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Why choose to stay rather than leave a contaminated area? A place that poses a threat to life, but that can still nourish the relationship with the world.
This is how a group of former residents of the Bento Rodrigues district in Minas Gerais, Brazil describe the feeling of returning to the area where they once lived before the world’s biggest environmental crime in the history of mining. On November 5th, a dam containing mineral waste from an iron mine run by the company Samarco (joint-veture between the Brazilian Vale and British-Australian BHP) collapsed, flooding the region with toxic mud.1
A few months after the event a group of 30 former residents starts to return to the toxic ruins of their village. The group named “Loucos por Bento” (Crazy about Bento) is a testimony to the resilience and solidarity of the residents affected by the Dam Collapse. Despite facing obstacles in the form of legal restrictions on reinhabiting the area and remaining instabilities such as the constant risk of further dams breaking near the site, contamination in the water, soil and air, they have come together to find solace and strength in their shared pain. The emerging tradition of gathering in the ruins of this territory, to pray, protest and support each other is a powerful symbol of their determination to continue defending their right to coexist here.
Regardless of the pain and trauma accompanied by the loss of their homelands, the entangled relationship between this grassroots group and the soil-river-montains-plants guides them to this act of healing return. “We were called crazy by those who don’t want to come back here,” explained Marcos Muniz, one of the group’s leaders. The adjective “crazy”, which may seem derogatory, was adopted, in an attitude that mixes provocation and manifesto. “It’s an attempt to ease our suffering, protest and declare our love for our land”.2
We can try to connect with this radical way of resilience by listening to their voices or attentively noticing their gestures, which might embody a certain search for the (im)possible—looking in the ground in hope to find personal belongings or statues of their saints that were covered by the mud on the day of the Dam collapse. What voices can we hear through their voices?
The author Shoko Yoneyama, raises an important question when referring to the case of mercury contamination in Minamata Bay (Japan), that occurred in the 1950s: “How can we address the question of soul when it tends to be devoured by modernity?”3 This aspect of the incident cannot be resolved in institutional or political arenas. The cosmology of the beings who pertain/pertained to that place cherish an intangible connection between each other, and this is a heritage that cannot be forgotten.
For the grassroots group “Loucos por Bento” leaving the environment behind is not an option, they remain exposed4 as a way of fighting against the idea of an “end” after the contamination and destruction.They face one of the companies responsibles for the crime, Vale do Rio Doce, and claim their right to be on their own lands while fully aware of the importance of sharing their stories as a consequence of a devastating exploitation model. Immersed in probably contaminated air-water-soil, the group carry out their prayers, religious celebrations, funerals, gatherings and other repairs of this territory. Of all, what matters the most is simple, stay, along with the many other beings who kept their existence there, such as the soil itself and the plants, which grow continuously.
Besides all the changes and challenges, the group affirms that this is the place where they want to be and care for, where they are rooted—embracing the ruins, the uncertainties and the power of these beings that are apparently inseparable (earth-being, stone-being, human-being, tree-being, river-being5).
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Endnotes
- https://www.greenpeace.org.au/blog/dam-collapse-in-brazil-destroys-towns-and-turns-river-into-muddy-wasteland/
- https://piaui.folha.uol.com.br/loucos-por-bento-rodrigues/
- Shoko Yoneyama, Animism in Contemporary Japan: Voices for the Anthropocene from Post-Fukushima Japan (London: Routledge, 2018), 79.
- In his remarkable essay reflecting on the nuclear catastrophe from Hiroshima to Fukushima, the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy makes an appeal to remain exposed, that is, to endure our encounter with catastrophic loss by allowing ourselves to sense it. If we move too quickly, even catastrophes, like everything else under capitalism, becomes little more than general equivalents of exchange. “We are being exposed to a catastrophe of meaning,” Nancy asserts, adding, “Let us remain exposed, and let us think about what is happening [ce qui nous arrive] to us: Let us think that it is we who are arriving, or are leaving.” Jean-Luc Nancy, After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 8.
- This excerpt was inspired by Ailton Krenak’s description of how the stone and the water implicates us “in such a marvelous way that it allows us to conjugate the we: we-river, we-mountain, we-land”. Ailton Krenak, Futuro Ancestral (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2022), 12.
Silvia Noronha
Anais-karenin