What does Watu tell us?

Vitalizing Our Dwelling on Earth

Abstract

This article aims to problematize modern anthropocentrism and the inauguration not only of a new epoch in the world, but also of the regulation of ways of living to determine a “way of inhabiting this earth”. An inhabitation that has culminated in the ecological crisis and evokes a total abandonment and devastation of ecosystems and their biodiversity. In this way, in a dialogue with Ailton Krenak (2022), Antônio Bispo dos Santos (2023) and Malcolm Ferdinand (2022), we thought together with ancestral knowledge preserved by memory a proposal to build a confluence between cartographies of the world, in particular, the voice of the waters of the river Watu, considered the grandfather of the Krenak people, as an exercise in listening to the voices of the waters as a relational dynamic of affections in which Watu decentralizes anthropocentrism to other plural forms of existence enunciated by anthropos and their colonial model of inhabiting the world. In addition to this exercise of listening to the voice of the waters of the rivers, especially the Watu River, we propose the action of aquilombamento (Ferdinand 2022) as a foundation for the construction of new cartographies of the world and the recovery of a transcendent bond with Mother Earth. After all, the act of aquilombamento practiced by African peoples who were victims of slavery is a refusal to live in a world marked by violence and the destruction of other humans and non-humans (nature).

Key words: Ancestry; Climate Crisis; Political philosophy; Territorialization.