SweekStars 2018: Excerpt from Vaulted Home – Day Seventh by Ana Filomena Amaral

…We are swallowed by the mass culture made in USA, leisure and pleasure become the first objectives of our existence and, anesthetized by fashion and by cosmetics, we let ourselves become entangled in your webs which want us away from the spheres of power, your fear of us had increased since we proved that we can substitute you and we are more, although divided and in separate bodies.

It is necessary that we tear off the veils, that we let the parandja fall, so that everybody can see our face, and feel the flow of the fight in our glance and, finally, recognize us in our difference, not as a rival, but as someone similar, because equal we are not. Our strength is centripetal and intrinsic, comes from the inside, from the mark of our immortality. We are ourselves what you are only with us, immanent. What you are only in the realization of yourself. You still dare to ask “what does a woman want” and we dare to answer “everything”. Not only the political and libidinous revolution, because in us lives the true essence of creation.

Since everything is secret and fear protects it, we quench the fiery words and say only the watered ones, at this time the clock of the world, the time that is left to us is little for us to be and later create. Therefore, tell us why you continued to feed the monster when everything seemed to be appeased, for what was the secret experience in Algeria, the silence about the Vietnam, the “disappeared” of Latin America, the death houses. Was this the way that you liberated the world, transforming the history that you say you are the protagonist of in an endless list of barbaric and atrocious acts?…

We went out to the street in the month of all the mothers, women, May 68 and we did not raise your fists but our hands in vulva since this defines our gender. Together we manifested for a mixed culture, at two voices, and you didn’t seem convinced. But you didn’t drop your left wing and progressive mask. Openmouthed you saw us overthrow the prohibitions, and throw into the rubbish bin of freedom the bras, the ribbons and the false eyelashes. Distrustfully you watched us confronting the tanks in Prague and now you also took consciousness that the difference between us is the fundamental difference of humanity, it dictates the beginning or the end of everything.

To want the triad, to possess the triad, enjoy the triad was the condition for being accepted in the consumer society. The home protection, the speed of the car and the illusion of television drove in lethargy our luck without us realizing that death had gone before life, in a pink vegetal. Absent, we and you lived in the world of what seems and, in spite of those commanding, it just makes you an integral part of its secret, but it doesn’t allow you to unmask it. It feeds your narcissistic imaginary with media icons and instills in you a new fear: that of the paranormal, covering its fabricated explanations with a vaguely scientific coloring and appealing to your mythical-savage thought.

DASEIN, we are all here, trying to assume once more our body, robbed, tortured, raped, our bodies our selves, owners of our wombs, and you too, adhering to the national cause of good shape, the body accomplished in jogging, ski, tennis, feeling well in skin, in the good American way of life.

The body, the new altar of faith, prepared, sun tanned, soft and firm to the glance of others, is the new public space of what was more ours and yours. It materialized ours and your personality, affirmation, fulfillment. It is the soul and the spirit and it is also the whole threatened by agents of death, from the outside the violence and from the inside sickness and old age. And there we go, we and you, to execute the last ritual of tamed death, choose the coffin, the clothes according to the dictates of fashion, the “in” cemetery and, in a total softening, we get inside for the drive in funeral home and the American way of death is lived until the ultimate moment when the cold heavy earth covers us, that which no amount of publicity can make light.

We and you conformed to the illusion of all the values, independence, freedom, autonomy, friendship, love. We and you vulgarized death and the mirrors and the evasion substituted the assumption that we demand so much. Life crumbled like dry bread and the secret pursued us until it drove us to the most secret place: suicide. Challenging everything, subverting everything, we cheat death with a last flash libertarian ardor marking the moment of its coming.

He who destroys life crumble destroys history and now it is not only the pillage of the third world that frightens us but the ignorance of your limits in setting yourself up as a miracle maker and master of illusions, trying to hide your games with the veil of a solidarity dictated by your own interests. The competition doesn’t let you go and you have to achieve at all cost the best price, it’s all a question of economy, of money, of dollar, of petrodollar, finally of energies that are exhausted, like us and you, we ourselves destroyed in exhausting it. You converted them into concrete, into speed, into communication, into computer science, into electronics, into cities and rural deserts, nuclear power and Chernobyl. You converted them into television, the largest and most rapacious empire of ever. You wanted the world to be a global village, here you have it for breakfast, lunch, dinner. Whenever you want to press the on. On via by all the transmission channels, you have the hunger that doesn’t take away your appetite, the war that doesn’t disturb your sleep, the disease that doesn’t worry you, all the frontiers are well guarded. But you have more. You have the village at its end, dying of thirst in the advancing desert, with black feet from the tides and the rubbish expelled from here, terrified from there, the eyes blinded by polluted air, the lips and the hands cracked from the radiation. This exhausted and ragged village transports on her back, from house to house, the last days of our civilization. Do you know how to remove the weight with which we have burdened? Yes, we know, it is by treating her like a mother, like a living being, respecting her as perfect creation. Unconsciously, you took your revenge on her, like on us, you dominated her, like you did us, tortured her like us, degraded her, like us, and now what will you be without her, and without ourselves?

Mother, forgive them, for they know not what they do!

The Marias wrote the New Portuguese Letters and directly you tried to snare us in the trap that you yourself had fallen in, for how can you believe that not all writing is feminine, but just ours? Even when you alone were its messenger, the word was always us, from the beginning. It emanates from the difference which unites us, what fertilized seed. It is the true symbol of the “cosmovital fusion” of the strength and of the shape – the becoming. For it and through it we conquered the letters and the arts too. Deconstructed, demolished, rebuilt we became creators. But even so an ancient and profound sadness gives us no truce, and you, how can you wish happiness and think about achieving it when our children are enslaved, tortured, prostituted, sold and killed throughout your world, even so, you want to be a father and we mother at any price.

It isn’t enough for you to transplant organs, put satellites in orbit, change geography, manipulate light, manipulate electronics and informatics, invent the quantum theory, clone animals? No, because for you to be a god you have to create yourself.

You knocked down the wall and you unified this old continent. You opened the doors of the house which war had closed and it became transparent, like a crystal. Then you tried to forget all the crystal nights and you celebrated a new Treaty, which has to face the crisis and instability when redrawing the map with many more colors. Next, you went home, turned upon yourself and wanted the continuation of your name, of your blood, of your genes. We opened the doors to the most intimate secret of humanity, that which is generated from the fusion of your being with mine, we opened the doors of our love and it is dying. Your secret sterility and mine exposed obsess us, plunge us into mourning. We want a child, we want to seek in the future the root of this past of immemorial refusal, this past which stigmatizes and shames us, which makes us incapable to the proud and pious eyes of others.

We don’t care about medical ethics, the fundamental rights of the person, the eugenia and the ontogenesis embryology. We want to produce a child and that we can, we choose the sex, the color of the eyes, in fact all according to our taste and according to our desire. After everything, the theatricality and all the people, alone, now, we have him in our arms and we should be happy, but the disquiet and the doubts invade us, corrodes us. Of whom is this child, of the woman, owner of the womb which generated him, of the father, owner of the semen which fertilized it? What father and mother are we, what family do we constitute, what power is this that we have conquered? We fall after all into the trap of our obsession and we are dragged by the vertigo of the illusion of being gods.

And now we are tired, we will live the seventh day and fortify our spirit of that resistance which, almost gives up the fight, and hides itself in the new ways of the old boring messiahs, who are born as our pain and despair increase. How we suffer with your suicidal fundamentalisms that spill our blood, how we die with your racist fanaticism. We are all, the excluded and the refugees of the planet, we are the children of the end…of the century, of the millennium and, maybe, we are also the children of the beginning.

Let’s open the stuck doors to hope, build a colored monument to peace and to freedom, light the brilliant torches in the night, to tolerance and to solidarity let’s go, finally, together, to shout until we break down all resistances:

“Mother, forgive us. Do not abandon us on this day when we need you most!”

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