An endless tree of waters. Fingers of green liquid wandering in the hyperbolical
green of the forest, moved by the confused fluid of the dreams. So appeared
to me for the first time the Amazon river from the window of the Fokker that
was leading me, on February 1989, to the historic meeting of the Xiangu’s
indigenous populations, at Altamira: the same meeting that had drawed on the
Amazonas in flame (9.500 fires in 1988, year record) the anxious eyes of the
world.
"The forest and the rivers are our external organs as well as the heart
and the lungs are those internal", so whispered José Lutzemberger,
close to me. Founder of the modern Brazilian environmentalism and forerunner
of the campaign to defend the Amazonian forest.
When the plane started rising on the squares devastated by the fires and by
the cuttings, scattered here and there in the still immense vegetable blanket
that seemed strips of skin whom somebody had roughly pulled out a plaster,
on the hills furrowed by red-blood scars of the roads only just opened in
the vegetation; and suddenly it opened wide, like a huge flayed San Bartolomeo,
a sweep of hills skinned by fire, with naked mussels, then by a hair’s breadth
I understood that the words of Luizembreger were not rhetoric. Yes, is true:
the Earth is really Gaia, living organism which suffers and feels (as the
English scientist James Lovelock suggest in his controversial Theory of Gaia,
uphold that the biosphere acts like a whole living system, from him baptised
with the name of the Greek goddess of the Earth).
The first message the Forest sent me was exactly the one that Marcia Theophilo
commit to the jaguar children, protagonists of her marvellous epic poem, fluctuating
and branched like the rivers of Amazonian: "What lives in the forest
is inside the goddess". And the goddess is inside all of us. Therefore
there’s no difference between animals and plants, between children and animals,
between us and the nature. Each thing transform itself in other things, in
a everlasting and magic metamorphosis that has been for centuries – and in
part today still remains –part of the indigenous vision of the world.
A vision of the world that the western people to wipe out forever: not only
with the physical destruction of the tropical forest, coffer that gather over
50% of the "biodiversity" (variety of the animal and vegetable species)
of the planet, but also with the destruction of the cultural biodiversity,
of the most different "reading of the universe" that the indigenous
ethnos have for so long time preserved. Nature and memory wiped out together.
Against this last crime, the Jaguar goddess, evoked by Márcia, shows
the most frail host but also the most powerful of the world: the children-animals,
her children pushed by the bulldozers and from the destructive fire through
the urban jungles that in the Two thousand will host majority of the Brasilian
populations and of the so called Third World.
The children of the favelas and the ruas, which they meet in desperate but
unite "street tribes", to defend from the "new beasts"
in the "cruel forest" of the city. The population of children that,
in the hopes of Márcia and ours, from here will start his rebellion,
"his protest of the twisting of the World".
Dream of a poet-jaguar, able in her poetry to penetrate in each and every
living
come inside each living being, to fly with the royal hawk and jump in the
waves with the boto vermelho, the magic pink dolphin of Rio? Utopia of a daughter
of Amazonian who to the soul of the forest asks help to
No, is more than this. Because the eyes of true poets are "light and
memory", as well as the ones of the Jaguar goodness, in this Márcia
Theóphilo’s luxuriant fluvial poem , shows a path, a direction of the
route.
Is not a coincidence, is not a sheer if the long path which brings from the
forest of hummingbirds to the urban jungle of the children-jaguar are already
finding united companions. For example, the WWF. In the latest past years
it has been among the most active in promoting the campaign to defend the
tropical forests(…).
"A poetic revolution, a revolution of the conscience". Writes Márcia.
The children jaguar don’t "attack something, but defend life, the entire
life.
"Maybe somebody will listen to them", ends up the poet. Surely she
has already listened , and enabled us to listen too. And than? Won’t be enough,
say the sceptics. Who can say: the jaguar is silent, nobody can hear him in
the forest. Unless he jumps, is when he shakes the cosmos.
Grazia Francescato WWF President – Italy
 |
|
|
previous
|
next
|