de publicar meu segundo livro de poesias, de estudar percussão e fazer samba e entender que é preciso e urgente criar e fortalecer possibilidades ainda que remotas de discursos contra-hegemônicos!!!

Quero ler Gramsci, Deleuze, Guattari, Marx, Simmel, Foucault, Sartre, Levinas, De Certeau, Guattari, Saramago, Gabriel Garcia Marques, Cortázar, Borges, Machado de Assis, Jorge Amado... quero reler Jorge Amado!!!!

Sem falar em Drummond, Bandeira, Clarice, Ferreira Gullar, Pessoa, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Neruda, Ferlinguetti, Bukowski, e outros que nunca saíram de minha cabeceira!!!

Quero aproveitar o que grandes metrópoles como Nova Iorque, Rio, São Paulo tem a me oferecer de arte, pensamento e inspiração!!!

E PASSAR ADIANTE NA FORMA DE VERSOS E RIMAS E NOVOS SENTIDOS!!!!!!

Quero Circulando!!!!! mais do que nunca!!!! e recitar nas favelas, nas ruas, na Lapa, no Sujinho - até pra ver se assim contribui e conserta a besteira que estão fazendo!!!

Estudar, atuar politicamente e incidir na medida do possível na vida e no mundo!!!

Quero ir mais ao Sana e transformar o Sana na filial bucólica dos ombudsman!!!!!

Quero ir pra Valença!!!!

Pro Irajá!!!!

Beber torres de chopp no Catete com a Clê!!!!

Ir pra laje da mãe do Faveleiro e recitar palavras doidas!!!!

Escrever no VQ!!!

E batucar, batucar, batucar, batucar, até cansar!!!!!!

E compor e compor e compor e com

por

até o dia amanhecer!!!!!

E quero encontrar logo com vocês porque eu não escrevi nada que tinha pensado antes e já fiquei emocionado com a lembrança da gente e dos amigos do meu país e já estou bêbado ouvindo Charles Mingus demais...

Então, pra não deixar a impressão de que leu o post em vão ao possível leitor que até aqui chegou... um texto do Saramago que eu li no 'The Zapatista Reader', foi publicada na Le Monde Diplomatique e me fez chorar de ver que é isso mesmo e a gente tem que tentar mudar essa merda...

Isso é TRABALHO pra mim agora!!!

(infelizmente não consegui arranjar uma tradução em português... mas entre francês e inglês, acho o inglês mais democrático, no mau sentido... ou seja, assimilado pelo mundo)

Chiapas, land of hope and sorrow

A few weeks before he was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature, the Portuguese writer José Saramago went to Chiapas with the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, to meet Subcomandante Marcos and report to the world on the sufferings of the Indians of southern Mexico. He met a proud people who have refused to give up hope. The Zapatistas with their National Liberation are insisting on autonomy - but not secession or separatism. Notwithstanding, the 1996 San Andrés accords failed to materialise into the hoped for law to amend the constitution. Two years ago negotiations were broken off and since then the government has tried to bring the Zapatista forces to their knees with a combination of aid programmes and counter-insurgency measures using armed civilian groups. In the violence that has followed over a hundred have died.


In 1721 Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, asked with an assumed simplicity that in no way masked a bitter sarcasm: "Persians? How on earth can anybody be Persian?". It is nearly 300 years since he wrote his celebrated Persian Letters and we still have not managed to find an intelligent answer to this most fundamental question in the long history of human relations. We fail to understand how anybody could have been "Persian" then, and, as if that were not absurd enough, could still obstinately persist in being "Persian" now, when the whole world is conspiring to persuade us that the only truly desirable thing in life is to be what we like to call "Western" - a general and deceptively handy term (Western values, fashions, tastes, habits, interests, enthusiasms, ideas). The alternative, if the worst comes to the worst and one cannot rise to those sublime heights, is to become some kind of "Westernised" hybrid by dint of persuasion or, failing all else, force.

To be "Persian" is to be foreign, different - in short, not like us. The mere existence of "Persians" has been enough to upset, confuse, disorganise and generally throw a spanner in the works of our institutions. "Persians" may even go to the intolerable lengths of disturbing the very thing all governments hold most dear - their sovereign right to rule in peace. The Indians in Brazil (where being landless is another way of being "Persian") were and still are Persians; the Indians in the United States were but have now almost ceased to be Persians; the Incas, Mayas, Aztecs were Persians in their day and so were and are their descendants, wherever they may be. There are Persians in Guatemala, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and the unhappy land of Mexico.

There, the relentlessly questing lens of Sebastião Salgado sought out and recorded these moving and arresting images that speak to us so directly. How is it, they ask, that you "Western" and "Westernised" people of North and South, East and West - you who are so cultivated, so civilised, so perfect - still lack the intelligence and sensibility to understand us, the Persians of Chiapas?

For it is, in the end, a question of understanding. Understanding the speaking look in the eyes, the grave expression on the faces, the simple way of being together, feeling and thinking alike, weeping the same tears, smiling the same smile. Understanding the way the sole survivor of a massacre places her hands like protecting wings on the heads of her daughters, understanding this unending river of the living and the dead, the spilling of blood, the rebirth of hope, the fitting silence of people who have been waiting hundreds of years for respect and justice, the contained anger of people whose patience has finally run out.

Six years ago, in obedience to the dictates of the neo-liberal "economic revolution" masterminded from outside and ruthlessly enforced by the government, the amendments to the Mexican constitution put an end to the distribution of land, and to any hope the landless peasants may have cherished of having their own patch of ground. The native peoples believed they could defend their historic rights (or customary rights, if you think Indian communities have no place in Mexican history) by banding together to form civil societies - societies, strange as it may seem, still marked by a refusal to countenance any form of violence, even such violence as would be perfectly appropriate to their situation.

These societies have always had the support of the Catholic church, though to little avail. Their leaders and representatives have all been thrown into prison. There has been an increase in systematic, implacable and brutal persecution by the state and the great landowners - united in the defence of their interests and privileges - and the Indians have continued to be forcibly expelled from their ancestral lands. As a last resort they often had to flee to the mountains or take refuge in the forest and it was there, in the deep mists of the hills and valleys, that the rebellion was to take root.

The Indians of Chiapas are not the only people in the world to be humiliated or oppressed. In every age and every place, regardless of race, colour, custom, culture, or religious belief, humankind has always been ready to humiliate and oppress people it still, by a sad irony, persists in calling its fellow men and women.

We have invented things not found in nature: cruelty, torture, contempt. In an abuse of reason, we have divided humanity into irreconcilable categories: rich and poor, masters and slaves, strong and weak, learned and ignorant. And, within each of these divisions, we have created subdivisions, so that the pretexts for despising, humiliating and oppressing are endlessly varied and perpetuated.

In recent years, Chiapas has become a place where the most despised, humiliated and oppressed people in Mexico have been able to regain that dignity and honour they had never entirely lost. It is a place where the heavy rock of age-old oppression has shattered, making way for an endless funeral cortege of the dead led by a procession of the living - new and different people, today’s men, women and children asking only that their rights be respected - their rights not just as members of the human race but as Indians now and in the future.

They rebelled and took up arms, but their chief weapon was the moral force that only honour and dignity can maintain in the mind when the body is prey to the hunger and poverty it has always known.

Beyond the uplands of Chiapas, there is not just the Mexican government, there is the whole world. Every attempt has been made to persuade us that this is just a little local trouble that can be brought under control by a strict application of national laws - laws which, as we have seen once again, are deceptively malleable and can be adapted to suit the strategy and tactics of the economic powers and the political powers that serve them. But the issue that is being fought out in the mountains of Chiapas and the Lacandona jungle extends beyond the frontiers of Mexico. It touches the hearts of all those who have not abandoned, who never will abandon their hopes and dreams and their simple demand for equal justice for all.

As that remarkable man who goes by the name of Subcomandante Marcos once wrote, the rebel demands "a world that will contain countless worlds, a world both unified and diverse". Dare I add, a world that will uphold the inalienable right of everyone to be "Persian" for as long as they like and be beholden to no-one.

The mountain ranges of Chiapas are certainly among the most spectacular landscapes I have ever had the privilege of seeing. But they are also a hotbed of violence and crime. Thousands of natives, driven from their homes and lands for the unpardonable crime of showing silent or open support for the Zapatista National Liberation Front (FZLN) are crowded into makeshift camps. There is little or no food, the small amount of water that is available for the refugees is almost always polluted, and adults and children alike are ravaged by diseases such as tuberculosis, cholera, measles, tetanus, pneumonia, typhus and malaria. Meanwhile, the public authorities and medical services turn a blind eye. A military force of almost 60,000 men, a third of the Mexican army, is currently occupying the state of Chiapas on the pretext of maintaining public order.

This explanation is belied by the facts. If the Mexican army is protecting a section of the native population and even giving them training, weapons and ammunition, it is generally because they are members of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which has held sway for 70 years almost without a break. It is no coincidence that these paramilitary groups are formed for the sole purpose of doing the dirtiest work of all - attacking, raping and murdering their own people.

Acteal (1) was yet another episode in the terrible tragedy that began in 1492 with the arrival of the conquistadors. For 500 years in Iberian America the native peoples have been passed from pillar to post - from the soldiers who killed them to the masters who exploited them and, ever present, the Catholic church which took away their gods but could not crush their spirit. I use the term "Iberian" advisedly, not to exonerate the Portuguese and Brazilians, who took over the genocide operation that reduced the three or four million Indians living in Brazil in the Age of Discovery to barely 200,000 in 1980.

After the Acteal massacre, the simple words "We are winning" began to be heard on the radio. Anyone who was unaware of what was going on might have thought this was an insolent and provocative piece of propaganda put out by the murderers. But no, it was a message of encouragement, a call to take heart - going out on the air and uniting the native communities as if in an embrace. While they mourned their dead, 45 more to add to five centuries of slaughter, those communities stoically raised their heads and told each other "We are winning". For to survive humiliation and oppression, contempt, cruelty and torture cannot but be a victory - a great victory, the greatest of all, being as it is a victory of the spirit.

Eduardo Galeano, the distinguished Uruguayan writer, tells how Rafael Guillén (2), before he became Subcomandante Marcos, went to Chiapas and spoke to the Indians but they did not understand him: "Then he went into the mist, he learned to listen and so to speak." The mist that stops us seeing is also the way to the world of those who are not like us, the world of Indians and Persians. We must stop talking, we must look and listen, and then perhaps we will be able to understand.

(1) Massacre in Chiapas on 22 December 1997, in which 45 alleged Zapatistas, mainly women and children, were killed.

(2) According to a statement issued by the Mexican ministry of the interior on 9 February 1995, the real name of "Subcomandante Marcos" was Rafael Guillén, born Tampico 1957.