We Belong to the Land

by Antônio Bispo dos Santos

Translated by Carmela Zigoni¹

I. When I provoke a debate about colonization, the quilombos², their manners and their meanings, I do not want to position myself as a thinker. Instead, I am positioning myself as a translator. My elders formed me first through orality, but they put me in school to learn through written language so that I could translate the contracts³ we were forced to make.

I went to the school of written language at the age of nine but since I started to speak, I have also been trained by ‘craft masters’ in our community activities. When I went to school in the late 1960s, oral contracts were being broken in our community to be replaced by written contracts imposed by white colonialist society. I studied until the eighth grade, when the community assessed that I could already be a translator. In the 1940s there was a major campaign of land regularization by writing, i.e., official documents. This occurred in Piauí⁴ and also all over Brazil. The law said that the people who occupied the land would be called posseiros (squatters). That law put a name, objectified these people. We were not squatters, we were people … What did that mean to us?

From the moment that the law says that we are squatters, it plays an important role for colonialism. Colonialism names all the people they want to dominate. Sometimes we do the same thing without realizing it: when we have a dog, for example, we give him a name but not a last name. Colonialists provide a name but not a surname because the surname is what power means. The name objectifies, the surname empowers. So by calling us posseiros, they put us in a situation of subordination, forcing us to fulfill the contracts that the nomination imposed on us⁵. Our people’s contracts were made orally because our relationship with the land was through cultivation. The land didn’t belong to us, we belonged to the land. We did not say “that land is mine” but “we are of that land”. There was an understanding among us that the earth is alive, and since it can produce, it must rest too. We did not start owning our land because we wanted to but because it was a state imposition. If we could, our lands would be as they are – in relation to life⁶.

The quilombos are persecuted precisely because we offer a different possibility of living. It’s not simply because of the color of our skin. In the Church documents I evaluated, the permissions for peoples to be enslaved do not talk about the color of those peoples, they talk about their religiosity. Pope Nicholas V’s 1455 papal bull says that the pagans and the Saracens should be enslaved. The instructions did not refer to people as black, nor white, nor Indigenous. They referred to people as pagans, the people who have a cosmology. What people are these? These are the people who continue to eat from the fruits of the trees. These are the people who have not obeyed the guidance of the Euro-Christian god. These are the people who feel no obligation to work. They are the people who do not need to eat by the sweat of their brow, because nature already offers the food.

II.

Concepts that we think are very similar to those of ‘living well’ and ‘welfare’ are ‘living organically’ and ‘living synthetically’. To live well is to live organically and to have welfare is to live synthetically. We understand that there is organic knowledge and synthetic knowledge. While organic knowledge is knowledge that is developed by developing ‘being’, synthetic knowledge is what is developed by developing ‘having’. We operate through organic knowledge and colonialists operate through synthetic knowledge.

When the god of white people said that the earth was cursed because of Adam and Eve and that they would eat by the sweat of their brow, he said they could not enjoy nature as it presents itself. So they would need to synthesize everything and so they went out into the world synthesizing – including themselves. Much of white thinking is synthesized. The thought produced in the academy is a synthetic thought. It is a knowledge focused on the production of things. The thought operationalized by writing is a synthetic thought, disconnected from life. Our thinking, moved by orality, is an organic thinking.

‘Being’ [existence] has little value in synthetic knowledge, despite being the creator of the property. On the other hand, ‘having’ [owning] is the creature that devours its creator. People always act based on having. Even biology is becoming synthetic. Soon you will eat steak without the need of a cow.

Our assessment is that right now we are experiencing one of the greatest possibilities for an end to this Euro-Christian, monotheistic, colonialist and synthetic world. This world is coming to an end. No wonder we are experiencing this despair, this great confusion. But, incredible as it may seem, we are also experiencing a new confluence.

I work with the concepts of ‘confluence’ and ‘transfluence’. Confluence was a very easy concept to develop because I only needed to observe the movement of the waters by the rivers, by the land. Transfluence took a little longer because I had to watch the water move across the sky. It took me a long time to understand how a river that is in Brazil merges with a river that is in Africa. I realize that they do so through the rain, through the clouds. By the rivers of heaven. Thus, if it is possible for the fresh waters that are in Brazil to reach Africa from the sky, also from the sky the wisdom of our people can reach us in Brazil.

That is why, even though the colonialists have tried to destroy our language, our lifeways, they have not been able to take away our relationship with the cosmos. They did not and cannot take away our wisdom. That is why we have managed to adapt ourselves wisely without harming the true owners of this territory who are our Indigenous brothers and sisters. We have this ability because we are able to connect with our elders who were in Africa, through cosmology, despite the fact that we are forbidden to return there physically. This is what we call transfluence.

III.

Both quilombolas and Indigenous peoples of Brazil became legal subjects only in the 1988 Constitution. Until that constitution, to be quilombola was to be criminal and to be Indigenous was to be wild. The 1988 Constitution said that we have the right to gain title to our lands by writing – which is an aggression, because by writing we would become landowners; but our elders taught us how to deal with this aggression.

I had an uncle named Antonio Maximus, who was the operator of a great martial art called Jucá¹¹ He taught me that sometimes we need to turn enemy weapons into defense, so that we don’t turn our defense into weapons. Because if we turn our defense into a weapon, we will only know how to attack and those who only know how to attack, lose.

If cities, with all their weapons, do not live in peace, and we in the community live in peace without weapons, then it is clear that it is not weapons that solve the problems. That’s why my uncle Antonio said to turn weapons into defense. Mother Joan, also one of my great teachers, said that the vessel of giving is the same as receiving. So, if I point a revolver at you, this reveals that I am afraid of the revolver. I am offering to you a fear of the revolver, and thus this dispute will have no end.

Thus, to address land titling through writing does not mean we agree with it, rather it means that we adopt an enemy weapon and turn it into defense. For us, it is not land titles that determine if we are quilombolas, but rather the way we relate to the land. In this regard we and Indigenous peoples are conjoined. We conjoin in the territories because our territory is not just the land, it is all the elements.

Piauí is a state that practically does not exist for the rest of Brazil. When I say I’m from Piauí, people sometimes even ask me where Piauí is, as if it isn’t on the map. It’s not on the map that fits in those people’s minds. Then, it is said that in Piauí there are no Indigenous people, as it is also said that in Roraima there are no quilombos. But in Piauí today there are three different Indigenous groups fighting for their self-identification, self-recognition and the demarcation of their lands. And who are the partners of these peoples? The quilombolas. Their territories are continuous.

In Piauí there is a great alliance between quilombolas and Indigenous people, both in terms of the regularization of ownership of our territories and also of updating our cultural expressions based on an organic knowledge. Organic knowledge is the knowledge that updates, while synthetic knowledge is the one that recycles.

IV.

We are not losers. I do not work within this logic of “victimology”. I have no right to be a victim. I am a winner; my people have won. My great-grandfather had three sugar mills; I was raised in abundance. I have no scars of slavery in my memory. I do not disagree with those who work with the image of the scar of slavery. However, I don’t work with this image of the victim, I work with the image of the winner. Even if they burn writing, they do not burn orality; even if they burn symbols, they do not burn meanings; even if they burn bodies, they do not burn ancestry. Because our images are also ancestral.

Many communities in every corner of Brazil are being attacked in the same way as were Palmares¹², Canudos, Caldeirões, and Pau de Colher. Today, the Armed Forces are in Rocinha, a shantytown, practicing ethnocide. The government of Getúlio Vargas was one of the most ethnocidal governments we have ever had. He killed and burned the people of Caldeirões in the state of Ceará in 1936 and also the people of Pau de Colher along the border with the state of Bahia in 1942. But we still do not stop struggling¹³.

Our relationship with world images is based on the logic of the emancipation of peoples and traditional communities through counter-colonization. It is not through class struggle because class struggle is European and Christian monotheistic. I do not treat traditional peoples and communities as Marxist categories: as workers, unemployed or revolutionary. This language is not ours. This language is Euro-Christian-colonialist.

Some thinkers in Piauí wrote very well about the quilombos but they used the perspective of Marxism and it bothered me. I think of our walk from inside the slave ship. When the first slave ship departed the first quilombo was formed. The first quilombo was in there, with people reacting, throwing themselves into the sea, crashing and dying. Then the quilombo began. And Marx didn’t even exist at that time! What does Marx have to do with it? When Marx said something, Palmares had been established 200 years earlier. I think Marx has his role in Europe. As we say in the backcountry, “cada quem no seu cada qual” [i.e. each person takes care of their own].

The MST [Landless Movement], for example, is wonderful, one of the greatest inventions ever made, but it is a colonialist organization. You just have to go through most of the Brazilian states to see that the MST coordinator is usually a white and southern man. How? I do not believe that the other states could not produce their own leader. You get there in Piauí and the MST coordinator is drinking maté tea¹⁴! Well, in Piauí what we drink is cashew juice¹⁵! Of course, the contribution of the MST is important but from a political point of view, the MST is mono, linear, vertical. They wanted to be the only movement capable of representing the field. We do not want to be “the only one.”

From the beginning of colonization, from 1500 to 1888, the African people were regarded and treated as slaves, and what they thought and said did not enter Brazilian thought. From 1888 to 1988, our cultural expressions, capoeira, samba, continued to be considered crimes. This is colonialism. To colonize is to subdue, humiliate, destroy or enslave the trajectories of a people who have a cultural matrix, an original matrix different from yours.

And what is counter-colonizing? It is updating our trajectories from our matrices. And who can do that? Ourselves! The trajectory of the quilombola people can only be updated and revisited by those who think of circularity and through the polytheistic worldview. It is not Boaventura de Sousa Santos, although he is playing a good role in this process. To the extent, at least, that he says we have to dismantle what his people, the colonialist people, did. This is already of enormous generosity. At least he is not saying that you need to sophisticate and do more. But we are discussing counter-colonization. For us, quilombolas and Indigenous people, this is the agenda: counter-colonization. The day universities learn that they don’t know, the day universities agree to learn Indigenous languages – instead of teaching – the day universities agree to learn Indigenous architecture and learn what the caatinga¹⁶ plants are for, the day they are willing to learn from us as we learn one day from them, we will have a confluence. A confluence of knowledges. A process of balancing the diverse civilizations of this place. A counter- colonization.

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Original article in Portuguese by Antônio Bispo dos Santos
Translated into English by Carmela Zigoni

Suggested Citation:
Bispo dos Santos, A. 7 August 2020. “We Belong to the Land.” Translated to English by C. Zigoni. AGITATE! Blog: http://agitatejournal.org/we-belong-to-the-land