While I write this short response paper, there is an election happening in Brazil. I find quite ironic the fact that I am discussing the idea of being presente, as presented by Diana Taylor (2018), while feeling the frustration of not being there. There is a sense of being powerless about something as huge as my country’s future. As written by Gloria Anzaldúa, I also feel that “I am a turtle, wherever I go I carry ‘home’ on my back.” (p.21). And this home sometimes can weight so much… But I think that this heavy shell can help me. I recalled a quote that I recently saw at an essay by Silviano Santiago, its epigraph is from the book Antonio Calado’s book Quarup:

O jabuti, que só possuía uma casca branca e mole deixou-se morder pela onça que o atacava. Morder tão fundo que a onça ficou pregada no jabuti e acabou por morrer. Do crânio da onça, o jabuti fez seu escudo. [1]

Being attacked by this powerful enemy, can also lead us to build something different, “to fashion my own gods out of my entrails” (Anzaldúa, p.22). This was an important connection because while reading the text I also recorded the words that Susana mentioned: “Marielle, Presente!”, words that echoes on every rally and protest in Brazil since Marielle’s cruel murder. “If being presente demands an ethical engagement” as stated by Taylor (p.6), this idea of repeating “Marielle, Presente!”, let me to think how can we use this presence to also conjure our dead? Could we cement together this shield built from violence? Being presente seems to indicate a focus on the “present”, on the “now”, but it only does so when we do not subscribe to the Western vision of temporality as linear, without connections. As Taylor states, “its reiterative power points to its ongoing demands, the constant shuffle between the past, present, and future configured differently in different epistemes.” (p.16).

This possibility of connection with the dead also is important to remember us that in order to survive and to grow, we need to expand our view of beings with which we need to be present with. We need to listen to Donna Haraway idea of “making kin”. The dead, the animals, the fungi, the virus, the minerals… How to forge alliances with them? How to be presente along them? To walk along them to learn new ways of seeing/feeling the world, is something that seems crucial if we want to propose new possible ways of constructing new futures.

 

 

[1] The jabuti, who only had a soft white shell, let himself be bitten by the jaguar that attacked it. Biting so deep that the jaguar got stuck in the jabuti and died. From the jaguar’s skull, the jabuti made its shield.