Children and Childhoods: clandestine crossings

ABSTRACT

This text is an invitation to the production of thinking and knowledge beyond the institutional forms by which children are framed. Find in Graciliano Ramos, Machado de Assis and Clarice Lispector, visions of children in mundane Brazilian childhoods, who show how they live their experiences in arid contexts, segregated in their rights. But fiercely, these children are advancing adult frontiers to imprint traces of courage, subversion and transgression in their future memories of a culture that not only inhibits their freedoms, but also imprints, from an early age, their “due” place in the world. of big people.

Keywords
Childhood; Literature; Clandestinity

RESUMO

Este texto é um convite para a produção de pensares e saberes para além das formas institucionais pelas quais as crianças são emolduradas. Encontrar em Graciliano Ramos, Machado de Assis e Clarice Lispector visões de crianças em infâncias brasileiras, mundanas, que mostram como vivem suas experiências em contextos áridos, segregados em seus direitos. Mas, de forma aguerrida, essas crianças vão avançando as fronteiras adultas para imprimir nas memórias futuras rastros de coragem, de subversão e transgressão de uma cultura que não somente inibe suas liberdades, como imprime, desde cedo, o seu “devido” lugar no mundo das pessoas grandes.

Palavras-chave
Infância; Literatura; Clandestinidade

Children in Literary Weavings

So many forgotten geographies in schools and curricula, in society's understandings. Someone else's body, the ground, other words are our first geographies and insist on existing in the eternal contradiction of living (Lopes, 2024).

This text is a fragment of the doctoral thesis, defended by the author in the middle of the pandemic, in the year 2021. The research and its writing were produced in conditions of social isolation, with studies and memories of experiences as a basic education teacher in the public education network, as a researcher in a very powerful research group and, also, inspired by the ideas produced in another research space in education, which is the Pedagogy course, in a teacher training college in the Brazilian public higher education network¹.

The German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was happy to imprint in the word “monad” the tension between the universal and the particular in substances. According to Leibniz, simple substances or monads have a “detail of what changes, which produces, so to speak, specification and variety” (Leibniz, 1974 apud Petrucci Rosa et al., 2011, p. 204). Both W. Benjamin and M. Bakhtin took the monad as a bundle of meaning, a spark that carries becomings; units of culture that are not constituted in parts of a whole, but parts-whole, syntheses of meaning. This reading brings us closer to children as sparks of human senses and not miniatures of adults (Benjamin, 1987; Bakhtin 2014, 2015). So, children are like monads reflecting everything in themselves, reflected in everything, fertilizing words, ideas, senses. We understand this powerful meaning in Bakhtin and Benjamin, as both allowed us to go through childhood with the idea of the monad. Thinking of children not as a prospect of the future, but as people full of future, who refract senses of the future in all their actions, hence monads: small fragments of memories of the future. Together they can tell their story, although they also carry traces alone that allow us to tell them.

The comparison was the methodological path that allowed us to think about childhoods and children in this text. We understand from Bakhtin (2014) that comparing implies a chronotopic look, that is, thinking about the author/character/story/work and its chronotopic forms of time and space that involve the heroes and heroines, the encounters, the events and the motivations in different texts. Comparison, from this perspective, enables an experience with language in the form of ex-position, which allows us to move with our senses between the different fields of human life and compare them with their texts, recognizing, as Bakhtin provided us, that science has provoked us much more when compared with art and life.

We find in literary art fragments of childhood and children that we embrace. These are narratives that also have a sense of monads if thought of in temporality. These are childhoods and children narrated in a time that we perpetuate every time we read them. As interlocutors, we perpetuate their voices and give them the power of monads. These children and childhoods, in their time, carry traces of the future, therefore they are full of meanings like the Benjaminian and Bakhtinian monads. We made a comparison with Graciliano Ramos, in “Vidas Secas”; Machado de Assis, in “Contos de Escola” and Clarice Lispector, in “Felicidade Clandestina”. In the ways in which childhood and children are translated by these authors, we found issues that helped us think about the ideas of clandestinity and penetration related to children, which we bring to the debate proposed here.

In Vidas Secas (2024), Graciliano Ramos and Fabiano, his character, did not have the same perception about children, what they would be like, how they would personify the family saga. However, Graciliano took the lead and decided on the presence of the children, even though Fabiano did not allow them to speak.

Now he wanted to understand with Sinhá Vitória about the education of little ones. She certainly wasn't guilty. Leave it to the house arrangements, watering the carnations and pots of wormwood, going down to the water fountain with the pot empty and returning with the pot full, leaving the children loose in the mud, muddy like pigs. And they were questioning, unbearable. Fabiano got along well with ignorance. Did he have the right to know? He had? He didn't have it.

- It's there.

If he learned anything, he would need to learn more, and he would never be satisfied

(Ramos, 2024, p. 23).

Their toughness of people did not give the author this permission, they would just be boys, differentiated by whether they were older or younger than each other. But the boys were there and were able to fertilize the hard and dry life of Fabiano and Sinhá Vitória translated by Graciliano Ramos. About the youngest boy, Graciliano only told us that he was young enough to fit “straddling in the hips” of Sinhá Vitória, but his time as a younger boy, without a name, without a word, cluttered, almost invisible, became giant, for us, without dialogue. The youngest boy has a chapter of his own, and in this place he make himself present.

Climbing on the bank, his heart pounding, the youngest boy waited for the goat to reach the water fountain. That was certainly risky, but it seemed to him that he had grown up there and could become Fabiano. He sat down undecided. The goat was going to jump and knock him down. He got up, walked away, almost free from that temptation, and saw a flock of parakeets flying over the catingueiras trees. He wanted to possess one of them, tie it with a rope, give it food. They all disappeared, screeching, and the little one was sad, looking at the sky full of white clouds. Some were little sheep, but they fell apart and became different animals. Two large ones came together – and one had the figure of the sorrel mare, the other represented Fabiano. He lowered his dazzled eyes, rubbed them, approached the bank again, made out the confused mass of the herd, heard the blows of the horns. If the goat had already drunk, he would experience disappointment. He examined the slender legs, the dirty and torn little shirt. He had seen living beings in the sky, he considered himself protected, he was convinced that mysterious forces were going to support him. He would float in the air, like a parakeet. He started screaming, imitating the goats, calling his brother and the dog. When he didn't get any results, he became indignant. He was going to show them both a feat, they would return home amazed

(Ramos, 2024, p. 50).

The boy wanted to be Fabiano. A rough Fabiano for Graciliano, but powerful for the boy: grown up, handsome, strong, people, with a name, with a sharp knife at his waist, with a straw cigarette in his mouth, with rawhide shoes and jingling spurs; with stars in their eyes and little sheeps cloud on his head; eager as the sorrel mare and light as the parakeets that the boy dreamed of having. An unbearable form of penetration for Fabiano. The youngest boy showed Graciliano that he was not satisfied, and in his silence celebrated the renewal of the author's senses. Graciliano tried to say what society thought of children in the 1930s; After all, a brat is a brat, that which is not yet a person, has no willness, has no desires. But the little one insisted and with a lot of effort convinced to let him be present. Even though he was mute in words, the younger boy deviated from the limits of his age as a younger boy and set himself up as an interpreter of adult culture, penetrating it. And penetrating, he translated it: big men are strong, they ride sorrel mares, they wear leather boots, they lie on beds of poles to stretch their bones, they jingle spurs like stars, they wear cowboy hats, they provide for their families with honor; they are beautiful, brave, imposing! The boy looked at himself through his father's eyes. The younger boy worried Graciliano. Fabiano became a big, strong, imposing, provider person, through the younger boy's eyes. Even though only the author spoke (not that we are saying that this work is monological, on the contrary), the youngest boy showed that he had a lot of say in his father's silence, that life was not crude, that was simply the life. In his way of narrating the youngest boy, Graciliano narrated the child with otherness, revealing a childhood whose experiences take place in and through the children's penetration into the world of grown-up people. Children with a lot of history and insight into a harsh life plagued by drought. It showed that children have expectations for the future, which were the traces of the future that Fabiano left in the younger boy's childhood experiences. That parakeets were free, and the boy knew what freedom was! That we should not fear the clouds in the sky because they are Fabiano floating his grandeur.

Lopes also compared Graciliano Ramos when investigating migrant childhood in the period between 1995 and 2000. Lopes highlighted the absence of this migrant childhood in the literature on the subject, producing an alteritarian narrative with these children, in the form of responsive understanding in his writing. A childhood capture that reveals the children present in migratory journeys between and with adults, producing very peculiar childhood experiences. The author tells us that the children he found in his research

[...] they occupied a determined social location in the community, there were culturally elaborated traits and bundles that materialized childhood as a valid instance, constructing a childish subjectivity that could be accepted and lived in the collective subjectivity of the group, including as a psychological category. The ‘Being child’ was immersed in the symbolic network created by the group

(Lopes, 2003, s/p).

In these contexts, Lopes and Graciliano Ramos, with boundaries of temporality, show us that children experience the same adverse conditions that the adults who accompany them also experience, and this beyond time, as we see children present in popular manifestations for housing, for better wages, due to the reduction in public transport fare; at the presidential candidate’s rally; sharing the only egg in the meal; helping adults think about how to get through the month and pay the bills; cooking with firewood because there is no way to buy cooking gas; and also hiding from stray bullets so that they are not found; watching making out on soap operas; dancing at street dances; circulating among fake news on social networks, ultimately present in universes that, in adult logic, were not created for them, and in this same logic, these experiences are not legitimized as childhood experiences. Therefore, we say: children become gatecrashers in adult scenarios and in this way, as gatecrashers, they produce a penetrating childhood, which may even be captured in images, but are not included in numerical data, in testimonies and in other forms of capture represented in literature, as Lopes put it to us in his studies.

Linhares, like Lopes, was also fertilized by the penetration of children sharing with adults the adversities of the events of these dry, refused and denied lives, which a large part of Brazilian families experience.

And children deserve to be highlighted among these crowds of invisible and resistant people. If they represent another asphyxiated, rejected, discriminated in their exercise of autonomy, there is no denying that although considered heirs of a past, with which adult generations try to commit them, they converge with becomings and adapt themselves, like no other age, to a time to come that belongs to them

(Linhares; Queluz; Linhares, 2008, p. 14).

But, as pupils, students, apprentices, children are understood and translated into the legal system for Brazilian² education as historical subjects with rights, but that does not presuppose participating in the fronts of struggle, migratory journeys in search of better living conditions, sharing eggs at meals, taking care of the house, thinking about how to spend the month and paying the bills, taking care of younger brothers and sisters, among other experiences that seem invisible in literature, but are pulsating in children's lives. How artisans touch up there or here, kind of customizing the life prepared for them, thus creating other finishes or as Larrosa teaches us (2000, p. 5),

[...] childhood is the other: what, always beyond, defies any attempt of capture, disturbs the security of our knowledge, questions the power of our practices and opens a void in which the well-constructed building is overwhelmed by our reception institutions.

Machado de Assis already told us, back in 1840, about the dissonances between school children and children's schools. We can feel in his words the force that a colonial education in an imperialist country exerted on the boy Pilar, the character himself³.

It's hard for me to say that I was one of the most advanced in school; but I was. I'm also not saying that I was one of the most intelligent, because of a scrupulousness that was easy to understand and had an excellent effect on my style, but I have no other conviction. Note that I was neither pale nor musty: I had good color and iron muscles. In writing lessons, for example, I always finished before everyone else, but I left myself to cut out noses on paper or a board, an occupation without nobility or spirituality, but in any case naive (Assis, 2008, p. 36).

The boy Pilar resented how little the school knew about him and his virtues; He also felt the size of the abyss that separated people by color and socioeconomic conditions. He knew that his place was among the stray boys, because they knew very well how to narrate the adventures on the hill and in the field, the parrots flying their lightness in the air, because they were in their place, on the other side of the school windows.

[...] Frankly, I regretted having come. Now that I was trapped, I was burning to walk outside, and I looked back over the field and the hill, thinking about the other stray boys, Chico Telha, Américo, Carlos das Escadinhas, the fine flower of the neighborhood and the human race. To add to my despair, I saw through the school's windows, in the clear blue sky, above the Livramento hill, a tall and wide flying kite, attached to an immense rope, which soared in the air, a superb thing. And I was at school, sitting, legs together, with a reading book and grammar on my knees. [...]

(Assis, 2008, p. 37).

The boy Pilar needed to give in to the obligations of reason, something the stray boys didn't need to worry about. Going to school seemed like an effort to reward his father who dreamed of a great commercial position for the boy. That's why he should learn to read, write and count, become a clerk, as this was the principle of the great capitalists: start behind a counter (Assis, 2008, p. 36). And this dream, which was not his, forced the boy Pilar to deviate from childhood and go to school, the path of reason, because he knew that there was nothing of reason in childhood; that childhood and vagrancy had the same meaning for the city's gentlemen. But, contrary to reason, it was at school, with Raimundo and Curvelo, who were not stray boys, that the boy Pilar learned about corruption and delation, a learning that the pain in his hands from the twelve slaps he had taken from Professor Policarpo would never allow him to forget.

Vagrancy sounded powerfully in the narratives of the boy Pilar. It seems to be the place where the meanings of life emerge with force, allowing him to feel free even if he is trapped behind the school windows; that relieves the pain of paddles; that supports the excess of seriousness that exists in that space. Vacancy sounded to us like a sense of childhood, of doing hidden things, like going up to the hill or going down to Campo de Santana instead of going to school, of flying colorful kites and of understanding what corruption is and what delation is, because only vagrancy allowed him to have this understanding about what happened that morning at school.

In our wanderings as childhood researchers, we have talked a lot about children's trajectories in school spaces. We have also been thinking about the political and social contextures that weaves these trajectories, sometimes as a power, sometimes engendering educational practices with children with conservative and colonizing ideas, based on the image of the child as a developing person, whose life needs to be surrounded by care, but care in the sense of polishing, of shaping.

The result of not taking the child into account as a dialogical participant in statements about themselves is that historically their actions, sayings, ways of being and being in the world are taken as treats and curiosities, and not as the authentic word of a unique and singular human being, who speaks in culture. Either they are not taken as true or they are perceived as relative points in a continuous line of development that will lead to a determined adult model, as a point of arrival, incomplete in a colonized way, that is, they will be completed in the future

(Mello, 2017, p. 419).

Strange boys, strange girls and strange childhoods; a kind of strangeness that cannot be narrated because we lack translation, or as Larrosa told us, “those strange beings about whom nothing is known, those wild beings that do not understand our language” (2000, p. 5). A clandestine strangeness translated into the happiness of the girl Clarice and the envy of her red-haired “friend”:

[...] Until the great day came for her to start carrying out chinese torture on me. As if casually, she informed me that she owned “As Reinações de Narizinho”, by Monteiro Lobato.

It was a thick book, my God, it was a book to live with, eat and sleep in. And completely beyond my means. She told me to stop by her house the next day and she would lend it to me. [...]

(Lispector, 2020, p. 8).

The girl Clarice, written by Clarice Lispector (2020), knew how to be bold in revealing her envy, her anger, her vanities, her small revenges, all in clandestinity, a word with meanings that seemed to us to dialogue perfectly with the idea of childhoods that we bring in this text. We see more power in the word clandestinity than invisibility, because children are seen, but they are not translated into the concreteness of their experiences, so they become clandestine. But they are there, in the adult world, penetrating everything, avid interpreters and creators! The clandestinity gives childhood a power of militancy. In it, the children are not officially in the scene, but they are there imprinting meanings and moving us. We owe this inspiration to the girl Clarice, who showed that revenge is a dish best served cold. That it was worth walking the same path every day to taste the bitter gall that ran down the “thick body” of the red-haired girl, owner of “Reinações de Narizinho”; that it was worth letting the dark circles dig into her eyes, amazed by the daily denial: because the book was with me yesterday afternoon, but you only came in the morning, so I lent it to another girl (Lispector, 2020, p. 9). In that small moment in which her tormentor's mother intervened and unmasked her, saying that the book had never left the shelf and, to put an end to that farce, revealed that her daughter had never even read the book, the daily torture had its deserved and victorious end. The mother, then, not only unmasked her daughter's deception but also granted Clarice the right to enjoy Monteiro Lobato for as long as she wanted (Idem).

Wild but penetrating beings. Children, as we have already said, are unique gatecrashers, clandestine, sluts. That kind of party crasher that throws a party in adult culture, the party of renewal, as Bakhtin (2015) thought. As illegal gatecrashers, children are not considered in the list of guests. We say that mothers are born with children, fathers too, as well as grandmothers, aunts, etc.; we call the school children's; public policies on children's policies, but in fact, officially, it is the adults who control the events, as they are thought, elaborated, lived and controlled by adults, and therefore there is no other way for children to participate other than as they penetrate, in clandestinity. Therefore, as gatecrashers, children and childhood are penetrating. They arrive without being invited and quickly find a way to enjoy the party like children, because they don't dance to the music, they don't dress appropriately, and in their restlessness they create a small party inserted into the big party, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin (2011).

Producing Clandestine Looks and Thoughts

The penetrating childhood is a festival of renewal in adult culture, Bakhtinian speaking. Thinking etymologically about the word renewal, it is possible to cross over in some ideas the meaning of the word in its origin, but in dialogue with the penetrating and clandestine childhood, the celebration of childhood renewal can translate into the power to make something inaugural, in its initial state, thinking of childhood as the space-time of the inauguration of things; as an inaugural and timeless event that involves us all. Just like a festival of renewal, childhood penetrates adult culture and restlessly questions it, mixing meanings, revolving them with the past, those forgotten ones that, in this displacement, come to the surface, are remembered, but will be revived “in a renewed form (in a new context)”. This is what Bakhtin (2015, p. 410) presents us with at the festival of renewal.

Agamben (2017, p. 15) was more emphatic when stating that

We must stop pretending that we know what a child is. Culture, in other words, education, is based on this fiction. All we know about the child is that the child makes everything we think we know about man useless. Before his smile, all knowledge is ridiculed. All morals become obsolete. All rights are null and void. This means that, only when we leave knowledge, law and morals behind, will we be able to begin to decipher the enigma of the child's face.

To say that “education is based on this fiction”, that we do not know “what a child is”, is an invitation to displacement; an invitation to take penetrative and clandestine childhood as one that allows children to approach their concreteness. It is a possibility of exotopy with childhood and children. Agamben went further by stating that children are “the paradigm of the human”, and not the adults. That there is no destiny, no “biological vocation” that can translate children and place us in responsive understanding before them. In fact, we can think of a provocation and take these beliefs as destiny, biological vocation, (in)capacity, (in)competence, maturity or immaturity, or many others that the “history of pedagogical ideas” (paraphrasing Moacir Gadotti, 2002) used to say about children, or as Agamben suggests to us, to say that they are fictions or, also, with Bakhtin to say that they are alibis, that they are those arguments or excuses that we use every time we try to avoid the responsible act, because with these fictions and alibis adults have gone through the ages justifying their inability to establish more alteritarian relationships with children.

The child is the paradigm of the human. Thus, Agamben celebrates renewal in our senses. He does not involve us in creating truths about children, since, in his view, our truths are fictions. It involves us inverting the logic that makes us produce truths; that place children as people in development, becoming adults. Childhood, in this inversion, stops being the place of the past to be the “previous future of man”, that is, from a human project to a human regress:

The child is the incessant revocation of the non-human before the human and the human before the non-human. That is why ‘no longer’ and ‘not yet’ define human time, the history. If childhood is the paradigm of the human, then regression is the most characteristic movement of man, which does not lead to the past or the future, but to a past in the future, a previous future

(Agamben, 2017, p. 15).

We then propose a game of meanings to think about this inversion that Agamben provoked in us. Thinking about the word “caixa”, for example, we found in an online Portuguese language dictionary a variety of meanings that were produced for this sign⁴. Bakhtin (2015, p. 302) says that when we speak we always take into account “the perceptible background of the perception” of our speech by the other, or better: their knowledge on the subject, on events, their relevance to the “cultural field of communication”, “conceptions, convictions and prejudices; antipathies and sympathies”, in short, there are a series of questions that will imply an active and responsive understanding on the part of the other (others) with whom we enunciate. This “perceptible background” that Bakhtin refers to allows us to consider that if we just say the word we can cause confusion in the other person with whom we communicate, but in an event in which we are both intertwined in some way, in relation to the “perceptible background of perception” of our speech, the probability of there being confusion between us is lower.

We know that the Portuguese language, and even more so if we take into account its Brazilianness, has a variety of meanings for the same sign. There is a social and historical dynamic that involves the production of meanings, which is not someone's invention or the result of abstractions with language, which is why we perpetuate ourselves as humans, we perpetuate our cultures; language places us in eventicity in the world and with the world because “living means participating in a dialogue” (Bakhtin, 2015, p. 337-357). Therefore, all the possibilities of meaning of the word “caixa” are the result of this active and dialogical participation of humans among themselves, in and with the world; however, even though they are produced in social dynamics, in dialogical relationships, in a historical process, the meanings we find in dictionaries are the stable part of the word as a sign of a given language:

Therefore, it can be said that any word exists for the speaker in three aspects: the word of the neutral language and not belonging to anyone (like the one we find in dictionaries) as someone else's word, full of echoes of other utterances; and, finally, like my word, because once I operate with it in a determined situation, with a determined discursive intention, it is already permeated with my expression (Bakhtin, 2015, p. 294)⁵.

Continuing the game, we can think of the box identified in figure 1, below, as the “neutral word” that belongs to no one, but how could we think of figure 2⁶?

Figure 1
The box⁷

Figure 2
Which box?

We found this image (Fig. 2) as the cover photograph of a Facebook page titled #PENSEFORADACAIXA⁸ on 06/23/2020, when the page was accessed for doctoral research to which this article is linked. Let's not stick to the page or its content, but try to think with the image and the phrase that suggest “thinking outside the box” or reversing the logic, as Agamben calls us. We consider that children have a much greater degree of freedom to invert logic or even subvert it than most adults (because logic is not childish). They say this about artists, poets, illusionists, in short, about a variety of people who learned to look at life in a deviant, inside-out, customized way, as many childhood thinkers refer, in their studies, to the look of children, such as Mello (2017), Larrosa (2000), Lopes (2003), Linhares (2007), Benjamin (2011, 2009), Agamben (2017) and others with whom we discussed in our research. We also consider the idea that adults have greater difficulty in going beyond the limits of the sign, and move more in the sign of the word, which concerns its already stabilized meaning, the one we find in dictionaries (as suggested in figure 2). However, we feel somewhat uneasy about the meanings interpreted for the word box attributed to the children in figure 2. We say “interpreted meanings” because we are referring to the transgression of meanings that humans in events are capable of producing, with and through the experiences they have in culture, that is, our horizons allow us to go beyond what is stabilized in dictionaries to think about the word in a broader way.

Thus, in figure 2, according to the authorship of the image, which we will attribute here to the page #PENSEFORADACAIXA, the universe of children's experiences is associated with the representations of children incorporated into the adult social imagination, the legal system for the education of Brazilian children, in which children's experiences are similar to those pertinent to the routines of children from the urban middle class (and other more favored classes), who live in apartments, travel by car, go to the cinema, the theater, have access to literature books, have adults who tell them stories, have toys, among other issues that meet what we said previously about truths/fictions. Therefore, to enable the cardboard box to also become a closet, crib, bed, wall of the house, work tool, “family breadwinner” it is necessary to consider the wanderings that a large part of Brazilian children are involved in, accompanying their parents and guardians in their routines. We are not, in this way, excluding games, toys, stories, riding in the car, going to the cinema, theater, going to libraries as pertinent to the universe of children's experiences, but we consider that the “representation” in the translations of children as beings who “think outside the box”, expressed in figure 2, disregarded other experiences that are no less concrete, no less legitimate, no less real among children, such as collecting cardboard on the streets, storing clothes, household utensils and foodstuffs in cardboard boxes, drinking cardboard as currency, something that for many children's families is worth money, because it buys food and pays the house bills, in short, if we don't do this we compromise the possibility of establishing alteritarian relationships with all children in our translations/interpretations.

The Scavenger

Manuel de Barros

A man was picking up nails from the floor. I always found them lying down, or on your side, or on your knees on the floor.

Never cutting edge.

That way they won’t drill anymore – the man thought.

They no longer perform the function of nailing.

They are useless heritage of humanity.

They gained the privilege of abandonment. The man spent the entire day collecting rusty nails.

I think this task gave him some status.

State of people who adorn themselves in rags.

Collecting useless things guarantees the sovereignty of the Being. Guarantees the sovereignty of Being more than Having

(Barros, 2024, p. 49).

This turn we took in writing made it possible to find Manuel de Barros and compare him with Mello (2017), in the text he wrote about the knowledge of children who collect garbage.

It's difficult to describe the beauty in penury. In a field almost ten meters high, raised by the accumulation of garbage leaked daily, covered with a few centimeters of earth, human beings discover the fire. By digging a few centimeters of this earth, placing a pipe and lighting its upper end, you have a lamp to illuminate the garbage collection, in the starry night of the dump on the banks of Serra do Matão.

From afar, it looks like an indigenous scene: torches turned bluish by the methane gas produced by the landfill, which burns continuously, illuminate work that we are unaware of. Eyes refined by selective practice discover the secret in the excesses of our culture, a continuous mode of objects with a counted time. Changeable values that, believing that they are the end, we ‘throw away’. Outside is now redefined in others inside: the value is re-signified by other subjects

(Mello, 2017, p. 35)⁹.

This text reminded us of the images we brought to dialogue with Agamben and Bakhtin: the neutral word or signality, the project meaning and the return meaning, that is: the passive understanding of truths/fictions and the responding understanding (the previous future or the inversion of logic). After all, more than deposits of remains or excess, as Mello thought, landfills are true “archaeological sites” that bear witness to a current history, of many people, of many children. In these spaces, each object, each remnant brings the trace of a world that these children only know exists, but are not part of it, do not belong to it, they build images through the traces they find in the excesses they collect daily from the landfill. “Excesses of culture”, as Mello well defined, what we discard. Objects discarded by us that these people “extend their validity”, imprint other values and meanings (Mello, 2017, p. 50).

These children were found by Mello in two universes: the dump, their homes, their childhood places, and at school, whose values of human dignity, citizenship rights and civility failed to translate life in the dump as a context of culture, as the author narrated in her text. We do not want and should not put the school and its knowledge into question here, just be in comparison with Mello, Bakhtin, Benjamin and Agamben. Mello also helps us in this dialogue when he states in his exploratory studies that “perhaps our training [...], which makes us prefer that all this did not exist: poverty, hunger, people turning over and reusing what we throw ‘away’, children eating what our supermarkets consider inappropriate, from the perspective of health standards” (Mello, 2017, p. 49), does not allow us to look at the lives of these children and take them as cultural contexts in educational practices at school. This frontal look that the school has on children's lives is full of fiction and that was Agamben's meaning (fiction) when proposing that we should abandon these truths, since they contaminate our look, they put us in a position of power over children, a power that does not educate, that does not liberate.

Garbage, for schools, is a dangerous object, which contaminates, and must be avoided, as it causes harm to health, therefore, trash for schools is the negative part of life. However, the school also teaches children how to reuse waste. During Mello's wanderings in that place, he captured many works at school that brought projects and ideas to reuse and recycle waste, but none of these works sought to investigate what relationships the children at the landfill had with those dangerous materials that contaminate and, for that reason, should be avoided. Mello raised some categories that allowed him to capture the knowledge that those children and their families had and that was not considered by the school: about barter as a form of economy; the work of collectors; the selection of waste to organize what would be used by the community and what would be converted into income, from sale to third parties outside the community, but the great power, according to the author, was in the stories of urban life that populated the imagination of the people of that place. The extent to which these stories preserve traces of this life, this dynamic, and even more so of power relations and consumer relations, this was knowledge that those children had and showed with great creativity the value that those objects gained for them; They further showed that recognizing this value, at school, meant recognizing their cultural contexts, the childhood cultures of those children (Mello, 2017, p. 40-43).

The school and the lives of its people carry an unspeakable universe of plots that become invisible to the eyes of school manuals and their convictions (or fictions, as Agamben teased us). We call “manuals” the texts of the legal system for education in Brazil, pedagogical projects, school regulations, teachers' plans, theories, educational trends, among many other texts that, in one way or another, forge educational practices and circumscribe their subjects, creating a peculiar texture through which the school culture is harmonized, preventing the translation of everything that disrupts this texture.

These children (the youngest boy, the boy Pilar, the girl Clarice, the children from the landfill), show that childhood cannot be an adult concept, because in this way we miss children's most powerful translations and interpretations. As interpreters of adult culture, children clandestinely penetrate the underside of this contexture and it is through the underside of it that they produce their cultures. The youngest boy from Graciliano, the boy Pilar, the girl Clarice and the children from the landfill show their truths with force. Experiences with contexts produced on the opposite side of social life, garbage, drought and poverty, a part of us that we deny, that we reject for our convictions and beliefs, but we find them in literary art and in life as fertile content for our thoughts, as was possible to see in the chronicles of Mello and Agamben, as in the novel by Graciliano and in the stories of Machado de Assis and Clarice Lispector, which produced spoken portraits of childhood fertilizing our ideas and helping to divert from the truths, their traps and illusions. A comparison!

Stitching the Conversation

Walter Benjamin presents us with the allegory of the construction site, with which he dialogues with childhood, and we bring it here as an alteritarian form of responsive understanding towards children, highlighting how this passage in his work can also be in comparison with the passage of the children from the landfill and Manoel de Barros's poem, The Collector:

Pedantically pondering the manufacture of objects – educational material, toys or books – that would be appropriate for the child is foolish. Since the Enlightenment, this has been one of the most musty speculations of pedagogues. Their obsession with psychology prevents them from recognizing that the Earth is full of the most incomparable objects of children's attention and exercise. And the most appropriate. In other words, children are especially inclined to look for any and all work places where activity on things visibly takes place. They feel irresistibly attracted to the waste that appears in construction, gardening or domestic work or carpentry. In waste products they recognize the face that the world of things returns exactly to them, and to them only. In them, they less imitate the works of adults than they place materials of a very different kind, through what they make toys with, in a new, abrupt relationship with each other. With this, children form their world of things for themselves, a small one in a large one, themselves. It would be necessary to take into account the norms of this small world of things, if one wants to create deliberately for children and does not prefer to let their own activity, with everything that is required and instrument, find on its own the path that leads to them

(Benjamin, 2011, p. 16).

Vast patch of leftovers, discards, excesses, like a landfill. Mello was able to tell how the children translated the face that the world of discarded things in the landfill showed to them. Graciliano knew how to tell the face of the world of dry things and raised the youngest boy with a boy's otherness. Machado de Assis and Clarice Lispector knew how to penetrate the face of things at school, the childish pranks that escape us, that take place in vagrancy and in clandestinity. Ultimately, our residual world frames children's cultures. Only children know how to produce this framework, but with Benjamin we were provoked to responsively understand “the norms of this small world of things” with which, in a peculiar way, children elaborate their cultures and demarcate the childhood territories they inhabit.

Ah, this childhood! Always childhood that we don't know whether to say in the singular or in the plural! This childhood that translates into the same and not different at the same time and, therefore, is pervasive, is clandestine. This childhood that is not content with being childhood, and makes us hesitate, making us stop and look sideways and backwards. Sideways, in our thinking wanderings and backwards in the rearview mirror of our lives, to see memory better; to consider the crossed times in a childhood that is already old in thoughts, almost forgotten, but still alive to let itself be affected by the celebration of renewal.

Notes

• 1
  Times and spaces full of people, most of them women, and thoughts produced collectively. Therefore, and considering that ideas and meanings are collective productions, this article will be written in the first-person plural.
• 2
  We highlight here the LDB National Education Guidelines and Bases Law nº 9394/96 (Brazil, 1996) and the BNCC National Common Curricular Base of 2018 (Brazil, 2018).
• 3
  In Conto de Escola, Machado de Assis writes himself, in the first person and through the character Pilar. The boy Pilar and two other classmates, Raimundo and Curvelo, get involved in a situation, resulting in severe punishment applied by Professor Policarpo to Raimundo, his son, and the boy Pilar. Raimundo asks Pilar for an explanation of syntax in exchange for a coin. The two are caught by Curvelo, who reports them to the teacher. With this short story, Machado de Assis makes a humorous critique of the 19th century educational system, exposing its ills.
• 4
  Available at: https://www.dicio.com.br/caixa/. Accessed on: 09 Sept. 2024.
• 5
  We put our comment in parentheses.
• 6
  Available at: https://www.facebook.com/penseforadacaixa.com.br/. Accessed on: 23 June. 2020 for use in the doctoral thesis.
• 7
  Image taken from the Mercado Livre website, licensed for commercial and other uses. Available at https://produto.mercadolivre.com.br/MLB . Accessed on: 14 Sept. 2024.
• 8
  The page faleforadacaixa.com.br is no longer available on Facebook, the social network of the American company Meta. In an internet search, we found, in the Google search engine, the information that this image has been circulating on the internet for at least 10 years, without reference to its authorship. We indicate the address http://emeiamarelinha.blogspot.com/2021/04/nivel-2b_22.html where the aforementioned image can be accessed at this time (16/09/2024).
• 9
  Emphasis added by the authors.

Availability of research data

the dataset supporting the results of this study is published within the article itself.

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• Editor in charge:
  Carla Karnoppi Vasques

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  29 June 2026
• Date of issue
  2026

History

• Received
  09 Oct 2024
• Accepted
  26 Dec 2025