Narratives of the Cerrado: the voices from the woods for an antiracist linguistic education

Abstract

The structure of the modern colonial world mobilized several projects of domination of nature, territories, and bodies, inferiorizing the colonized populations. Illustrated modernity self-proclaimed itself as universal and unique, invalidating any other form of being, feeling, thinking, acting, and talking: ontoepistemicide. Languages of colonization were introduced in the colonized territories as languages of culture and knowledge, delegitimizing all others: languagecide. Catholicism was imposed as the unique religion, and Christianity and the unique system to deal with the holy and the world. In order to be rational, civilized, and to conform to the new order, human beings must lose their divinity and their link with the Cosmos, though not completely. School and church took it upon themselves the harsh role of normatizing the “new man”. The goal of this discussion is to problematize the existence of cosmogonies and ontoepistemologies which manifested in cosmolinguistic practices and in mater-narratives from the Cerrado, which express the maintenance of the link of human beings with nature and the holy, in spite of modernity/coloniality. With this problematization, I intend to propose strategies for the strengthening of the mater-narratives and the cosmolinguistic practices, creating spaces and situations for the insurgence and installation of collective ancestral memories, by means of “escrevivência” (EVARISTO, 2020), in language classes, aiming for an antiracist linguistic education. I hope that with the practice of “escrevivência”, understood as “the writing of us” (NUNES, 2020), as a pedagogical locus in the language classes, school may potentialize writing as a political act for minorities, more specifically women from excluded groups, for whom writing has been historically denied. Thus, going beyond literature, “escrevivência” may surge in schools, in the teaching of languages, as an ally for subalternized women who fight for more social and political equality.