ACT I—Paths That Are Not Roads
If not all travellers walk roads, can we assume that not every road is a path? Not every route must be followed; not every line must be drawn. Some paths do not fit on maps, while some routes survive in the memories of the bodies that have walked them, inscribed by the steps and struggles along the way. The world we live in is one of ground scarred by concrete as it attempts to prevent other paths from forming. From small cracks, whispers burst forth and become wandering cries seeking the movement of life. To err is to be alive.
The formal verb ‘to err’ is semantically ambiguous. On one hand, it is used in its modern, intransitive sense to mean ‘to be mistaken’ or ‘to do wrong’. On the other hand, it retains a more classical resonance, closer to the Latin ‘errare’, meaning ‘to stray’, ‘to wander’, or ‘to go astray’. This older nuance evokes the image of a subject deviating from a path, hesitating. Above all, to err suggests an action that the subject performs upon themselves.
Even in its ambiguity, to err assumes the dimension of refusal and movement—an act of resistance against restraint, normalization, and the imposition of a singular path. In the sense of contemporary wandering, to err is a practice of invention and reinvention. If humanity is a practice, then to err is a politics of gestures, affections, listening—and, above all, of doubt. Certainty has no place where error is possible. The anchor of certainty forecloses questions, fair exchange, and the opportunity of recognizing oneself in what is unfamiliar. To be a wayfarer is to defy the logic of control—a movement that transgresses fences, norms, and borders. It challenges the idea of humanity as a static noun and reimagines it as a verb.
Black people, Indigenous peoples, quilombolas, riverine communities, Romani populations, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and those living on the margins are routinely denied the right to move freely. They live under constant surveillance—whether by the state or by society. We cross the city as if walking through a minefield. The penal-police state targets, objectifies, and dictates where we are allowed to exist. Targeted ZIP codes. Targeted skin.
In this sense, to err is understood as a tension with the concept of respectability—a set of western moral, aesthetic, and behavioural standards imposed on racialized groups, so they are tolerated in public. One of the main arguments for avoiding denunciations of racism when Black skin is associated with suspicion is culture and customs. This ‘suspiciousness’ is constructed by and for gendered and racialized performances. Thus, a paradigm is established for how to speak, dress, behave, and occupy spaces. In this sense, to err is not just a fault; it is anything that deviates from the bourgeois, white, European standard. For Europeans, this occurs through the qualifications given to Latin, African, Arab, and Asian peoples. In the intranational dynamic, the paradigmatic reorganization of whiteness adapts and imposes the qualifications of non-being and error on racialized and subordinate groups under modern-colonial logic. When asserted by racialized bodies, to err breaks with demands for domestication and assimilation by refusing acceptances that require sacrifices of language, corporeality, and ancestry. Pretuguês is an example of errancy.
When developing the concept of Pretuguês, Lélia Gonzalez made it clear that the Portuguese language was influenced by the worldviews of the people on whom it was imposed. Thus, we can think of Pretuguês as an errancy that is not an error but a reinvention. It is a deviation that dismantles imposed myths of universality and denounces epistemicide. Often ridiculed and corrected, Pretuguês names what is invisible to the norm and creates loopholes in censorship. Therefore, erring is political—it asserts the right to movement. Erring is a declaration of the right to laughter and freedom.
In this text, I will exercise erring through displacement, a journey to think about humanity as a radical practice. Deviation as an ancestral technology of what is affirmed, as taught by Nego Bispo, the beginning, middle, and beginning. Who has the right to err? Who may lose themselves to find themselves again? The curve chosen before performance, choosing to stumble, pause, retreat, breathe, listen, and encounter. The refusal of incarceration and silence. Erring not as escape, but as the creation of abolitionist futures.
ACT II—Erring as Knowledge
I propose that we view error not as a stumble, but as a path. This is not a new idea, as the verb essentially means ‘wandering’ or ‘being a wanderer’. It is also not innovative in philosophical and scientific thinking about error in the West, where it is absorbed and questioned. As Michel Pêcheux and João Flávio de Almeida have pointed out, erring should not be understood as disorientation, but as movement. In a constant search for perfection and truth, it is error—or the act of seeking to avoid it—that leads to renovation, even though perfection may be unachievable. As it moves, the body that walks invents, reinvents, and rewrites territory; it listens and learns. By proposing an epistemology of erring, the authors present a form of knowledge grounded in their discussion of language, tongue, and discourse as dynamic, fluid, and ever-shifting—entities that transform as we move. Thinking is not merely the accumulation of truths—whatever those might be—but the confrontation of doubt, the stumbling over meanings, and the hesitation over words.
Thus, Afro-Indigenous knowledge emerges as a pedagogy of movement, a beginning-middle-beginning. These cosmologies are not organized in a rigid or linear fashion, which does not imply chaos or disorder, but rather another form of order. They are organized in a circular fashion. This knowledge moves with time and the earth under the perception that the world is not external but a living organism with whom one can talk, dance, and exchange. In this context, erring is not a deviation but part of the journey. In anthropology, Amerindian perspectivism offers an alternative approach to knowledge by encouraging us to understand others from their own perspectives rather than from our own. The human then becomes a perspective rather than a paradigmatic essence. Therefore, we can understand knowledge not as mastery, but as a transition between ways of seeing and being seen. With this understanding, the monopoly of knowledge is shattered, and it is seen as distributed among all beings. Scholars such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Tania Stolze, and Manuela Carneiro da Cunha offer this radical inversion in our understanding of knowledge.
In addition to errancy, displacement does not lose its centre because it rejects the concept of a fixed centre. These are evolving forms of knowledge. Error is not something that needs to be eradicated; rather, it is the possibility of a new beginning—a beginning-middle-beginning. Time is not linear but spiral because it revolves around many origins and futures rather than around itself. In this sense, wandering and quilombo converge. A quilombo embodies the refusal to see error as failure and instead affirms deviation as a legitimate path—a way of life and a political stance.
Historian and intellectual Beatriz Nascimento, along with other Black intellectuals such as Abdias Nascimento and Clóvis Moura, affirmed the quilombo not only as a geographical space, but also a temporality and alternative form of social organization and technology of existence. Born out of forced displacement, it transformed into a re-foundation. It is an alternative form of organization because it questions the colonial state model that had been in place until then. It creates and recreates itself in the face of kidnapping and persecution. The physical quilombo was an affront to the colonial project because it deviated from the concepts of property and linearity while proposing community and shared ancestry as the future. It was not just about escaping but also about founding, loving, knowing, and living differently: living without an owner, without captivity, and without imprisonment; deviating toward freedom. Erring is the radical dignity of the route outside of official history, rewriting freedom with Black and Indigenous hands. Erring as living life.
In this context, disobedience is not a moral failing but a conscious choice to walk away from the path of domination. The quilombo became more than just a destination; it became a journey and a new horizon. It was transformed into a travelling pedagogy that reinvents the world.
ACT III—Narrating Oneself Outside Prescribed Routes
How can we think about erring as a practice within the context of human dynamics without engaging in dialogue with a fundamentally human creation such as literature? Through various literary characters, we can analyse the incorporation of wandering as destiny, condition, and reconstruction. Error is not merely an event in a literary plot; it is integral to the plausible depiction of the world.
Jorge Amado’s character in The Two Deaths of Quincas Wateryell (A Morte e a Morte de Quincas Berro D'Água, first published in Portuguese in 1959), Quincas Berro d’Água abandons bourgeois respectability and wanders the underground, refusing to perform the role assigned to him. Through this journey, he reinvents himself and the meaning of freedom. To some, this is a mistake; to Quincas, it is salvation. Riobaldo, a character from Grande Sertão: Veredas (1956) by Guimarães Rosa, is defined by doubt and an existential journey through life’s tensions. He walks, recounts, and loses himself. In this movement, he constructs meaning. Returning to classical tradition, we find the Homeric character of the Odyssey: Ulysses to some and Odysseus to me due to the preciousness of those who have studied classical literature. He is a wanderer par excellence. Odysseus did not return to Ithaca after the Trojan War just to reunite with his beloved Penelope; he returned because of destiny. Nevertheless, his journey home takes years and is marked by detours, delays, and enchantments. Each of Odysseus’s ‘mistakes’ becomes a story.
Mário de Andrade and his Macunaíma (1928) elude the classical hero profile, but his trajectory is marked by contradictions and subversions. Perhaps he is the character who best embodies, in Brazilian literature, the notion of the character-as-errancy. However, we also find Macabéa in Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star (1977). Unlike Macunaíma, Lispector’s character reveals an errancy that is almost erasure, but rises in strength in the face of opacity. In the literature of Conceição Evaristo, errancy emerges in the narrated lives of bodies and characters who dialogue with lives historically deprived of the right to err. There are figures, such as Ponciá Vicêncio (2003) and so many others in Becos da Memória (2006), who walk, resist, reconstitute journeys, and redraw territories of affection. Erring arises in everyday life to recreate what seems forbidden and prohibited.
We can also encounter an errant figure in Shug Avery from The Color Purple (1982) by Alice Walker. For Shug, wandering represents a desire for freedom and life. The consequences of this choice are significant—scandal, gossip, and social judgment. Nevertheless, Shug persists in her errancy as a form of liberation, asserting the right to live where and how she chooses. Her choices ultimately lead to the process of rebirth and the restoration of meaningful relationships.
The Beat Generation is a symbol of US literary counterculture and another example of errancy as rebellion and quest. In Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), the road is not only physical but also metaphorical, representing a journey of meaning. Is it a search for humanity as a practice? It is a rejection of conformity and moralism, a form of writing in motion that explores the improvisation of jazz. For other icons of the movement, such as Diane di Prima, errancy and exploration confront ideas of womanhood, motherhood, and activism. Errancy becomes a form of existential and formal disobedience, reinventing what is possible.
I could mention several other characters. Literature is important in discussions about humanity because it shows us that making mistakes is human, an act of creation. Characters may stray from the path not because of weakness, but because of choices, destiny, or vocation. The straight path is an illusion; there is wisdom in stumbling. Sociologist and literary critic Antonio Candido affirmed literature as a fundamental human right because it allows us to ‘exercise our condition as subjects’[1]. Verisimilitude, a literary technique, allows fiction to reveal truths deeper than immediate reality. It sustains literature as a space for the unspeakable and makes lived experiences believable, especially for those whose histories have been silenced. Erring, as a narrative and political gesture, also insists on writing worlds that escape their predetermined fate. It makes life a journey that never ends because it begins and begins again without ceasing.
ACT IV—Prison and Dehumanization: The Imprisonment and Death of Movement
Prison is the most brutal form of architecture that denies errancy. If erring means to walk, think, desire, and transform, then prison arrests time and corrodes the body. It functions as a colonial-modern apparatus that punishes not only specific acts but also extinguishes any possibility of movement. It impacts communities and opens social wounds with no intention of healing them. The prison system, the prison-industrial complex, and the public security apparatus are constantly growing and have little to do with crime prevention or violence reduction. They operate as instruments of social, racial, and territorial control. They contain historically marginalized populations, maintain structures of inequality, and sustain a logic of profit and exclusion based on the punishment and surveillance of bodies considered disposable. That is why I ask myself: Who can move? Who can err? Who can dream? And who can live?
As a human practice, errancy is denied to racialized, marginalized, and dissident bodies. Movement can be life-threatening and the end of ‘freedom’, or the idea of it, since it is constantly monitored and controlled. Prison is where the state abandons any pretense of recognition. It is the death of movement, listening, and subjectivity. It is a non-place of humanity.
The prison system is no exception; it is one of the triumphant faces of the colonial, capitalist, patriarchal, and racial project. Its function is to manage racialized populations who are considered disposable. Prison produces silence, erases memories, and, more importantly and dangerously, produces a pedagogy of fear. Attempting to discipline and correct guilt, which is often more ingrained than the actual offence, shapes the subject through violence rather than care, accountability, and collective reparation.
Penal abolitionism, particularly in its Black form, is urgent and necessary. It is a rebellious journey that rejects the paths imposed by colonialism, racism, and capitalism. Instead, it proposes deviation as the creation of new paths of justice, care, and freedom. This is a radical practice of humanity that advances by breaking down walls. Prison is revealed not as a failure of the system but as the system in full operation. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a thinker and penal abolitionist, proposes an ‘abolition geography’, where territories and communities are not mapped by fear, punishment, and control but by bonds of solidarity, networks of care, reparation, and collective justice.[2] Instead of prisons, there would be schools. Instead of policing, there would be listening. Instead of punishment, there would be accountability and transformation. In this possible space, abolition becomes a horizon, a practice, and a promise. It is unavoidable in the face of barbarism. Penal abolitionism radically affirms humanity as a practice and a collective exercise in rebuilding life. Criticizing punitivism is also committing to love as a political practice. As bell hooks reminds us, it is an exercise in listening, restoration, and accountability without the need for punishment. No being can be fully human if they cannot move. Therefore, penal abolitionism is the rejection of a world that punishes to build and sustain a world that cares.
ACT V—Freedom as a Verb: Reimagining Living—‘We Are Beginning, Middle, and Beginning’
For those who have been prevented from walking and erring, freedom cannot merely be a noun. It must be affirmed in practice, together with humanity. Freedom is not a destination, but a journey—a constant movement to create worlds that reject dehumanizing structures. By affirming freedom as an ongoing struggle, Angela Davis challenges the liberal notion of freedom as limited to individual rights that materialize in a selective, racialized, and commodified manner. Classical conceptions founded on individualism are fierce traps for bodies whose experiences include kidnapping, captivity, imprisonment, and gunpowder within the logic of capital and the nation-state. For Davis, exercising freedom presupposes structural transformations that break with inequality, incarceration, and poverty. Freedom is a process and a movement.
Antônio Bispo dos Santos, a writer, poet, philosopher, and quilombola leader who is better known as Nego Bispo, stated that ‘we are the beginning, middle, and beginning’[3]. Like a spiral of return and advancement, deviation and reinvention. In this sense, freedom is not the end of the road but what is built with each step taken off it. Therefore, freedom must be practised in territories that resist punitive logic and in abolitionist zones where care replaces punishment and life is valued more than the norm. These are terreiros, urban quilombos, occupations, peripheral collectives, restorative justice projects, and mothers fighting for memory and truth.
In this exercise, the listener sits in the centre, allowing the other person to exist without justification. According to communication expert, artistic director, and poet Lua Leça, listening is no longer passive, but active and serves as a tool for reconstruction. Active listening forms the foundation of any justice system that aims to be fair, restorative, and transformative.
None of these paths are easy. Reaffirming humanity and exercising it, disputing the meanings and directions of freedom, and claiming error as a path to emancipation are not easy tasks. Recognition, accountability, reparation, and reconciliation require allowing for error along the way. Error should not be seen as a flaw to be eradicated, but rather as part of the movement toward growth, coexistence, and rebuilding social fabrics. The first step is recognizing that erring is part of being human. Reimagining humanity and the world demands a reimagining of freedom and justice. This means understanding that there is a continuous process of construction and becoming, shaped not by straight lines, but by multiple, unfolding horizons.
ACT VI—Invention of Other Worlds—Humanity as Practice
Errancy enables encounter. When the world enforces obedience, straight lines, and colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist-racial discipline, it is through deviation that we rediscover the other and ourselves. Remember that one meaning of ‘to err’ is ‘to lose oneself within oneself’. This requires hope and a path off the beaten track. Through this refusal and errancy, humanity can finally embody a daily gesture of other existences, affection, and recreation.
In All About Love (2016), bell hooks presents love as a political concept that requires responsibility, commitment, and action. It is a practice based on relationships. In times of barbarism and destruction, practising love and humanity means insisting that life matters and is worth living. It means affirming the collective possibility of happiness, good living, and sharing community paths. This involves breaking with the logic of competition and individualism, which does not negate individuality, and allowing life to pulse in the spaces between, in the common. Community then becomes more than a place; it becomes a reinvented technology of ancestral care.
Errancy becomes vital. Disobedience becomes its driving force when laws are organized to destroy. Disobeying colonial normality, punishment as justice, and loneliness as destiny. By erring, one creates another possible order that paves the way for care, listening, and reparation. In this process, a freedom that excludes error is soon perceived as disguised imprisonment. Routes and detours cultivate joy in absence by practising everyday humanity. In anthropophagic dialogue, error becomes a critical digestive gesture. Wandering allies itself with anthropophagy to build a pluralistic path where culture is not merely consumption but a way of life.
Errancy is the movement of those who dare to live beyond what is permitted and glimpse what is possible. It cries out: ‘We are the beginning, middle, and beginning’. We are the step outside the line. We are the ones who stray to live. We produce food while mothers hold on to memories that reaffirm life.
Translated from the Portuguese by Mariana Nacif
This text was first published in the reader Not All Travellers Walk Roads—Of Humanity as Practice (Berlin: HKW & Archive Books, 2026). A German edition of the reader is also available.
[1] Antonio Candido, O direito à literature, in: Vários escritos (Rio de Janeiro: Ouro sobre Azul, 2011).
[2] Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (London: Verso, 2022).
[3] Antônio Bispo dos Santos. Colonização, Quilombos: Modos e Significações (Brasília: INCTI/UnB, 2015); Antônio Bispo dos Santos. A Terra Dá, a Terra Quer (São Paulo: Ubu Editora/Piseagrama, 2023).