asakiyume | Entries tagged with ailton krenak

Billy Behind Me, who was a character in the Patricia Russo flash story "Mena, Until," which I talked about back in February, makes an appearance in the second of this trio of short poems.

I like everything about that poem. I have a broken pot whose shards I want to try drawing with (though I have brilliant street chalks, so I don't really have the need--but it's the principle of the thing).

The end makes me think of how we talk with people when we can't talk to them in the waking world anymore. How we talk in dreams. Makes me think of what Ailton Krenak says, and about what the characters say in Embrace of the Serpent, and also of the story The Lathe of Heaven.

Some music for you: Baixi-Baixi

Current Music: Yeahman (ft. Aluna Project): Baixi-Baixi

I'm reading too many things to do them all justice, and then interrupting them with other things, but the things I've spent most time with are

--More of Life Is Not Useful, by Ailton Krenak. The first essay was good; I felt more at sea in the second and now the third--I can't quite follow the logic of where he goes all the time, and sometimes there are jargonish phrases that I don't get. Even so, there are moments I like very much.

This, for instance, is both serious but also amusingly expressed:

We can inhabit this planet, but we will have to do so otherwise. If we don’t take steps in this direction, it would be as if someone wanted to get to the highest peak of the Himalayas but wanted to take along their house, their fridge, their dog, their parrot, their bicycle. They’ll never arrive with heavy luggage like that. We will have to radically reconceive of ourselves to be here. And we yearn for this newness.

And this I love:

There are people who were fish, there are people who were trees before imagining themselves as human. We were all something else before becoming people.

--I also have been reading Eagle Drums, by Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson, a story of an Iñupiaq boy who's compelled to live with eagles to learn what they want to teach if he wants to stay alive. I got this one from the library based on what

osprey_archer wrote in this entry, specifically, that it "is built on axioms about how the world works that are vastly different than the ones structuring most modern fiction." She's right! And I'm enjoying that very much.

--I started reading C.S.E. Cooney's Saint Death's Daughter-- I love CSE Cooney's writing so much! I just hope I can maintain momentum on it, because it's long, and somehow I don't apportion as much time to reading as I could (which is a terrible thing for someone who writes to confess to).

Meanwhile, here are some things that I want to read (or have read and want to call attention to):

Aster Glenn Gray's Deck the Halls with Secret Agents. Long-time rival Soviet and US agents meet at a Christmas party! I wonder what happens next ;-)

Iona Datt Sharma's Blood Sweat Glitter --Sapphic romance around roller derby!

This one came to me as a recommendation on Mastodon, and since I follow the author on social media but have never read anything by her, I'm very excited! It's also a podcast--not sure if I will listen or read it: "The Font of Liberty" by Elizabeth Porter Birdsall.

And then there's Kerygma in Waltz Time, which I've read and would recommend to fans of story retellings, fan fiction, and falling into stories--it's by Sherwood Smith, originally published under a pseudonym in It Happened at the Ball, an anthology of ballroom stories.

Some quotes from Ailton Krenak's Life is Not Useful, (trans. Jamille Pinheiro Dias). These are from the essay "You Can't Eat Money."

Here, on the other side of the river, there is a mountain that guards our village ... Looking at the mountain is an instant relief from all pain. Life moves through everything, through rock, the ozone layer, glaciers. Life goes from the oceans to solid ground; it crosses from north to south in all directions. Life is this crossing of the planet's living organism on an immaterial scale. Instead of thinking about the Earth's organism breathing, which is very difficult, let's think about life passing through mountains, caves, rivers, forests.

And earlier, regarding Elon Musk and his ilk:

[Recently there are] billionaires who have the crazy idea of creating a biosphere, a copy of the Earth. That copy will be as mediocre as they are. If a part of us thinks we can colonize another planet, it means we still haven't learned anything from our experience here on Earth. I wonder how many Earths these people need to consume before they understand they are on the wrong path.

In The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler made the fact that octopuses were able to write a central part of what indicates they're advanced (a character says, “Yes, they have writing… which is an enormous leap in cultural evolution”)--a hugely ethnocentric notion.

So it's very affirming to read Natalia Brizuela's introduction to another brief collection of essays by the Indigenous Brazilian activist Ailton Krenak. (The collection is called Life Is Not Useful.) She writes:

Yasnaya Aguilar, the Mixé linguist, writer, and activist, reminds us ... that Indigenous people do not have “oral traditions,” but rather “mnemonic traditions.”⁸... Western modernity, with its countless institutions and homogenizing temporal framework, always sees the oral as preceding the written, as falling somewhere behind in the chronology of development. But as Ailton and many other Indigenous people explain, the practice and activation of memories – through dreaming, singing, dancing, storytelling, and various other activities – are ways of belonging to and sustaining the cosmic sense of life.

⁸ See Yasnaya Aguilar Gil, “(Is There) an indigenous Literature?”, trans. Gloria Chacón, Diálogos 19.1 (Spring 2016), p. 158.

She goes on to quote Ailton about the importance of listening and then to unfold that:

“Either you hear the voices of all the other beings that inhabit the planet alongside you, or you wage war against life on earth” (p. 38) ... Listening means being alive, staying alive, and keeping the ecosystems to which one belongs alive as well. Listening is caring. Not listening brings war: that is, a type of destructive encounter, a form of non-co-existence. We listen with our entire bodies, not just our ears ... Our bodies are part of and an extension of the Earth. If we allow them to become sensing instruments for dreaming and conversation, the cosmic sense of life would not be so threatened.

I love this statement: We listen with our entire bodies, not just our ears.

I have so many saved up for this! And I'm actually writing on a Wednesday. Wohoo, win condition!

What I've just finished

A Family of Dreamers, by Samantha Nock.

radiantfracture put me onto this collection by quoting one of the poems. Samantha Nock is an indigenous poet, and her poems reflect that heritage, but also explore family relations, love, self doubt--you know: the stuff we write poetry about.

( Some quotes )

* * *

Ideias Para Adiar O Fim Do Mundo, by Ailton Krenak
This has also been translated into English (Ideas for Postponing the End of the World). Ailton Krenak is an indigenous activist from Brazil, of the Krenak people, and this very short book collects talks that he's given, including the title one. He's very, very good at reminding his listeners that there's more than one way of understanding things, more than one way of approaching problems, and that for some people, the end of the world has been happening for a long, long time. (My Goodreads review has quotes that give a feel for it)

* * *

Besty and Tacy Go over the Big Hill, by Maud Hart Lovelace
They do, and they discover a community of Syrian refugees. The more things change...

This story mulls over kings and queens in lots of different ways. Early on the girls write a letter to Alfonso XIII, who upon turning sixteen has become king of Spain. The girls tell him that they'd love to marry him but realize that, sadly, they can't, since they're not of royal blood (also they're only ten, but they don't mention that), but that nevertheless they wish him the best. And then at the end of the story they get a letter back from the royal secretary, telling them the king appreciates their thoughts! And I was thinking how much smaller the world was then--that girls could write a letter to the royal palace in Madrid, and that a palace secretary would actually answer! ... Well, assuming that that incident is based on something that actually happened in MHL's life--it might not be. But it's conceivably possible. Alfonso XIII came into his majority in 1902. Wikipedia tells me that in 1900, the human population was a much more intimate 1.6 billion. Not like our current 8 billion. Palace secretaries could write to little girls in Minnesota!

What I'm reading now

Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. My approach to this has been very roundabout. I'm not a big fan of long books of serious essays, even when I should like them. So I started by just dipping in. But it's won me over, so I'm going to read it straight through.

* * *

Why Didn't You Just Leave, edited by Julia Rios and Nadia Bulkin. A collection of horror stories that answer the question of why people don't just leave the haunted place they're in. Excellent so far.

* * *

Lady Eve's Last Con, by Rebecca Fraimow. A rom-con romcom in SPACE that I've only just started but is highly delightful already, with lines like this:

Ever since we got in on the luxury-liner gambit, money had been dropping into our hands like coolant from a leaky ceiling

and

It wasn't so hard to get someone like Esteban to think that you were their romantic ideal; all you had to do was present an attractive outline and leave plenty of space, and they'd fill in the rest all by themselves.

I think I can see what the end state is going to be, but I am here for the ride!

Coming Soon
Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown, the next of the Betsy-Tacy books.

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Asakiyume mita

Entries tagged with ailton krenak

Billy Behind Me

Wednesday reading and to-reads

"Looking at the mountain is an instant relief from all pain"

Mnemonic traditions and listening

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