The pot and the interrupted flight

coloniality, and the production of sub-citizenship at the margins of the brazilian State

Abstract

This critical-narrative essay analyzes the autobiographical memory of hunger as an epistemological, political, and pedagogical category for problematizing the production of sub-citizenship at the margins of the Brazilian State. It begins with the episode of consuming a hawk in a context of extreme food vulnerability in the countryside of Espírito Santo, later resignified in the author’s trajectory as a Mathematics teacher in the Rondônian Amazon. The narrative “The Hawk and the Flesh of the World”, written by the author, is taken as the central corpus of the essay, and not as an intimate illustration or literary ornament. Methodologically, the text articulates autobiographical writing, critical essay, and theoretical analysis, in dialogue with Adorno, Santos, Castro, Quijano, Fanon, Mbembe, Bourdieu, Freire, Galeano, and Skovsmose. It argues that hunger does not constitute an individual deficit, a moral failure of the poor family, or a cultural trait of peripheral territories, but rather a historical expression of a social order that unequally administers access to a dignified life. The scene of the pot, the slaughtered hawk, the cheap bones, and the fruits from the backyard reveals the distance between formally proclaimed citizenship and materially experienced citizenship among subalternized bodies. It is further argued that Mathematics, when converted into a technocratic grammar of indicators, targets, averages, and budget cuts, can obscure structural violence; in contrast, Critical Mathematics Education makes it possible to problematize the social uses of numbers and to form subjects capable of reading, questioning, and reconstructing the rationalities that organize inequality. The essay concludes that writing from the pot means affirming the margin as a legitimate place of theoretical production, ethical elaboration of teaching, and political struggle for life.