Yanomami hope

I would like to see you happy. I don't know your name. I saw your face briefly on instagram. You were attached to your mother's breast. A breast without milk. A mother without flesh. A skin-and-bones mother. She was hungry your mother like you who cannot suck her milk. A hunger that has lasted for more than five hundred years.

The Country you live in was only land, it was only freedom, it was only happiness five hundred years before.

Your ancestors lived off the forest and the sky.

Then men arrived, with beards, on a caravel from the other side of the world, from Europe. Men with a flag and an arrogance that came out of their quivering fingertips. And your ancestors, in that ice-cream cone we now call Latin America, had their land, their happiness, their life stolen from them. They even had death taken away from them, which at the time of your ancestors was still dignified, still in connection with the ancestral spirits.

Then every connection was swept away. Every road destroyed. Every communication severed. Your people, who had always been there, became orphans of themselves. The men who came down from the caravels, the men of the other world, began to speak of the four winds with which they had “discovered” you. However, you knew that you had always been there, in that land, yours, given by the gods and by heaven. People never discovered by anyone. Nevertheless, you know lies have short legs, but when they are thrown out into the universe they run fast. Especially when carried on the tip of sharp spears. And that is how the original peoples from North to South, East to West were exterminated. Killed by poisonous spears or by invisible killers who rendered their flesh as if burnt. Happy people suddenly lost inside the nightmare of a carnivorous power. And so ancestor after ancestor the original peoples, those who had always been there, saw the world change. Where there was forest suddenly an enclosure. Where there was freedom suddenly a prison. And with your ancestors the animals and trees wept too. The former killed for no reason and the others slaughtered by the axes of deforestation. Thus, you have learnt to resist. To keep ancestral knowledge in mind. Not to lose contact with nature. Of your people, the Yanomami, child, it is said that you are keen observers of nature. You know about botanical species that scientists at emblazoned universities do not. Moreover, you know how not to overdo Mother Nature. You know the limit between man and the earth. You respect the world. And perhaps that is why the world has not respected you. Since the 1990s, your lands have been invaded by “garimpeiros”, illegal miners in the pay of the “gold mafias”, who pollute the rivers and skies. They are in the pay of unscrupulous potentates. And in recent years, the situation of your people has worsened. Everything around you, who are a child, is dying. The fish, the birds, the larvae. The mercury dumped into the rivers is making you sick too. You have stomach cramps, your beloved land has become malarial, putrid. And you no longer have enough to sustain yourselves. Brazil, the country where your ancestors have always lived, became aware of your hunger only a few moments ago. Many people did not know of your pain. They saw your skeletal body, that hunger drawing a grin in your mouth for the first time. And many, not those who starved you, but all and sundry, cried. They became angry. Everything must change, they said, on the street, on social media, in well-written newspaper editorials. A woman leads the newly established Ministry for Indigenous Peoples. You cannot look at her because of how weak you are. Nevertheless, I see a glint in the left side of your childish eyes. That is the hope you have for your little big life. And you cling to your mother tightly, waiting for happiness to come.

BY IGIABA SCEGO