Selfie in quarantine
We miss palpable digression.
The time of expectations,
the flow of afections, sound,
saliva, the skin and the smell.
Nothing is more permanent than the impermanence of things. At this rate, I am more used to the speed in which the things have changed. I needed to tackle this reality and created spaces of escape. But this is a privilege.
Everytime when I talk to someone we first talk of how everything changes in a uncontrollable and rapid manner. The moods, desires and the future possibilities. There is no solid ground to step on. Everything is always changing. The only moment where to be is the present, and it has never been more obvious than now.
In the middle of this game when the house becomes a shelter and a prison cell, for some of us it can be difficult to handle our own company in such intense dosage. And I cannot stop thinking about aspects of my indentity. A man, brasilian, black, gay, cristian (?), living in the blackest city outside of Africa…..in the constant seach of relevant things.
The colonial period had marked us so profoundly. Like a red hot blade.
Without even realising, crossing the ocean journeying to the north become a ritual. This is how I had felt in the last few years: going north to dance the dances that bring me back home. I only go out in order to return.
This year I was not able to go out. Therefore I do not know when I will return.
Without others, we are loosing the context.
Here in Brasil, the pandemic seems to be just one of the topics, another difficult topic among others, in the middle of this obvious crisis of civilisation in which we are all submerged.
The most prominent fear of loosing our family, friends, friends’ families. These fears are not even so common. It is not difficult to understand why so many people have managed to handle this situation in a natural way and almost with indiference. In a country where genocide is almost a rule, any other atrocity is another daily thing.
In Brasil we have lived a crucial moment and this is beyond this tragic episode of the pandemic.
Finally, the talks about racism had took a dimention out of control, and had spread and grown in all the layers of the society.
For many years in Brasil, the society had understood racism as an injustice, a direct and personal act of offence. We have build our own myth, a modern and efficient one: a racial democracy. Behind this generic sweetness, almost idilic, almost pathological, that for us constitues a world that we cherish, a subjugation system always existed.
The racism in Brasil is structured, it is the logic that provides foundation for this nation. This means that all the social structures, official institutions and symbolic systems were created from the economic and racial perspective. And this logic has neven been broken. It has been hidden as a belief-advertising of a mix race, peacefull and happy nation.
In the south there is a noise without a cease.