A pause in
Ogun’s time

I was born in the same place Ogun’s(1) energy was born; the energy of Ogun was born in the same state I was born. Vegetable and mineral coal, iron, and steel. In other states there is oil, ports, and containers. Landing stations, vehicles, electricity and location arrays, and giant earthworms that traverse the earth. What I see in all these places are still colonial and modern war machines. After all, who are we fighting? Are we fighting humanity itself?

“The planet is telling us, ‘You’ve gone crazy, you’ve forgotten who you are and now you’re lost, thinking you’ve accomplished something with your toys.’ The truth is that all technology has given us are toys. The most sophisticated toy we have is the one that puts people in space; and also the most expensive. It’s a toy that only about thirty, or forty guys can play with. And, of course, there are billionaires that want to play with it”, wrote Ailton Krenak(2) in the book A vida não é útil.

Colonial modernist and contemporary culture cannot encompass our existences and is destroying the world that we know along with the Whiteness that spreads across the continent. I am trying to understand a body that denies gender norms and leaves colonialist rural environments, moving towards cities and metropolises as a way of existing. I used to believe that stopping the world would transform it into something better, into another possibility for life. The world “stopped” with the Covid-19 pandemic and, however, we remain alienated, with no understanding of each other in society. I say we remain because our acting and our existence are still the same.

I am a novice in Umbanda,(3) and before Covid-19 arrived in Brazil, I was starting to have conversations and to share feelings with the entities, entidades.(4) Born in a Christian rural community, still under rigid colonial molds, it took me a while to realize the global arrangement in which a place my homeland. Together with the entities, I announced myself in this arrangement, aligned with the energy of Ogun, who initiated me. I am a small cog in this flow, a drop of blood in the midst of this global sea of iron. The internet, for me, has been fundamental.

What I live, however, are countless years and times, not accounted for by the internet or contemporary colonial, ultra-fast time. What I have been experiencing is the power of aligning myself with the global force of Ogun, from the beginnings of the production of iron, to the production of steel and all the technology that we experience in this carnal and material plane. I write from a communal, ancestral and spiritual point of view, and I try to abandon the academicism that architecture, design and urbanism have taught me.

I do not consider myself a daughter of Ogun – not, at least, in the official sense that this may have in Candomblé(5) or Umbanda. My head has not yet been made,(6) and I did not grow up learning in named ways. On the contrary, we were born here forgotten; I was born small, a successor to agreements and violences passed on to me. I consider Ogun to be a parent, as well as other Orishas,(7) fathers and mothers who teach me about ancestry and ways of living.

I was born amid the social and global precariousness of the Jequitinhonha Valley, historically extracted by coloniality and neocolonialism. The elders here still believe in what was imposed by the settlers, bandeirantes tropeiros,(8) years ago, in a way that is only possible thanks to a rigid and continuous experience of decimation, misinformation and poverty. Whiteness, along with the multinationals that settled here in the past century, seems to be the path for ascension, to achieve education, employment, to access things. The information age appears to me as a possibility for elucidating our experiences, which have been stagnant for centuries, but also as a form of great confusion.

When I understood myself in the context of my homeland, my fight turned against the patterns of Christian Whiteness that were making me sick within my own family. It is difficult to dialogue with my ancestors, who caused me pain and brought brutality to our life, and who, in their own survival plans, refuse whatever is new, because they cannot bear more violence and they face psychological exhaustion. I am the peak of this high mountain. It is exhausting to outline strategies for survival and ascension in a context of exploitation that is still alive and present, based on informational poverty and historical erasure. 

After years living in the capital of the state of Minas Gerais, I returned to my hometown because of the pandemic. For months I have been reading and understanding the victorious methods of regional survival and, within my family history, also the whitening process we have undergone. The arrangements of the modern and contemporary world are too much for my ancestors, involved in their Christian colonial rural daily life. I question myself to what extent I should bring to them the questions that cross me today, my new baggage, my metropolitan language, which are not from here and which come once again to modify them.

I understand all of this when I see myself alone. I cannot blame them for having been submitted to a whitening socialization that arises both from coloniality and from the multinationals that dominate the region – but I have warned them. Surviving and yearning for knowledge, stability and access cannot be a fault. Here I have witnessed strategies that help me understand our history and how to stop replicating it.

Our whitening came from the surrender of our people to the molds of disinformation and to the dazzle that enrichment can create. It also comes from the surrender to so many weapons and adaptation strategies: the church, capital, architecture, academics, politics, entrepreneurship, economics, sexuality and gender. If there is no space to broadly discuss other forms of experience and ascension beyond those we know through whiteness, how then can one recognize and change one’s own life? 

Lately more real images of the social have finally emerged in Brazil –  in soap operas and cinematic productions. These were some of the few tools that brought me here, in the midst of a community with a history like ours. I do not blame my mother, father or grandparents for not understanding all this – even I, who have access to information and to academic studies, still find it difficult. Nor will I be able to blame future generations who will come to this chaotic, fast-paced world and will fail to understand it. We owe them time.

I once heard from the entities that my strength, my reach and my resistance come from our people and their ability to transform the earth, the water, air and fire into crops, clay, coal and steel. There is a long historical process of resistance in the Jequitinhonha Valley. Our psychologies were built from that resistance, too. From that moment onwards, I started to see everything differently. I saw the resistance of my father, an extraction worker, standing still in the face of giant mechanical and electronic machines. I saw my mother’s resistance to the strength of men and their machines. I also saw the resistance of my sisters, confronted with misogynist forms of socialization. I noticed how our people show strength in dealing with the dynamics imposed to them since the creation of the Jequitinhonha Valley, finding their own tools in order to work, make money, seek an education and a dignified life. By connecting countryside, cities, metropolises and globalization, I see how bodies have created resistance to the machinery invented for us to be here.

Sometimes I feel that Ogun’s energy and responsibility are too dense for me. I am surrounded by kilometers of eucalyptus plantations, clay ovens, machinery, metallurgical plants, dust and soot. When I look above it all, I see a sensitive body struggling against the physical, psychological and mechanical resistance of this place. The river that runs through the middle of the city is dirty and I am miles away from seas, natural forests and clean sources of energy. What remains is fire.

I am tired of resisting with my body and my mind in order to be able to renew myself and not suffocate in the solitude of my identity, which reminds me of my childhood.

Today I call myself Jequitinhonse(9) as a way of recreating an identity erased from the Valley by global Whiteness. Here, the dream of achieving white progress and the necessary infrastructure to live well is still shaped by imaginaries that come from the “developed” world. There are countless neglected temporalities that intersect in the ever-faster advancement of humanity. I, however, see time as big veins.

To be a Jequitinhonse is to be crossed by the routes of bandeirantes tropeiros and by the whitening imposed on villages, quilombos(10) and remaining Indigenous and Black communities. It is to be immersed in an imposed urbanization, permeated by mining and extractivism, plunged into impoverishment. It is searching for a restitution that never happened, our daily lives empty of new informational and cultural memories. Past colonial projects reside in different levels of time and in different spaces (metropolises, cities, districts, towns and villages) spread across Brazil. Access bans still control the informational flows of colonial cleansing and past and present norms.

Still, I try to experience the essence of a body that refuses binarity, queer difference and any and all systems of human categorization. Which refuses the strangeness that systematization into an acronym or into a word can cause. The few laws that I follow are those of the energy transformation that takes place within me. I also follow the rule of non-alienation. I avoid alignments, and seek constant inspiration, pulsation, and self-combustion.

What still remains in me is the place where I was born and the burdens I was exposed to since childhood. The human construction of a “first world” is nothing more than the representation of White civility  –  so far from my origins and from so many others in this continental country.

I still want to walk towards a place where I can let go of this all for a moment and live the singularities I chose together with my sisters, who are also awakening, right now, in this world, in different places and in different ways, in a global revolution. In order to let go, to stop this cruel world, I need to display Ogun’s strength, to see the paths of his progress in the world. A world still under construction.

“The different Indigenous narratives about the origin of life and the transformations we undergo on Earth are memories from when we were, for example, fish. Some people were fish, just as there are people who were trees before seeing themselves as humans”, continues Ailton Krenak. I am being masterfully driven by ancestral plans. The spirits of forests, lands and waters and the caboclos(11) protect me while I am immersed in artificial forests and extractive plantations of global steel. As I write, I honor the energetic lines and currents that run through the vast veins and crops of civilization. I continue to pulse.

I have been claiming these spaces as our spaces, understanding the history of ancestral blood spilled by European, multinational, corporate hands. We historically belong to this continent and everything that the future will rightfully reserve for us is ours. I am a cabocla made of steel, breaking time and those who owe us with iron. The time we inhabit is not just the time of now, of the plans we make for two or three years from now, but ancestral time.

Ogun are the paths of civilization. Ogun are also the roads of my birth. Ogun is my guide to understanding civilization as it is and will be. Ogunhê,(12) Father. Greetings, Mother. I will offer you my meat in exchange for a request of a new world. In the meantime, I will fight for the world I believe in. One day I will no longer be this armored body that transits through an armored society. I will kill the flesh that lives in me and transform myself into something to come.

Father Ogun, humans are lost. Humans are fighting each other, for each other’s fortunes. Meanwhile, they use the rest of us, imprisoning my body in the shell of a man. I refuse to be a man; I refuse to live in such a system, of greedy, stupid people.

Block the pathways of this sick civilization, stop them from destroying the earth as we know it.

Let there be a pause in the time of men, let there be a break in the time of those who greedily and vulgarly manage us. They still do not know how to live in harmony, they cannot live together without destroying the Earth, without destroying the Other, without destroying diversity.

Ogun, builder of all paths in this whole world, allow us to beautify and to improve ourselves as living beings before the end, so that we stop being so human.

It is not necessary to explain the disgrace to which we have been subjected in recent times by corporate greed and human organization. Mineral extraction slandered Minas Gerais with toxic mud. We got into debt by trying to keep up with the world; we created all kinds of systemic strategies for living, we intoxicated the land, we heated and polluted the seas with plastics and polluted the air like never before. We are fighting dystopias and greater dooms.

How can cities sustain us without turning into scrap? How can we create a non-Eurocentric non-White experience of civility? Do we really need systems that know everything that we do and control us? Has White humanity created all kinds of control tools in order to stagnate its own destructive force?

We need a pause in Ogun’s time until humans become aware of the universe and the destruction they are causing. There will be paths that will make humans understand life in a different way, with dignity and care. Thus shall our evolution be. We now act as if we need to build more structures instead of transforming ourselves into structures necessary for adaptation. We do not need more; we need to wake up to what already exists.

Cyber-energy, the wisdom of steel, has come to the world. We are dealing with unprecedented speed and structural organization. We have revolutionized industry, we have produced systems that connect us and bring to us knowledge about all forms of life and, at the same time, we alienate ourselves in the face of destruction. The Anthropocene, the time of iron and cybernetics, made us into functional beings, made us into reproducers of garbage.

White and disciplined hegemonic progress kills biodiversity and diversity, and technology reiterates illusions and the lack of truth with the whole.

Open veins. Garbage is not just Western, it comes from everywhere, including the huge loads of technology arriving from the East. Our continent, which is disappearing into rails and containers, needs to know what is being sent out of here, elsewhere, and what could be built with what is ours. We also need to know what is silently coming in.

I dislike a world projected for a hundred years from now; I dislike the systematization of my body; ultra-intelligent technologies seem to me to be just another way of normalizing human beings that are emptied of experiences and emotions. Technology that creates its bases on synthetic and superficial reactions, on the ideological and imagery molds of a privileged minority, Eurocentric, American and now Eastern – ethnocidal. Privileges are now informational, governed by the amount of data each of us can process. Our consciousness is traded in data and the gamification of life rewards our brains with systematic competition.

I am talking about the future and how it can affect us, affect bodies that do not see technological advance as a possibility for life. Such advance may represent the radicalization of the kind of social control that we already experience: increasingly authoritarian governments and undemocratic forms of access and sociability. We have not yet begun to discuss how to treat technology and urbanity more broadly and democratically, and how to rethink and pause rapid and compulsory development.

Latin America has been adopting technological policies that do not consider dissident bodies. Compulsory urbanization is producing functional bodies that are increasingly whitened in their globalized and consumerist patterns of life. Should my body, which escapes gender standards, be categorized and framed in a norm? Should it be systematized?

The world launches itself into predicting increasingly technological futures, structured upon a low quality of life and the control and depletion of natural resources. Imperialism takes on new faces confronted with the needs of capital: social networks, Western living standards, brands… the entire apparatus of territorialization of the so-called developed countries are silently thrown into the same landscape.

They use our land and our territory, and their consumption laws bring destruction to our ecosystems and to our ethnic specificities. No one cares about the entidades and existences that escape the Western human norm. The singularities of an increasingly less human body like mine seem to have an expiration date, a date for extinction.

I find a maximized imagery example of all this in a videogame, Cyberpunk 2077. The game highlights the synthetic technological life of robotic energy within our bodies and the precariousness and human scrapping in the face of capitalism and artificial development in a dystopian present-future. It proposes to represent the maximization of control and power of corporations and the super-rich, who base their production on the enhancement of the physiological functions of synthesized bodies, as well as on the modification of urban spaces, that must suit their needs.

With the consolidation of capitalism in Latin America, we are witnessing the emergence of such aesthetics, ways of life and systematizations: corporatism, the gamification of cities and life, anti-community thinking, hierarchical and violent logics, the dispute for exponentially larger exhibition spaces and audiences for a spectacularized capitalist game.

In the past hundred years, Times Square in New York, known as the technological crossroads of the world, has been the concrete representation of this type of development in contemporary America. We learned to revere consumption and its urban and global impacts in terms of space, energy, waste, circulation, visibility, and engagement, without knowing for sure what its eco-systemic consequences would be on bodies and minds. We have all been carried away by a wave of maladjusted frenzy, forgetting our real desire for regeneration and objection to colonial history.

Cities are increasingly scrapped into cement and metal, bodies and biological death. Memory is increasingly fragmented by information and by the number of characters and digital spaces available. Flying cars are the new promise of capital for those who still cannot deal with their own viaducts and piped rivers. Meanwhile, as ships begin to leave the Earth, the functionality of steel serves the enchanting progress of subways.

To think about reforestation, bike lanes, mobility and basic sanitation for metropolises so vast beyond the centers… Yet another matter to be forgotten by the State and by those who have the power to rule our development. The centers are beautiful, touristy, profitable… but who wants to ride a bike in the city center only?

The cities I imagine are trans, travesti(13) and transmuted. They are made of clay, brick and metal, brown like the earth that provided for them, and technological just like any other white mirrored building. Alive, abundant, pulsating like our blood, colorful like our skin, energized and blooming like our flower bodies. They are cybermacumbeiras,(14) caboclas, chameleonic. What else could we do with all the skills we have gathered so far to survive the end of the world?

I know that Father Ogun has many planets, but on this one I refuse to be a functional being made of steel. I want to continue being made of clay and meat, I want to leave my flesh, feel the earth and beautify myself with Oshun,(15) with Tupã,(16) with the forests of Oshosi(17) and with whatever else has been taken from me. I want to shine with the bioluminescence of the Earth, with the natural, organic life of matrices that are rebuilt.

Sustaining in our bodies such an electrical energy is not yet possible. My body is not a steel machine, even though I am a sentry; but it has to be hybrid and sustainable. One day it will be possible to discover this kind of energy in our bodies and minds. Cyberenergy will be in my body and will make me shine one day, oh Father, but we humans still cannot understand it and receive it in our community.

I want to be able to precipitate our future in abundant rains and fertile lands, we who are experiencing unprecedented misfortunes and deep wounds. I want to rain regional, continental and global paths of healing. We have all the resources to reassemble ourselves in the origins of our first world. Abya Yala.(18) We need a pause, Father Ogun.

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