Banzeiro Òkòtó by Eliane Brum

Author:Eliane Brum [Brum, Eliane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

4.0. the children of altamira

The young woman had black hair and looked to be of Indigenous and African ancestries. At that moment, she didn’t know whether her twenty-year-old brother’s limbs were all in place. She didn’t know whether the head of the person she loved was on the same body as its arms. Nor did she know whether the arms were near the legs. Or if that wasn’t the case at all. Whether he’d been burned to death, whether the body of the brother she’d grown up with was a carbonized mass amid bodies of other brothers, fathers, children. Human people.

She screamed. Her mother was there with her. The mother of the twenty-year-old young man. She had conceived him and carried him in her womb for nine months. And right then was searching for his head, trying to guess which was the flesh of her flesh within that mass of incinerated bodies. She was a mother, and she didn’t know whether her son’s final breath had been drawn during the excruciating pain of having his head severed or the excruciating pain of suffocating as his body burned. She didn’t want to, but she couldn’t keep from wondering if it took him long to die, and she prayed it had been quick. These were the mother’s questions. Not only hers but the same questions asked by all the mothers, first in front of the prison gates in Altamira and then in front of the gates of the Medical Legal Institute, the morgue.

It wasn’t just because her son was dead—an inversion in the order of life, a pain (almost) anyone can imagine even if they can’t quite comprehend it. It was even worse than this pain. It was the pain of a tortured death, of the certainty her son had died in terror. The mother screamed and screamed. Because there were no words to name what she was living through. The sister screamed and screamed. Another woman, her face also furrowed by suffering, embraced the body of the dead man’s sister, as if wanting to contain the scream that was lacerating the world. A man embraced the mother’s body, but he seemed to feel too weak to contain the scream issuing from her like a tsunami swallowing up one person alone and everything she knew and was known of her.

There are images documenting this moment. But the photos cannot be published. There’s that too. The images can’t have a face, they can’t have a name, they can’t have a voice. Nor can the story’s details be told, the details of the young man killed in the custody of the state at the penitentiary called the Regional Recovery Center of Altamira. If the two women are identified by criminal factions, their heads might also roll—literally—down the streets of the city’s marginalized peripheries. They are ghosts. Living ghosts.

I’ll never get this image out of my head. The massacre of Altamira, which took place on the morning of July 29, 2019, was the second largest

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