Literature and Ethics in Contemporary Brazil

Vinicius Mariano De Carvalho, Nicola Gavioli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315386362
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria dell'America Latina e dei Caraibi

When Brazil was honored at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2013, the Brazilian author Luiz Ruffato opened the event with a provocative speech claiming that literature, through its pervasive depiction and discussion of 'otherness, ' has the potential to provoke ethical transformation. This book uses Ruffato's speech as a starting point for the discussion of contemporary Brazilian literature that stands in contrast to the repetition of social and cultural clichés. By illuminating the relevance of humanities and literature as a catalyst for rethinking Brazil, the book offers a resistance to the official discourses that have worked for so long to conceal social tensions, injustices, and secular inequities in Brazilian society. In doing so, it situates Brazilian literature away from the exotic and peripheral spectrum, and closer to a universal and more relevant ethical discussion for readers from all parts of the world. The volume brings together fresh contributions on both canonical contemporary authors such as Graciliano Ramos, Rubem Fonseca, and Dalton Trevisan, and traditionally silenced writing subjects such as Afro-Brazilian female authors. These essays deal with specific contemporary literary and social issues while engaging with historically constitutive phenomena in Brazil, including authoritarianism, violence, and the systematic violation of human rights. The exploration of diverse literary genres -- from novels to graphic novels, from poetry to crônicas -- and engagement with postcolonial studies, gender studies, queer studies, cultural studies, Brazilian studies, South American literature, and world literature carves new space for the emergence of original Brazilian thought.

1 2013 Frankfurt Book Fair’s Speech

Luiz Ruffato

What does it mean to be a writer in a country located on the periphery of the world, a place where the term savage capitalism definitely is not a metaphor? For me, writing is commitment. I cannot renounce the fact that I live on the threshold of the twenty-first century, that I write in Portuguese, that I live in a territory called Brazil. One speaks of globalization, but national borders have disappeared only for merchandise and not for the movements of people. To proclaim our singularity is a form of resisting the authoritarian attempt to level our differences.

The greatest challenge humans have faced throughout time has been exactly this: dealing with the self-other dichotomy. Our subjectivity may be confirmed by recognizing the other—it is alterity that grants us the feeling of existence—yet the other is also the one who can annihilate us. And if Humanity builds itself through this pendulum movement between aggregation and dispersion, the history of Brazil has been built almost exclusively through the explicit negation of the other, through violence and indifference.

We were born under the aegis of genocide. Of the four million indigenous peoples who existed in 1500, there remain today around 900,000, many of whom live in miserable conditions in settlements along highways or even in favelas in large cities. Our so-called Brazilian racial democracy is constantly heralded under the sign of national tolerance. It is the myth that there was no decimation but rather an assimilation of the original inhabitants. This euphemism, however, serves only to cover an indisputable fact: if our population is mixed race, this is due to the relationships between European men with indigenous or African women—that is to say that assimilation occurred through the rape of native and black women by white colonizers.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, five million black Africans were imprisoned and forcefully carried to Brazil. When in 1888 slavery was abolished, no efforts were made in the sense of providing decent living conditions for the former slaves. Thus, until today, 125 years later, the great majority of afro-descendants remain confined to the bottom of the social pyramid: they are rarely found among doctors, dentists, lawyers, engineers, executives, journalists, visual artists, filmmakers and writers.

Invisible, held down by low salaries and deprived of the basic rights of citizenship: housing, transportation, leisure, education and healthcare—the majority of Brazilians have always constituted a disposable piece of the machinery driving the economy. Seventy-five percent of the national wealth lies in the hands of 10% of the white population. A mere 46,000 people own half the land of the entire country. Historically accustomed to holding only responsibilities and never rights, we have succumbed to the strange sensation of non-belonging: in Brazil, what belongs to all belongs to no one.

Living with a terrible sensation of impunity, given that prisons only function for those who have money to pay for good lawyers, intolerance emerges. Abandoned in the bleakness of life on the margins, individuals who are denied the status of being human react to the other who denies them this status. Because we cannot see clearly the other, the other does not see us. And thus our hatreds build—our neighbor becomes the enemy.

The homicide rate in Brazil has reached 20 deaths per 100,000 people, which totals 37,000 homicides per year, a number three times greater than the world average. And those most exposed to the violence are not the rich, who are enclosed behind the high walls of private condominiums, protected by electric fences, private security guards and electronic surveillance, but the poor confined to favelas and neighborhoods on the periphery, living at the mercy of drug traffickers and corrupt police officers.

Male chauvinists: we occupy the embarrassing seventh place among countries with the highest number of victims of domestic violence, with a total in the past decade of 45,000 murdered women.

Cowards: in 2012, we accumulated more than 120,000 accusations of abuse toward children and adolescents. And it is known that regarding both women and children, these numbers are always underestimated.

Hypocrites: cases of intolerance toward sexual orientation reveal, exemplarily, our nature. The location of the most important gay parade in the world, which brings together more than three million participants, the Avenida Paulista in São Paulo, is the same place with the highest number of homophobic attacks in the city.

And here we touch a nerve: it is not a coincidence that the Brazilian prison population, around 550,000 people, is made up primarily by youths aged 18 to 35, poor, black and with little education.

Over the course of our history, the education system has been one of the most efficient mechanisms in maintaining the abyss between rich and poor. We occupy one of the last positions among rankings that evaluate educational performance worldwide: around 9% of the population remains illiterate and 20% of the population is classified as functionally illiterate—that is, one in three Brazilian adults do not have the capacity to read and interpret the most simple texts.

The perpetuation of ignorance as a tool for domination, which has been the defining characteristic of an elite that has remained in power until very recently, can be measured. The Brazilian publishing market is currently worth around 2.2 billion dollars, and 35% of this total represents purchases by the federal government on behalf of public libraries and schools. Nevertheless, we continue to read very little, on average less than four books per year, and in the entire country, for every 63,000 people, there is only one bookstore, primarily found in large cities.

But we have advanced.

The greatest victory of my generation has been the reestablishment of democracy during the past 28 years—a short period it is true, but this has been the most extensive period of the protection of rights in all of Brazil’s history. With political and economic stability, we have continued to garner social victories since the end of the military dictatorship. Without question, the most significant of these accomplishments has been the express reduction of misery: an impressive number of 42 million people have climbed socially during the last decade. Also undeniable is the importance of implementing programs like “Bolsa Familia,” which provides cash to low-income families, or the establishment of racial quotas for enrollment in public universities.

Unfortunately, however, in spite of these efforts, the weight of our 500-year history of abuses is immense. We continue to be a country where housing, education, healthcare, culture and leisure are not universal rights but the privileges of a few. Where the ability to come and go, at any time, cannot be freely exercised because of the absence of public security conditions. Where the minimum wage equals US$300 per month and exacerbates basic difficulties like the lack of adequate public transportation. Where respect for the environment is non-existent. Where everyone has become accustomed to circumventing the law of the country.

We are a paradoxical country.

Brazil appears on the one hand as an exotic region, a place of paradisiacal beaches, edenic forests, carnival, capoeira and soccer and on the other hand as a dreadful place of urban violence, child prostitution, disregard for basic human rights and disdain for nature. Brazil is celebrated as one of the countries best prepared to assume a leading role on the world stage with ample natural resources, agriculture, cattle production and diversified industries with enormous potential for production and consumer growth. Yet it also seems destined to an eternal supporting role as a provider of raw materials and products fabricated with cheap manual labor because of incompetence at generating its own wealth.

We now represent the seventh largest economy in the world. And we remain in third place among the highest inequality among all nations.

I return, then, to the initial question: What does it mean to live in this region situated on the periphery of the world, to write in Portuguese for readers who are nearly non-existent, to fight every day in the midst of such adversities, to try and construct a sense of life?

I believe, perhaps naively, in the transforming power of literature. As the son of an illiterate washerwoman and a semi-illiterate popcorn vendor, having worked myself as a popcorn vendor, a store cashier, a sales clerk, a textile factory worker, a metalworker, a manager of a diner, my own destiny was altered through a fortuitous encounter with books. And if reading a book can change the course of a person’s life, and given that society is composed of people, then literature can change society. In our day of exacerbated narcissism and the extreme cult of individualism, the person who is strange to us, who should awake in us both fascination and mutual recognition, is now more than ever seen as a threat to us. We have turned our backs on the other—whether immigrant, poor, black, indigenous, female, homosexual—as an attempt to preserve ourselves, forgetting that in doing so we are imploding our own conditions for existence. We have succumbed to solitude, to selfishness, and we have denied ourselves to ourselves. To counteract this, I write: I want to affect the reader, to change the reader, to transform the world. It is a utopic desire, I know, but I nourish myself on utopias. Because I believe that the final destiny of every human being should be only this: to achieve happiness on earth. Here and now.

2 Brazilian Contemporary Fiction and the Representation of Poverty

Regina Dalcastagnè

The critic Roland Barthes once posited that the writer is the one who speaks for another (33).¹ Once literature is understood as a form of representation, a space wherein social perspectives and interests interact and collide, one question arises: who is this other, what is their position in society and what does their silence conceal? That is why literary studies (in addition to literary art itself) are more and more concerned with the problems associated with the access to voice and representation of various social groups. In other words, these fields show an increased awareness of difficulties associated with the place of speech: who speaks and for whom. At the same time, correlated questions, even if not identical, of legitimacy and authority (a word whose linguistic proximity to authorship is not a coincidence) are discussed within literary representation. All of this is translated in the growing debate on the space, in Brazilian and foreign literatures, of marginalized groups—in a broad sense, encompassing those who experience a collective identity to which a negative value is attached by the dominant culture, defined by sex, ethnicity, color, sexual orientation, position in the relations of production, physical condition or other criteria (Williams).

The silence of the marginalized is covered by voices that overpower them, that try to speak for them, but it is also occasionally broken by the literary production of its own participants. Even in the latter case, significant tensions are established between the “authenticity” of the report and the (socially constructed) legitimacy of the literary art work, between authorial voice and group representativeness and even between the elitism typical of literary studies and the need to democratize artistic production. The key word in this ambit of discussions is representation—a crucial concept in literary studies, now understood with a greater awareness of its political and social resonances. Indeed, representation is a word that appears in different contexts—literature, visual arts and dramatic arts, as well as politics, law and others—and it is constantly contaminated with these diverse meanings (Pitkin). The central issue is no longer merely the fact that literature provides certain representations of reality, but that these representations are not representative of all social perspectives.

Therefore, the problem of representativeness is not restricted to honesty in the search for the other’s point of view or the respect for its particularities. The diversity of perceptions of the world is in question, and this is dependent upon the access to voice and not supplied by the good will of those who monopolize the places of speech. As Anne Phillips says in a different context:

Men may conceivably stand in for women when what is at issue is the representation of agreed policies or programs or ideals. But how can men legitimately stand in for women when what is at issue is the representation of women per se? White people may conceivably stand in for those of Asian or African origin when it is a matter of representing particular programs for racial equality. But can an all-white assembly really claim to be representative when those it represents are so much more ethnically diverse? Adequate representation is increasingly interpreted as implying a more adequate representation of the different social groups that make up the citizen body. (6)

Even though Phillips is referring to political representation, the discussion could be transposed with ease to literary representation—in Brazilian contemporary fiction, the almost complete absence of those representing the popular classes is remarkable. The issue here is literary artists, but the absence extends to characters. In a fairly simplistic approach, and allowing for some injustice (but not much), our literature may be described as the middle classes looking at the middle classes. This implies not the lack of good literature (good literature does exist), but rather implies a marked limitation of perspective.

What is the reason for such a limitation? It is obviously not something exclusive to the literary field. The popular classes have a more limited access to all spheres of discursive production: they are under-represented in the parliament (and in politics as a whole), in the media, in academia. This is not a coincidence, but a powerful sign of subalternity. Foucault observed the centrality of the mastery of discourse in political struggles taking place within society; according to him, “discourse is not simply that which translates the struggles or systems of domination, but that which is fought for” (10).

One of the meanings of representing is, exactly, speaking in the name of an other. Speaking for the other is always a political act, sometimes legitimate, often authoritarian—and the first adjective does not necessarily exclude the second. When a discourse is imposed, legitimacy frequently arises from the justification of a greater clarification, greater competence and even greater social effectiveness by the one who speaks. The other can only be silent. If his or her way of saying does not work, his or her experience will also have no value. It is a process anchored in structural dispositions. Citing Foucault again, “in every society, the production of discourse is at the same time controlled, selected, organized and redistributed by a certain number of procedures that aim at conjuring its powers and dangers, mastering its random occurrence, avoiding its heavy and fearful materiality” (8–9).

The mastery of discourse denounced by the French philosopher is the denial of the right of speech to those who do not correspond to certain social prerequisites: a veiled social censorship that silences the subordinate groups. According to Pierre Bourdieu, “among the most effective and concealed censorships are those that consist of excluding certain agents of communication, excluding them from the groups that speak or the positions from which one can speak with authority” (La distinction 133). It is crucial to notice that it is not only the possibility of speaking that is in question—contemplated by the principle of freedom of speech, a law recognized in all western countries—but the possibility of “speaking with authority,” that is, the social acknowledgment that discourse is valuable and, therefore, deserves to be heard.

The process is fulfilled by the introjection of structural constraints by social agents that do not leave the limits the discourse imposes excessively rigid, since everyone turns out to be within an authorized space. Still, according to Bourdieu, “censorship reaches its highest degree of perfection and invisibility when each agent no longer has something to say beyond that which he or she is objectively authorized to say: he or she does not even need to be, in this case, his or her own censor, since he or she is already censored altogether through forms of perception and expression internalized by him or her which impose its form to all its expressions” (La distinction 133). This is how certain social categories, which are excluded from the universe of politics—workers and women, for instance—are led to judge themselves incapable of political action and, therefore, to accept the position of powerlessness in which they have been placed.

The same is true for literary expression. Those who are objectively excluded from the literary universe due to a poor mastery of forms of expression believe they would also be incapable of producing literature. However, they are incapable of producing literature exactly because they do not produce it, that is, because the definition of literature excludes their forms of expression.

The literary ambit—understood in Bourdieu’s sense, that is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction: On Behalf of the “Here and Now”
• 1 2013 Frankfurt Book Fair’s Speech
• 2 Brazilian Contemporary Fiction and the Representation of Poverty
• 3 Memorials of Words: The Victim in Brazilian Literature
• 4 Deciphered Brazil and Enigma Brazil: Notes on Social Exclusion and Violence in Contemporary Brazilian Literature
• 5 Journeys of Resistance in Afro-Brazilian Literature: The Case of Conceição Evaristo
• 6 Growing Up to Human Rights: The Bildungsroman and the Discourse of Human Rights in Um defeito de cor
• 7 Narrating other Perspectives, Re-Drawing History: The Protagonization of Afro-Brazilians in the Work of Graphic Novelist Marcelo d’Salete
• 8 Neither Here nor There: Unsettling Encounters in Paulo Scott’s Habitante irreal
• 9 Can’t You Hear My Call?: The Guarani Kaiowá Letter and the Right to Land and Literature in Brazil
• 10 In Search of a New Invisibility
• 11 Revisions of Masculinity under Dictatorship: Gabeira, Caio and Noll
• 12 Testimonial Performance: Fictions of the Real in Contemporary Art
• 13 Lyrical Guides to the Peripheries of Rio de Janeiro: Two Historical Moments
• 14 Nicolas Behr’s Futuristic braxília and the Critical Reinvention of Brasiliensidade (brasília-em-cidade)
• 15 The Night Explodes in the Cities: Three Hypotheses about Vinagre: uma antologia de poetas neobarracos
• List of Contributors
• Index