1. Introduction

“To change the world, everyone’s love! Everyone’s love to change the world!” The verses of the poet Ìtalo Rovere echoed on the open stage of the Temple of Poetry, a cultural collaboratively run and lived in space occupied by poets from Fortaleza, who, in addition to promoting the democratization of culture through saraus,¹ took poems to buses, performing poetic interventions within communities and at transport terminals.

The theme poem of the Temple of Poetry “Everyone’s Love to Change the World” is the articulation of a commitment to co-creating art to transform the injustices and cruelties imposed by the exclusionary and oppressive capitalist world-system. This is a resistant cry and commitment that multiplies from the open stage of the Temple of Poetry to the open microphones at the saraus on the racialised peripheries of Fortaleza. It is embedded in the lineages of popular education of Paulo Freire and his ‘Pedagogy of Indignation’ (2000), in which he argues in his pedagogical letter entitled “From law and of the duty to change the world”: “It is certain that women and men can change the world for the better, to make it less unfair, but based on the concrete reality that they make sense of in their generation” (Freire, 2000 , p. 26).

The poetry, art and culture experienced in the saraus, which are spread around the peripheries of Fortaleza, are emergent and embedded in such a concrete reality and enunciate this desire for the transformation through indignation at oppressive contexts of systemic violence against poor and black youth on the peripheries of large cities. In the “The Color of Homicides in Brazil” Waiselfisz, (2012) demonstrates the selective and systematic racialised nature of urban and structural violence, which socially excludes and kills young Afro-Brazilians from the popular classes. In 2014 cultural Collectives and activist scholars from the State University of Ceara gathered in the racialised periphery Serrinha neighbourhood and formed Viva a Palavra with the aim to strengthen cultural practices and/as a struggle against the extermination of youth, artists, academics and activists from social movements and cultural collectives. This political-cultural articulation allowed the collaborative construction between activist scholars and movement members of an extension (outreach popular education) research collaboration entitled “Viva a Palavra: circuit of languages, peace and resistance of black youth on the peripheries of Fortaleza” (Alencar, 2014).

The program, which was registered at the Ceará State University has been struggled over with the University so that they recognise the knowledge and art produced by cultural collectives and social movements in the periphery. This has resulted in, peripheral poetic production being brought to its curricula, classes, and to events and actions in peripheral neighborhoods (Alencar, 2014).

This article, located in the context of the collaborations and (onto-epistemological) proximities between a group of activist-scholars from the State University of Ceará from different disciplinary backgrounds, myself as an activist-scholar within critical Applied Linguistics, and cultural collectives from the racialised peripheries of the city. This nexus and relationship building across the borders of University and community centers the importance of developing research which is transformative and anti-oppressive (Rajagopalan, 2019) and that co-produces knowledge to combat human suffering (Moita Lopes, 2006), makes collective sense of the practices, art and culture of racialised youth in the peripheries, as language practices that seek to contest violence and social inequalities in the construction of a “viable unprecedented” (Freire, 1997; Motta, 2018). The article also intends to discuss the possibility of considering these language practices as therapeutic (in a collective emancipatory way) practices of language (Wittgenstein, 1999), and as part of a pedagogy of the oppressed (Freire, 1987). It articulates a vision of language in Paulo Freire with the philosophy of Ordinary Language by L. Wittgenstein to think about cultural pragmatics. This pragmatic perspective also engages with the ethnographic works of Veena Das (2007) on the daily life of women who have experienced violence. It is from the theoretical articulation between Veena Das, Paulo Freire and Wittgenstein that I develop the idea of a cultural grammar of resistance.

In what follows I outline this theoretical articulation, then our participatory and prefigurative cartographic methodology, give an overview of the collaboration, to then take this to make sense of a particular cultural circle that was held during Covid lockdowns in 2020.

2. Cultural pragmatics and the therapeutic practices of language

The philosopher L. Wittgenstein contributed decisively to the linguistic turn in philosophy by turning to the way language is intertwined with the world. In the first phase of his thought, language was seen as a figuration of reality, which would lead to the establishment of limits for language, from this relation of representation expressed in aphorism 5.6: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (Wittgenstein, 2008, p.245). Wittgenstein, however, not only abandons this representationist view of language, but starts to criticize it, for its reproduction of hegemonic uses of language against ordinary language. His critique is a critique of the idea that there is an essence to language or the exercise of the unique function of language, as a means to represent the world. When we turn to life, he argues what we have is a series of activities that constitute language games. There is also no essence that allows us to define a language game (IF§ 65): what we find between one game or another are family resemblances (Wittgenstein, 1999, p. 52). This imprecision, vagueness, which destabilizes and, at the same time, stabilizes the signs in family resemblances, is constitutive of grammar itself.

Thus, if there are rules that coordinate language games these rules are not closed, because they are fruits of the daily history of these language games. The rules that constitute the grammar of the ways of life are cultural, that is, they are invented and reinvented in everyday life, being, therefore, dynamic. And it is precisely this turning to life, playing the common game of ordinary language that Wittgenstein presents as the collective therapeutic of language and/or of life in that language is a way of life (1999, 32). For him (IF, § 432) “Every sign alone seems dead. What gives it life? – In use, it lives” (Wittgenstein, 1999, p. 129). And it is the historicity of this use that constitutes the social order and a provisional stability of the meanings of language, which work as hidden scripts to our linguistic and cultural practices. To imbricate oneself in the forms of life, in the practices of ordinary language is a way to overcome the representational violations of any claims to proper language or an essence to grammar outside of everyday inventiveness and practise.

Veena Das (1999) calls attention to the fact that forms of life bring “form” and “life”. The critical anthropologist studying violence and the production of female subjectivity weaves into her work a reflection on language as a form of life, looking at the inscription of violence in the daily lives of women who have suffered violent experiences at key political moments in Indian history. The possibility or impossibility of narrating the extreme violence suffered, such as rape of women as a punishment of war, is linked to what can be considered a form of life. There is a proper fabric in each way of life that functions as a hidden social script, a cultural grammar. Such grammar concerns the way in which daily life allows the inscription of what can be said and what can be shown, linking human and non-human lives in a web of relations that make us constitute meanings.

As Veena Das (2007) shows us, only by looking to everyday life can we perceive how violence can be reinscribed, and re-signified by the subjects subject to such violation. Such re-signification is a reincription and a form of resistance in which the pain of daily life can potentially become sensical and transformable. This creation through the reinscription of pain in daily life is a way to think about how the young racialised people from the peripheries reinscribe situations of pain and violence in their practices of art and culture. This inventiveness in daily life is a form of resistance.

The Brazilian thinker Paulo Freire (1987, 1996, 1997) also shows us that words spring from our everyday life, as a creative force. Words-worlds are ways in which words can be generated from concrete experiences that become seed-words that can lead to themes which can help make sense of experiences of oppression and violence in ways which can also become motivators of political and cultural actions for change and transformation. In his “Pedagogy of Indignation”, Freire calls us to “experience with intensity the dialectic between ‘reading the world’ and ‘reading the word’ (Freire, 2000, p. 39)”. And in the “Pedagogy of Hope”, he tells us: “neither the reading only of the word, nor the reading only of the world, but two dialectically solidary” (Freire, 1997, p.54).

In “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (1987), it is the concrete of life that provides the material for generating words that become “meanings constituted or reconstituted in behavior, which configure existential situations or, within them, are configured to promote: reflection, reflection and opening of concrete possibilities of overcoming” (Fiori, 1987, p. 7). Still according to Fiori, during the culture circles proposed by Paulo Freire, in the return to the ordinary languages of subjects, honouring words that are part of their daily life, the generating word-seeds and the experience that result become “reflection of itself and critical encouragement of new existential projects” (Fiori, 1987, p. 7).

Based on Freirean thought, one can also think of language practices as forms of resistance/re-existencias (so as ontological-epistemological) (Motta, Gadelha, Alcencar, Navare, 2023). In “Education as a Practice of Freedom”, Paulo Freire (1967) presents language learning as inventiveness. For him, learning to read and write is seen as an act of creation. Freire (1967, p. 104) shows us that in these processes of language learning, states of searching, invention, and claiming occur. We have here a perspective that can be expanded beyond literal language learning towards the inventiveness of language in everyday life which allows meaning-making for transformation and resistance (Motta, 2017).

Cultural pragmatics bring together these theoretical praxis strands to understand this flow of inventiveness as an encounter or encounters. It studies language as a form of life, which is always collective, and it does so in a collective way. In this perspective, cultural pragmatics advocates collaborative and co-produced research, understanding language as action-reflection-action, as ethical-aesthetic-social onto-epistemological practice (Motta, Gadelha, Alcencar, Neyane, 2023). It is from within such a conceptual-epistemological-political commitment that the mode of participatory research that focuses on the collective construction of everyday life through culture and language making as words-worlds making that this research and article are embedded.

3. Youth cartographies of the racialised periphery in pandemic times

Urban violence requires an understanding of the intersections between economics, politics, the production of urban space and production of language practices. Social movements and cultural collectives from the racialised peripheries of Fortaleza embody such a lived understanding and with this they denounce and condemn the genocide of poor, black and peripheral² youth. We know that this genocide is a consequence of necropower, one of the structuring forces of (neoliberal) capitalism, which instrumentalizes life and holds the power of death, managing strategically and systematically the destruction of bodies of certain groups and populations. According to Mbembe (2018), this politics of death operates as a macrostructure in countries that continue to be structured by the effects of colonization. In this sense, amidst the forms of coloniality that continue to establish cruel relations through racial hierarchization, resulting from the colonial-racist-patriarchal capitalist system, necropolitics operates with its power to manage the right to life and relegation to (social) death.

This politics of death was exacerbated with the Covid 19 health crisis as necropolitical neoliberalised governments primed themselves to defend profit before the defense of life (Yazbek, 2020). The violence of the pandemic also made ever more visible/palpable the dereliction of public health care systems and resultant precariousness in their ability to meet the needs of unwell populations. The absence of social security policies and investments in social areas, typical of neoliberalism and a continuation of necropolitics of capitalist coloniality, has allowed populations that have already experienced vulnerability, due to the lack of decent housing, sufficient food, and basic sanitation conditions, to then be some of the most affected by the pandemic.

According to Virginia Fontes (2020), the health crisis caused by the Covid Pandemic that began in 2020, evidences the capitalist crisis that was already underway: the widespread uberization, the expropriation of working-class rights, and the giving of billions from governments to capitalists were already the signs of this crisis, as Fontes points out:

Before talking about the health crisis, it is necessary to remember that we were already entering a new capitalist crisis, again due to capital overproduction, because the enormous volume of capital, in the form of bonds or money, that needed to be valorized, was already imploding social life. Far from the fallacious version that “we had been growing and the virus can get in the way”, presented by Trump and Bolsonaro, the crisis was already underway, and was announced by the bourgeois economists themselves (Fontes, 2020, p. 2).

Facing the devastating picture of the extermination of the peripheral racialised youth population (both pre and during Covid) we-in-relation to the movements and cultural collectives started to carry out research with participatory cartographic methods based in popular education.³ which explored with the cultural youth produces the place of language in the constitution of the complex and selective character of racialised and class violence (Silva; Alencar, 2013, Alencar, 2014). This participatory action research has also contributed to struggles to expand the right to life and prevent violence against Afro and other racialised youth in the peripheries of Fortaleza.

Through the cartographic research method, the Coletivo de Pesquisa Viva a Palavra, and the cultural collectives have focused on the process of language inventiveness and grammars of resistances not so much the cultural products. The cartography method also comprises an ethnographic experience with the recording of practices in field diaries, filming of focus groups and recording of interviews. However, in addition to ethnographic experiences, cartography involves building a common action plan between researchers and participants involved in the research which is materialized in a series of practices which become the process of the research, The research, thus, is not descriptive or interpretive, but is inventive and transformative in itself. This is an invitation for all to ‘adopt a certain way of being in the world, to inhabit an existential territory” and to “let oneself be known and be known” (Passos et al, 2015).

The data generated in previous cartographic research, allowed the construction of a research-intervention proposal in cultural pragmatics (Alencar, 2015, 2019) from the pedagogical framework of popular education and Freirean culture circles. We started an investigation of cultural grammars, from the analysis of the production of words and generating themes and seed-words by the youth cultural collectives. Generative seed-words were chosen from life, from the participants’ universe of vocabulary. These seed-words provoke a multiplicity of meanings and support in generating themes and work as ways to access the cultural grammars of the peripheral youth collectives. These generating seed-words are forms of language game and reinscribe violence as a grammar of resistance.

In the first stage of our cartography, we carried out what Paulo Freire, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, called “investigation of the thematic universe”. This involves “the collective discovery of life through speech, of the world through words” (Brandão, 1981, p.15). In this stage, we the Viva a Palavra collective and cultural collectives choose the world-words, the seed-words selected from the people’s utterances. In the second stage, we chose the generating themes. As Brandão shows us: each word also has its “pragmatic charge which, we have seen, is a combination of affective content and critical weight (…) Each word hides many words because it is loaded with signs of pain, struggle and hope” (Brandão, 1981, p.15). In this stage, it is necessary to be aware of the community’s issues: these issues relate directly to their ways of life which comes from the embeddedness in proximity and relationality. In the third stage, we have the debate, the problematization, or the understanding of life.

In this way, the cartographic research is articulated with the methodological proposal of the Popular Education Culture Circles. This articulation occurred by the very mapping of the existential territory and the common ground between the research participants. The researcher-cartographer needs to trace her path from the way in which the flow of the collectives goes about composing an existential map. And this map is always open. As Deleuze and Guattari state, the map is connectable in all its dimensions: “dismountable, reversible, of receiving constant modifications”. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to assemblies of any nature, prepared by a group or a social formation” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1995, p.22). The route is driven by the participants. As Gorczevski (2015, p. 191) states “in the very constitution of the map the characteristics of the territory are outlined. (…). There are lines in people, in technologies, in learning, in art’.

Thus, when we started the research-intervention in 2015, the first methodological step to draw these first cartographic lines was the “investigation of the thematic universe”. This involved developing the knowledge of existing youth interventions, getting to know groups, collectives, movements, and projects that operated in the racialised periphery of Serrinha (Alencar, 2015). The enunciated world-words, seed-words that became the generating themes were violence, youth, culture, and popular education.

At the first meeting of the Research Collective to prepare the Viva a Palavra project, the Ekobé⁴ caretakers and popular educators were present, along with the collective of the saraus, the hip hop movement, the residents’ association, and the social movements. Popular Education is one of the lines of composition of the research map and territory. In this way, the Research Collective Viva Palavra started to carry out, since 2015, both the Culture Circles and the Saraus, as one of the methodological lines in its field research of cartographic bias.

In 2019, in continuation of these participatory cartographies, a series of Culture Circles were held in the Guaribal Community, in Serrinha periphery, in Fortaleza, as part of Viva a Palavra’s learnings in Popular Education and Cenopoesia. As poet and popular educator Dr Vera Dantas explains cenopoetry is “the language of art worked by the popular movement”, (2009, p.5). The meetings were led Vera Dantas, and artist, educator and cenopoet, Ray Lima. During the weekends of May and June 2019, artists, activists, popular educators and students participated in these Culture Circles, Soma Sempre Fair,⁵ care corridors,⁶ and parades through the streets of the community, which culminated in a Cenopoetic Act, elaborated by Ray Lima, as a creative synthesis of those encounters.

One challenge that arose with the Covid 19 Pandemic and the need for isolation was how to continue these meetings. As many social movements and collectives did, we could hold our cultural circle meetings using platforms such as Google Meet. However, this raised issues of how to remotely hold meetings that required proximity and intimacy, without the hands held in the ciranda (circle dance) without the touch in the care corridor, without the hugs, especially as popular education is realized by “learning with the whole body” (Dantas, Silva. Castro Junior, 2020). It was then that the Research Collective decided to promote, in August 2020, the I Virtual Journey in Cenopoesia and Popular Education, through the Google Meet platform. We held two virtual journeys, one in the first semester and another in the second semester of 2020.

Although we were distant from each other in person, I could see that these encounters involved us in care and affection. The circle was maintained, although we were not, on the platform, in a circle format. The circle was an existential territory. Even in the remote modality, the corporeality, the care, the presence of the other was strong, through cenopoetry. The Research Collective realized that the concept of territory must be considered in a broad way (Motta, Gadelha, Alencar, Nayane 2023). The meetings of Cenopoesia, even by remote means, made the Collective feel at home, as Guattari and Rolnik (1996, p. 236) tell us: “territory can be both relative to a lived space and to a perceived system within which a subject feels ‘at home.”

Thus, although the Viva a Palavra Collective had been driven by the health crisis imposed by Covid 19 to promote meetings with computer-mediated interactions, it was clear that the lovingness, the care, the closeness/proximity of people continued. As stated by Hine (2000), technologies as cultural artifacts confer a new perspective on the concepts of space, temporality, and, mainly, on what we understand as “presence”. The Viva a Palavra collective was experiencing the “permeation” that Hine (2015) talks about, when groups that know each other through other means start to occupy the social interaction platforms available on the internet. Thus, in 2021, to expand the meetings with other collectives, Viva a Palavra started transmitting the meetings in the Google Meet room to the YouTube channel, dialoguing with other collectives through the chat of the Viva a Palavra Channel.⁷ Then began a virtual journey of dialogues between the Collective Viva a Palavra and Ekobé, which happens monthly on the last Saturday of each month, until the end of 2021.

For the sake of delimitation, due to the limits of the article, I chose to focus the analysis on a single meeting of the Jornada Diálogos entre Educação Popular e Cenopoesia, entitled: “Word-world, Word-seed: the community experience in Viva a Palavra”. The choice was made because this meeting, attended by members of the community and the university, brought up the core theme discussed in this article: the cartographic trajectories of the Coletivo Viva a Palavra, and the cultural practices of the racialised youth of the periphery, as part of the networks and grammars of resistance to urban violence.

4. Word-world, seed-word: the Viva a Palavra community experience

‘Viva a Palavra! Viva a Palavra!’ was chanted by the cenopoet participants to open the Dialogues between Popular Education and Cenopoesia Conference entitled: “Word-world, Word-seed: the community experience in Viva a Palavra”. The meeting took place on the Google Meet platform and was simultaneously broadcasted by the Viva a Palavra Channel on the YouTube platform.⁸ The animators-facilitators of the meeting are participants of various projects of Viva a Palavra. To introduce them here, I use the codenames they themselves chose based on living plants emergent from the idea-concept-cartography of seed-words that was part of the title of the meeting and on the authorization of each one to be part of the research-intervention.

Participant 1: Semente de feijão/black bean seed, cenopoet and popular educator, participant of the Cenopoesia Collective of Viva a Palavra, living in Siqueira, on the periphery of Fortaleza;

Participant 2: Semente de juazeiro/juazeiro seed, primary school teacher, participant of the collective coordination of the popular course Viva a Palavra, and resident of Maraponga, near Itaperi, UECE’s main campus, on the periphery of Fortaleza;

Participant 3: Semente de girasol/sunflower seed, artist, participant of several cultural collectives, among them Gás Carbônico (music group) and Sarau Viva a Palavra, living in Serrinha, on the periphery of Fortaleza;

Participant 4: Semente de samambaia/fern seed, poet and cultural producer, participant of Viva a Palavra Library and of the popular initiative Bibliotecanazaria social movement, living in Jardim América, near the UECE Humanities Center;

Participant 5: Semente de algodão/cotton seed. cenopoet and popular educator, participant of the Elaspoemas Collective: peripheral writing, professor at UECE and resident of Dionísio Torres, periphery neigbourhood in Fortaleza.

The cenopoetic act began as the poem My Word by Ray Lima, recited by the participant Semente de algodão:

• Danger-word
• operative-word
• Feel because you live the daily life of things⁹

The Coletivo Viva a Palavra chose that it would be the cenopoetry that would give us this proximity, intimacy, and the emotional connections necessary for the dialogue between various artistic, cultural and care practices. According to Vera Dantas, cenopoetry “propels us towards the possibilities of dialogue between the various languages of art. It is it that makes it possible for us to perceive the perspective of language as action-reflection-action.” As Nicole Cruz (2018) tells us, Cenopoesia:

was constituted not only in an encounter between theater and poetry, but as a dialogue between knowledges, arts and people who play in the act their human cultural repertoire and thus the event is lyrically invested from words to actions that join each other for love, and not for syntax. (Cruz, 2018, p. 17).

In the act Semente de juazeiro, makes the denunciation: “globalization is the hegemony of northern values over the south, it is the continuation by economic means, of colonization, which was political.” (Lima, 2019, p. 7). And Semente de algodão/cotton seed announces speaking Ray’s verses:

The time has come, my people, the time has come
to curb the assault on democracy;
The time has come to avoid new bloodletting
as ethics, in the Brazil that begs us¹⁰ (Lima, 2019, p. 3).

Cenopoetry can be understand as a language game that works as a therapeutic in terms of collective political practice of language, since the artistic creation in cenopoetry, the creation of the cenopoetic act is the reinvention and re-signification of the experiences of a collective. The cenopoetic script is the re-signification of seed-words from the participants’ vocabular universe, since it is born from the “investigation of the participants’ thematic universe”. It was the interaction of the participants in the experiences of Viva a Palavra, during the weekends of May and June 2020, that enabled the collective discovery of life. Cenopoesia is the ordinary language inscribed in poetry through the speeches of the participants of the collectives. In that online meeting, the act experienced in person was relived, reinscribed in a new form of proximity.

After the cenopoetic act, the participants of the Google Meet, representatives of Viva a Palavra projects, “got into the circle” bringing short narratives about their trajectories and Viva a Palavra projects. From these narratives, below are some excerpts:

Excerpts – Semente de girasol/sunflower seed:

• 1. I come from socio-cultural movements in Fortaleza, and from other places, like the street barter movement, and from there we flowed; I come from the punk movement (…) I walked around in many corners (…). I became more frequent in the neighborhood and we met the MH2O hip hop movement. Then the gangs ended a little with the hip hop issue, with the power of the word, and then it was a transformation because hip hop embraced me the way I was.
• 2. (…) we are able to speak in several languages, always taking the social issue into account.
• 3. (…) The Cine was something like this… Awesome, because we managed to get into the communities, which was a problem until today. With the cinema, with art, we managed to bring together the children, the mothers, it was very good…
• 4. (…) It is interesting that we did not create (geographical) barriers, we went to Bom Jardim, Conjunto Esperança, Pirambu, the famous Pirambu all periphery and racialised neighbourhoods in the city.¹¹

This brings me back to Veena Das’ (1997, 2004, 2007) work on pain and social suffering to analyze the narrative scenes of this encounter. Just as Wittgenstein (1992a, 1992b) speaks of a grammar of pain to show that one cannot understand and conceptualise pain outside of always collective language games, Veena Das argues that suffering should be understood from a social, cultural, economic, and political complex, which is resignified by the meanings given and invented in everyday life.

From this perspective, sense making of suffering and its resignification must be understood from a sharing of meanings, since pain, violence, and suffering can only be understood by considering the collective experience that is expressed from a grammar, a cultural grammar. In this sense, the violence experienced in the cities that preferentially affects the peripheral population should be analyzed as a form of social suffering that affects young people. One of the forms of manifestation of this violence is the way in which young people are prevented from moving from one neighborhood to another, or even from one street to another in their community. In the narrative excerpts above, Semente de girasol/sunflower seed brings worlds as worlds to this social suffering, when talking about the displacement imposed by organized crime and at the same time narrates the new tracings and the “barriers” broken by the nomadism of youth cultural collectives (Alencar, 2019), as can be read in excerpt 3: “awesome, because we managed to enter the communities, which was a problem until today.” And in excerpt 4: “interesting that we didn’t create barriers, we went to Bom Jardim, Conjunto Esperança, Pirambu, the famous Pirambu.” In excerpt 1, the participant enunciates a movement of transformation about and against the situation of urban violence and its effects on the lives of young people and peripheral communities: ‘Then the gangs ended a little bit with the issue of hip hop, with the power of the word and then it was a transformation like that because hip hop embraced me like that the way I was’.

When Semente de girasol/sunflower seed refers to the “power of the word” and the welcome he received, I can relate this power to the reinscription of trauma and suffering through daily practices that resignify these experiences of violence. In the language practices of art and culture, the participant finds collective transformative therapy in the social use of language, in the meaningful processes of cultural practices. As he says in excerpt 2: “in these artistic practices of collective intervention: we manage to speak in several languages.”

In the narrative scene of the Diálogos Cenopoéticos meeting, Semente de feijão/black bean seed replies to Semente de girassol’s/sunflower seed speeches by indicating a generating word that becomes the generating theme of this article:

Excerpts: Semente de feijão/black bean seed:

• 5. I think there is something in your speech, in your brief narrative of life history, that calls my attention, which is something, in fact, is a word I believe is fundamental, and it is not a fashionable word, it is not a word… that people have the habit of saying is a fashionable word, that it is a tired word, which is the word “resistance”.
• 6. I have been talking with other people, with other collectives and artists there that we are in a moment of really assuming our existence, the existence of the territory.¹²

It seems to me that the speech of Semente de feijão/black bean seed reaches the second stage of the culture circle, when the generating themes are chosen. The participant selects the generating words “resistance” and “existence” and elaborates the community’s theme: resistance relating it directly to the existence of peripheral youths, their ways of life, imbricated with art and culture, so daily in those communities.

These themes, which lead us to the grammar of youth resistance, are also touched in the narratives of participant 4, who chose the codename Semente de samambaia/fern seed:

Excerpts – Semente de samambaia/fern seed:

• 7. These libraries are much more than libraries, they are cultural centers in the periphery, care centers (…)
• 8. It is a very practical example of how the work of Viva a Palavra keeps these young people away from drug gangs, because if the state doesn’t come in with its cultural assets, the drug dealer is the only reference those kids will have. If we go into the community and we have the community’s own people doing reading mediation activities, doing cultural activities and other diverse activities, this group will be a reference for the younger kids.¹³

In excerpts 7 and 8, Semente de samambaia/fern seed enunciates new senses for culture: that of culture as care. Raymond Williams (2007, p. 117) studying the meanings for the word culture states that “in all early usage culture was a noun referring to a process: the caring for something, basically harvests and animals.” When the participant reminds us, in excerpt 8, that culture can be a therapeutic way to dispute the dreams of racialised youth of the peripheries, he resumes the sense of culture as care. In Viva a Palavra, this shows itself as a practice with a loving and citizen practice. As Ray Lima tells us in his cenopoesia: “caring for the other is caring for me, caring for me is caring for the world” (Lima, 2013, p. 64).

In this way, we can say that the seed-words, the generating words, lead us to themes, such as the ones that were fruits of this harvest of words in the online Dialogues between Popular Education and Cenopoesia: art, peace, social transformation, culture, and care. It is these generating themes that allow us to reach the peripheral cultural grammars and, through the inventiveness of language games make collective therapeutic meaning of the experiences of social suffering to re-inscribe them in a grammar of resistance.

In the midst of the Covid 19 health crisis, the deepening of inequalities has shown its face through the policies of death promoted by neoliberal capitalism. Its constitution also includes the dissemination of values such as individualism, selfishness, and contempt for human life. When cultural collectives bring in their linguistic practices seed-words that confront these values harmful to human dignity, one can realize that such words are indexes of a cultural grammar of resistance “Art”, “social transformation”, “culture”, and “care”, the seed-words generated in the research-intervention worked on here, are parts of a politics of life such that in the peripheries there was self-management through the solidarity of communities that perform actions such as prevention, monitoring and follow-up of people infected by the coronavirus, assistance to the houseless community, distribution of food baskets and other practices of promoting life. It can be considered that, consistent with these actions, the sarau, the cenopoetic experience, the culture circles, promoted by Viva a Palavra, remotely in this pandemic period, are language games that are part of the care practices that oppose individualism, selfishness, social exclusion, and abandonment of the vulnerable population by governments committed to necropolitics. The seed-words produced in these language games generate themes that constitute the grammar of resistance of the racialised youth of the Coletivo Viva a Palavra in the periphery of Fortaleza.

With the analysis, I hope to have shown how the culture circles as cartographic lines can contribute as much in the generation of data as word-seeds, in the processes of research-intervention, as in the procedures of analysis in three phases and as moments of transformations and emergence of grammars of resistance:¹⁴ In many ways these methodologies are prefigurative and immanent in which the world becomes the world, and the world manifests through the word (Motta, 2011).

A few final words

In this article, I sought to reflect on the role of language in the face of an overwhelming reality: the violence that frighteningly attempts to exterminates poor Black youth from the periphery, physically and symbolically. Violence that is accentuated by the current crisis of capitalism and the health crisis caused by the Covid 19 Pandemic. The discussion held here intended to contribute in one more step so that Applied Linguistics as cultural pragmatics, as a producer of knowledge focused on social practices and transformation, may join the efforts to confront violence and social exclusion of racialised youth on the periphery.

One of the legacies of the great educator Paulo Freire, whose centennial we celebrate this September 2021, is the idea that the mastery of language is a way to understand and transform the reality in which we live. The field of Literature and Linguistics is increasingly committed to understanding the dialectical relationship between language and society and to reflecting on the contribution of professionals in this field to social change.

In this sense, the Viva a Palavra Program, which articulates teaching, research, and extension (action research), while seeking to carry out research and academic actions aimed at strengthening the trajectory of young people, carries out language practices, such as cenopoetic experiences and culture circles. These act as therapeutic collective practices of social use of language, contributing to the dignity of the lives of young people from peripheral communities, sowing seed-words of resistance, so necessary in our time.