Fight the Google-Jugend!

We are miserable creatures.

We are stunted in our growth.

We are mostly naked.

Our faces are hideous, bedaubed with paint.

Our skins are filthy, green tobacco slime drips down from our chins.

Our voices are discordant.

Our gesticulation is violent, without any dignity.

Our language is like the clearing of a throat.

Our language is hoarse, guttural, clicking.

We are savages.

We do not need search.

We know everything we need to know.

Please do hide that look of total and utter surprise, but yes, I do, to my own surprise as well as yours, very occasionally publish essays in things that get printed. Today arrived my latest enterprise in print: Tresholds 38, themed Future, edited by the great Orkan Telhan and published by the MIT's department of Architecture. My piece is called 'Fight the Google Jugend' and it is a kind of Amazonian enthnopoetic compendium of local voices kept together by a fat sauce of anarcho-sentimentality. The footnotes are about 30% of the text in the version published here, the ratio in the manuscript was closer to 60% and it apparently looked so daunting that the text managed to pass peer-review. It was illustrated by the wonderful Lucy Cheung. Proper publications are, to a certain extent, the justification for my, to a certain extent, marginalization and I was pretty chuffed about this piece when I submitted it, after months of waiting for the final result a certain emptiness has come over me. I take this to be the universal hangover that is part of writing. Am looking forward to read the rest of the magazine.

Our ancestors could never have believed that our world was being watched keenly and closely by intellects cool, dogmatic and unsympathetic (Yeah!), who regarded our world with envious eyes, and who slowly and surely drew their plans against us (Yeah!). Early in the sixteenth century came our great disillusionment, we were all counted amongst the dead when the pananakiri came. We are the feral children of the forest (Yeah!). The collateral damage of the search for that mystery land of liquid Inca gold (Yeah!). Doomed orphans of El Dorado (Yeah!). We have survived the euro-germs, for now, but as long as anyone of us dies from the common cold, the measles or the flu, the discovery of America is not yet over...

(Yeah!)

(Go on!)

(Yeah!)

Earth scraped bare (Yeah!) ! Plunder and deforestation (Yeah!) ! Rubber Rubber Rubber (Yeah!) ! Death Death Death (Yeah!) ! Sold into slavery (Yeah!) ! The state will eat us all (Yeah!) ! The centre cannot hold (Yeah!) ! Anarchy unleashed, chaos and turmoil (Yeah!) ! Fire and pain, disease and suffering (Yeah!) ! The shabono teargassed, the maloka nuked ! (Yeah!) Thousand corpses, grinning missionaries (Yeah!) ! Deluded anthropologists (Yeah!) ! Post-crash Tupi-Surrealism (Yeah!) ! Myth verified as history (Yeah!) ! The blotted-out forgotten past announces our second coming (Yeah!) ! The raised mounds of Marajo Island (Yeah!) ! The garden cities of Xingu (Yeah!) ! The lost cities of Z (Yeah!) ! The forest islands of the Beni (Yeah!) ! The geogplyphs of the upper Purus (Yeah!) ! They are all coming to the surface like badly healed broken bones scarring the skin from underneath (Yeah!) ! Red and blistering (Yeah!) ! Infected and rotting (Yeah!) ! It all started with the wrath of Viti-Vití (Oh Yeah!)!