May-2015
“They think we don’t know anything”
“I think they think we don’t know anything,” he said when I asked him why adults today always say that children don’t know how to play anymore. “What a strange question” he must have thought. Carlinhos has no doubts about what he knows, he simply acts, not giving up the chance to live in silence.
In the code of his expressions, words are not his strong suit. He talks to himself as he cuts, scrapes, drills, sands, tries again. His hands are the builders of wishes. He builds cars made of solid wood, canoes from buriti stems, ox carts out of cork root, sculpting these woods of various weights with a machete. He could spend a whole day watching the wind blow through the loose opening of his window. Time is not his enemy, to the contrary, he loves to spend hours watching it go by behind the big cashew tree outside his window.
Boys with these traits don’t adjust well to the seats in a school. They pray that someone notices the birdsongs coming from outside. They feel empty when their hands carry only the light weight of pens and pencils. They tend to take home notes about their failures.
They say that in there he will get a certificate to become something in life. If he fills out all these papers and stuffs his notebooks and textbooks with the right words, success is guaranteed, he will become a true citizen.
Carlinhos sees truth in the winding shapes of the cars he builds himself, which he learned just by watching “that guy over there making them.” He sees truth in the shaking of the fish he takes off the hook, like he learned from his father. He sees sense and truth in the warm smell of flour when he helps the older people grind and toast it. His eyes are the first to arrive when he sets out to learn how to be. It’s a shame that lessons through watching do not have the same weight as lessons on paper.
His mother carries the anguish of looking after his future. She bought into the idea that you need to know how to correctly recite school materials to have a good job, preferably in the city, so he can leave this “dead end” life on the farm.
A destiny drawn in a straight line and without return since the day he sat down on that school chair: do your homework and you will be “successful.”
His father never received the “blessing” of a school and admits today that he is not a successful citizen. The common wisdom is that this is now the task of this generation, so full of opportunities.
Carlinhos feels sorry that I’m not listening to the birds outside. Much less the ones inside.
Text and photos: Renata Meirelles
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