The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule.

Walter Benjamin

 

E quando ouvir o silêncio sorridente de São Paulo diante da chacina (…)

Pense no Haiti

O Haiti é aqui

 Caetano Veloso e Gilberto Gil – Haiti

 

This year, while hitchhiking between two cities in Brazil, I experienced a (in)tense moment. The driver of the car I was in told me that he was uses to drive the “caveirão”[1] and, while reporting his experiences, he occasionally talks of how they usually just drop the dead bodies inside the car. He tells me this as the most mundane act one could think off. I was astonished, but since I was in such a delicate situation, I kept myself quiet. While reading this week’s essays, I was once again transported to this moment. How not to remember of his words when reading the idea of necropolitics as discussed by Mbembe? It’s all there. The banality of death, the state right to maim and/or kill and to dispose of those bodies. Bodies that live in these “separated” cities within the city. The construction of the image of the favela and the people that lives in there as the Other, as the Enemy, has a long history in Brazil.

We can see how this segregation is linked with the idea discussed by Aníbal Quijano about how the formation of the nation-state in South America is completely imbricated with the colonial formation, the separation between Us and Them.  So, we must always discuss racism when talking about classes, for “social classes in Latin America are marked by color (…) This means that the classification of people is realized not only in one sphere of power – the economy, for example, but in each and every sphere. Domination is the requisite for exploitation, and race is the most effective instrument for domination” (Quijano, 2008, p.220). Inside the cities, there are this “other” places, with supposedly different laws and ways of living. Places that constantly are framed as where lurks menaces and threats to the city and to its citizens. The favelas are then seen as disposable places and its habitants as disposable bodies. And the idea of disposable bodies is an idea that we can see being central to Mbebembe and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui.

Even if Mbembe mainly refers to Israel when discussing his ideas of necropower, one can also see how some of his arguments can be applied to the favelas. For him, “the dynamics of territorial fragmentation, the sealing off and expansion of settlements. The occupied territories are therefore divided into a web of intricate internal borders and various isolated cells. (…) this dispersal and segmentation clearly redefine the relationship between sovereignty and space” (Mbembe, 2003, p.19). As we can notice by the relate given by the caveirão, the favelas are usually seen as segregated places where there is a constant war. Was is the normalcy, thus the state of exception is not the exception, but the rule. Therefore, many of the city’s public politics towards these places can be seen as military decisions, as if they are in a constant warfare. Dead bodies are thrown inside urban tanks for their later disposal, and this is told to others as the most banal thing in the world. I relieve to those tense moments in the car of this man who is telling me of all these barbarous things. Once again, I do not know what to say, or what to do. Even though I know that I would not be one of those dead, since they are socially and racially marked while I had a privileged middle-class upbringing, I just cannot stop the felling that for some hours I became one more of those mute bodies that he usually transports.

 

 

[1]  Caveirão is the augmentative of caveira, which means skull.  This is a popular name for the armored car used by Rio de Janeiro’s police when they enter the favelas. It is like a war tank both in appearance and how it is used.