GERMINATING WORDS

INTERVIEW WITH NEGO BISPO

Abstract

Antônio Bispo dos Santos, also known as Nego Bispo, lives at the Quilombola Community Saco-Curtume, in the city of São João do Piauí/PI – Brazil. He’s a poet, writer, teller of knowledge, farmer and quilombola leader, as well as the author of the books Quilombos, Modos e Significados [coloca aqui a tradução] (2007), and Colonização, quilombos: modos e significações [coloca aqui a tradução] (2015). In this interview, Nego Bispo speaks about his thoughts on the differences between ‘germinating words’ and ‘concepts’, discussing afro-confluence, crossroads, inspiration, and education, anticolonialism and decoloniality. For the Master, germinating words, such as confluence and afro-confluence, are alive, have trajectories and allow revision. They generate organic writings, seeds and fruits that feed minds and senses. Different, for example, from stationary words, composed by a synthetic letter, without force and disconnected. Furthermore, the crossroads, for Bispo, is a germinating space, and not an academic concept of synthetic writing. Reading and listening to the Master Nego Bispo with his quilombola ancestral inspirations is an invitation to sow and germinate ways of life converging towards the present and the future.