Student shot dead at Professora Helena Kolody State School in Cambé (PR)

Epigraph: the three-line poem “Areia” (“Sand”), by Helena Kolody, on a sand statue of which nothing remains after the high tide.

Last week, I made a small painting of Our Lady using watercolor pencils. I used three colors that went together, sky blue, water green, and a skin tone like mine, a caboclo (a Brazilian of mixed Indigenous and European descent). Looking closely, I think she is pregnant, and that surprised us both. I used that same canvas, the same stiff paper of excellent quality, to write the instructions for the course I gave on internet reputation. That painting and those class notes were my greatest contributions to communication in recent years. That is, we are dealing with a plastic surprise, the pregnancy of a virgin lady, and with a surprise of wisdom, that the worst among colleagues should speak of reputation.

We are all tired of the news, ladies and ladies. The numbers are there for anyone who wants to see. Personally, I have joined those who avoid knowing what someone somewhere wants us to know. All of us of great editorial and artistic talent now prefer that petty thefts and the cruelest abandonments be handled within each one’s family, because we have nothing to do with it. We were, in good times, deluded before a seductive literature of intelligence and future. But our proverbs very quickly turned into chasing after the wind. We had no time to savor the harem of our hotties, or to eat and drink from our labor. We set off violently to chase after the wind.

We failed gradually and miserably. We were not avenged on our perpetrators, we honored people who wish to kill us, we were victims of sighed-for negotiations. They shove our kindnesses and mercies up their asses. To our enemies we are nothing but those who screw them, Olavão guarantees.

We are not interested in the number of dead on the highway, not anymore. They were never interested in our truths about traffic violence. We want fiscal matters and lawmakers’ thefts to stay as they are, putrid wounds for those who operate them. Power and money melted such lovely people, people we would invite to baptize our children. We could have forgiven everything, we could have overcome this difficult moment together, but now they have killed Helena Kolody.

• Former student storms school and shoots student dead in Cambé, Paraná (in Portuguese)

‘Condescending digital structures’

Writer Cassiana Pizaia wrote on the subject in the following terms:

“The Helena Kolody school, in Cambé, is two blocks from the house where I grew up and lived until I finished college. Seeing students and teachers walking up and down the street was part of the everyday life of a peaceful neighborhood.

For someone to enter the school armed, kill a 16-year-old girl, wound and threaten students is the inconceivable and unacceptable rupture of decades of normality, of everything one believes a school space to be.

It is not an isolated case, the consequence of just one sick mind. It is barbarism replicated, encouraged by violent practices and discourses, which must be understood and fought at the source and in the condescending digital structures that feed and reward it.

My solidarity with the families of the victims and with the community of the Helena Kolody school and of Cambé, forced to live through such horror.”