Daniel Tirso Fiorotto
Special for ANALYSIS
Society is going through an era of fragmentation and ‘every man for himself’, where “the other” is guilty until proven otherwise. Journalism is within society, ergo…
Parents of 12-year-old girls who compete in a sport in Paraná and insult the opponents and their own daughters. Cultural people who clash in a discussion about the sex of angels… The dissociated society is weak, and journalists sometimes take the microphone to entertain (unsuccessfully) with news.
Perhaps in this maelstrom, nature, ancient wisdom that we have ignored enough already, can give us some advice. Well: the authentic Paraná is cloudy, it does not carry clay: it is made of clay; It does not drag camalotes: it is camalotetal. Paraná is a good pharmacy for us journalists to treat our pathological tendency to become like pool water, fed up with chlorine and algaecides. “Clean” water, isolated water.
The river is cloudy water, accompanied. It is seen that the willow, the alder, the sarandí, the armada, the surubí, the islero, the fisherman, the biguá feel at home, and we are the basin, as much as the water.
What would shad feed on if the river were crystal clear, when they live on detritus? Why do dorado without the shad?
We environmentalists say “basin view” to break down borders and compartments. To verticalism: basin view. To the division: basin view. To obsessive specialization: basin view.
The basin involves water, soil, tree, fish, ravine, butterfly, aguara popé, human being with its dances and songs and trades and worries, bird with its trills, renewal of aromas, mbicuré in the trunk of the exotic paradise, gurises in the sandy; nothing is left outside the basin. The dissociated society could learn from the watershed, from that interaction, and the story could adopt the watershed perspective.
Journalism usually appears somewhat artificial, appearing clean. What is cleaning? Is a river of shrimp dirty? The camalote, the brown clay, are they perhaps impurities, or are they the very, essential condition of Paraná?
Now, how has this distortion of journalism, this laundered profession, happened? There will be several contributing causes, but undoubtedly one of them is its dependence on the agenda imposed by power, be it state, economic, or corporate. And another cause, our formation dependent on the colonial system, therefore: colonized.
If journalism is washed, what can we say about the classroom. There the mbicuré (which precedes us by hundreds of thousands of years) is a victim of atopy, the non-place, the discomfort, and the same is the mate that generates the ancestral environment for authentic knowledge but bothers the seats of the high houses of “study” (Forbidden to drink mate means prohibited to use mate). We suffer from a kind of stubbornness against the environment, and in journalism it is very evident but it is not the only area: by saying that Paraná, in the middle of the phytogeographic province of Espinal, banned trees with thorns on the streets…
If journalism is water, power acts as chlorine and algaecide. Decide what is weed and what is not, distribute merits and status, turn faucets on and off. This is how journalists who want to be faithful to the word betray expectations. There are some, they are not few, they are easier to find in the cracks.
Demonstrating dependence would not be difficult: a year would be enough in which all the mass media were supported by humble neighborhoods, marginalized families, landless peasants, the unemployed, artisans and artists, supported by biodiversity; and after the experience, compare. What topics would we cover, then? Who would we interview? What would we say about that official subscribed to the microphone today? What would we know about that businessman who today pays for silence? What about the system itself?
When we wash ourselves of history, of neighborhood, of mountain, of river, we call weeds what the system calls weeds; We call those who the system calls poor the poor.
This is how journalists sometimes line up and bow to the colonial Western worldview that Boaventura de Sousa Santos denounces: abysmal thinking. Our profession (and with exceptions), allows a hundred topics out of a thousand, opens the microphone to certain supposed representatives who do not even represent the mother, to certain recalcitrant disciplines, and little else. The rest remains in an abyss and gives, with luck, for nice little notes of color.
Breaking watertight compartments, which serve power, overcoming knowledge lockers (built to make our reality invisible), is one of the challenges to reverse the process.
Let’s look at this example: why do we interview a minister of health, and praise the success of the vaccine against the virus, and on the other hand, interview the environmentalist and recognize with him the health risks involved in fumigating the soil with insecticides and herbicides fifteen meters from families in their homes or at school? If the economy promoted by the state (masquerading as the public) puts the health of biodiversity and, in it, of people, at risk, then doesn’t the Ministry of Health just entertain us with declamations and shout far from the nest, like the uterus? ? If at the same time we talk to relatives of victims of accidents on the roads (the main reason for death of youth), what will we say about health care, when all the routes depend on the same state and its ministry of health, and are a real guillotine for the innocent, with tapes in poor condition, poor care of people, a dangerous mix of trucks and cars, etc?
For the ministries of health, health on the roads is a matter of Roads, health in food is a matter of Production, health in overcrowding in neighborhoods is a matter of the Housing Institute… Dividing reality is good for them to distort And why do we copy that artificial partition in knowledge, instead of opting for the basin view?
In our territory, for decades many people have been prohibited from being born in their town (as was done before), so mothers who are prescribed rest have to travel 50 kilometers between potholes if they feel contractions, and return another 50 km between potholes. If it is a false alarm, until the child is born with less peace of mind than in the 15th century and we do not know if he tells the story. Ah, but how well does the Ministry of Health work if it painted the façade of the hospital…
The teaching and media pigeonholes serve the system. They make invisible what the system wants to hide. Round business. But dividing knowledge and responsibilities is the opposite of a basin view.
How different, when we journalists get a little muddy, we listen to the mothers forced to give birth far from home, we listen to the voice of the river. How different, when we stay a little week in the crowded neighborhood, and the next little week in the desolate countryside, without a soul, owned by a Dutchman, an Italian, a Buenos Aires man, one of those who can’t even pronounce mburucuyá, who don’t distinguish the thrush of the black lizard, who think that López Jordán is a street, the charrúa an obstacle that has been overcome.
The coloniality of the system is such that something similar sometimes happens to us journalists as those students who are bullied for saying words different from those used by their tribe. And the coloniality is such that we naturalize the pigeonholing of each element, where nothing permeates the whole. Artigas for the history class, chaná for ethnology, chamamé for the folklore program, land for the agronomy faculty, jopói for the Guaraní language class, thrush for the obsessions of the ornithologist neighbor… So far from the basin, where the parts They are only understood in dialogue with the whole.
“The rivers, those beings that have always inhabited the worlds in different forms, are the ones who suggest to me that, if there is a future to think about, that future is ancestral, because it was already here.”. Words by Ailton Krenak.
From time to time, the truths of an Ailton, the music of flocking thrushes, emerge from the abyss, to warn us that some of our news is already boring because it is repeated, and that, as happens with the Moon, there is another side. entire, hidden side, to visit.
