rio em coma
un fleuve dans le coma
Here’s the translation: The reflection of thinker Ailton Krenak (*A vida não é útil*, 2020) on the Doce River, devastated upstream from his village by the collapse of a mining waste dam. Krenak doesn’t say the river is dead or that it’s “polluted”: it’s in a coma. The word keeps the river on the side of the living—a body (*corpo do rio*) whose life is suspended but not extinguished, one that is kept vigil over and mourned like a relative, and whose awakening remains conceivable. It shifts what is owed to a river: not a technical repair, but the cessation of everything that weighs upon its body.
Apenas um rio em coma nos separa da estrada de ferro.
Rio em coma (Portuguese, “river in a coma”) is no rare word in the Krenak language: it is a Portuguese expression, coined by Ailton Krenak for the Doce River. Honest provenance—the phrase is his, the French calque “un fleuve dans le coma” is marked as such; nothing here is a disguised Indigenous borrowing. What reopens the question lies solely in the word coma.
The gap it fills in French is that of an intermediate state. For what happens to a river, our language hesitates between two verdicts: “dead river” (a closed loss, the past) or “polluted/degraded watercourse” (damage to a resource, to be remedied and compensated). Neither captures what Krenak aims at: a life suspended without being extinguished. Coma, from the Greek kôma, “deep sleep,” names the threshold of death from which one may still return. Krenak also speaks of the corpo do rio, the river’s body, and of his village “in mourning for our rio Doce”—one keeps vigil, one mourns only the living.
In context. The word changes what is owed. To engineers come to “recover” the river through technology, Krenak replies that what is needed is “to halt all human activities weighing on the river’s body, for a hundred kilometers on either bank, until it becomes living again”—not to add a technology, but to remove all those that prevent its return. A body in a coma is not repaired: it is watched over, and what holds it asleep is lifted.
Not to be confused. Rio em coma is not the same operation as Davi Kopenawa’s urihi: the latter contests the word “nature” and the object it fabricates; Krenak, for his part, does not dispute the object—he rejects death in favor of coma, and keeps the river among those close ones whose awakening we await. Two adjacent refusals, not to be conflated.