SPEAKING PLACE: CAN I TALK OR NOT? (PART 1)

From Brasilia, the capital of Brazil.

On August 31, I celebrate two years writing for Pernambuco em Foco. I asked and I’m glad the editor-in-chief, and owner of the web newspaper, has granted freedom to write with didacticism, that is, being explanatory with statements or denials, out of the traditional spectrum adopted by journalism.

I intend, in summary, and throughout this series, to explain what is “speaking place”, and to guide how you can position yourself without being intimidated by those who misunderstand the theme, and even so, want to dictate rules, as well as in reason for those who take pleasure in locking up knowledge in ghettos, especially to assert dominance.

Human beings and knowledge belong to the world. All those who want to limit them are like the river, whose muddy waters flow into the ocean and hope to change its color. The mud may prevail for a few meters and even kilometers, but the day will come when the force of the sea will return contamination and garbage to the coast.

On August 12, talking to a friend and writer from Rio Grande do Norte, Roberto da Silva, he recited the phrase said by Professor Pedro Nava, to students who despised the power of knowledge: “meanwhile, we continue to graze on the grasslands of ignorance”.

If we allow ourselves to educate and learn correctly, and if those who love knowledge allow themselves to hold hands, the effort will not be in vain. The day will come when knowledge will fire the right trigger in our brain, and we will realize that the cosmos is made up of differences. Respecting them delimits the degree of our humanity.

The immense planet Earth, today, only a particle of the Milky Way, and this, once celebrated as the infinite cosmos, and today scientifically only a tiny celestial body among the more than three billion galaxies known by Cosmology, exemplify as well as the knowledge is powerful for resizing value scales.

What is yours and my real size, and importance, within that reality? In fact, what makes us so important about being white, black, brown, yellow, indigenous, “gay”, men, and women?

Forget the artificiality of politics, law, economics, and think with me: how much better we really are, related to each other? Could it be that for our entire existence, we have been foolishly deceived into leaving aside the simple and most precious understanding, which is the fact that we are all “human”?

Wasn’t this, throughout life, the only classification and condition that should prevail, instead of embracing ideologies that aim at our thingify and ghettoization, to justify the dominance or the feeling of superiority, over one another?

There are currents of thought, there are governments, academics, and social scientists who work against humanity. They are so fallacious, that they sometimes transfigure the good essence of knowledge, of someone or something, with the aim of deceiving, and reinforcing the foundations of human beings’ objectification.

Accepting such ideas without filtering them, as we have been doing for millennia, dehumanizes us and fulfils the role they desire because after accepting to be demoted from being human, it is easy to be manipulated and dominated. Who will speak for us amid our suffering?

You need to be reflective and learn to filter whatever you want to pass on as teaching.

When someone says that only the poor can speak of poverty; that only blacks can defend civil rights and social justice for blacks; that only the indigenous must defend the cause of the Indians, and that only women should speak of feminism and machismo, such a person or group can be serving the ignorance.

It can also be malicious and thirsty for dividing us, as humans, as a strategy to subjugate a person, a group, or an idea. You must know that the strategy of dividing to conquer, is only effective, as long as we continue to graze in the grasslands of ignorance.

It is for this path of brief reflections on the “speaking place”, that I am inviting you, since today and for some more articles.

One of my proposals is to remember that your personal universe expands, every time you are willing to read and reflect diligently about knowledge.

To be continued…

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