In 1978, a coalition of different black cultural and community groups in Brazil protested racial discrimination on the steps of the Municipal Theater in São Paulo. The event was historic, both because it marked the first unified effort to debunk the myth that Brazil is a “racial democracy” and because it did so in the midst of a military dictatorship. Neusa Maria Pereira is a black journalist and activist who was part of the core group that established the protest, which resulted in Brazil’s Unified Black Movement. Through both words and actions, Pereira worked at the intersection of the fight for racial justice and resistance to Brazil’s military dictatorship. Here, she sits down with Artememoria to explain how she pioneered a political and cultural outcry against racism in a society that feigns color blindness.

Artememoria: Tell me about how you first became interested in writing in general, and in journalism more specifically.

Neusa Maria Pereira: I’m old school, and I had a literary education. I’m machadiano.⁸⁸ I read Lima Barreto, da Cruz e Souza. I read almost all of James Baldwin, who was a key author in my literary, political, and emotional education. I’m from that school of thought, you see? I identify with those authors.

I also inherited the practice of writing from my father. My dad always wrote. He was the neighborhood block association representative. He was the one who wrote up meeting minutes and neighborhood demands, who wrote prayers. I inherited writing from him.

Journalism taught me to meet people and to listen. More than just listening, it taught me to put the stories I heard on paper. And journalism taught me to do that in such a way that anyone from a domestic worker to a higher-up in the literary academy would understand what I had written. I’m not a researcher. I observe our society and I am a victim of our society, and my actions are part of the historic liberation movement tied to issues of race in this country.

Artememoria: Was there a specific moment in your youth that you began to get involved in political and social activism?

 Pereira: My childhood was very rich because my grandmother raised me. My mother died when I was three years old, and my grandmother was a feminist, even though she worked in the home. My black feminism comes from her. She was a matriarch who raised my brother and me. She didn’t know how to read and yet, when we were just toddlers, she told us: “you two are going to go to school.”

I didn’t want to go to school. That world was a total nightmare for me. I was in public school and the teacher made the girls who talked during class sit under the desks. The girls who had to go under their desks were always the poorest black girls, you know? I came from a lower middle class background in financial terms, but my dad received a standard salary as a government employee, my grandmother received a pension, and my uncle also worked. I wasn’t someone who went hungry. I would go to school nicely dressed with a bow in my hair, which meant that I didn’t get discriminated against. But seeing those little black girls going under their desks – the ones who came from poorer backgrounds, which you could see in the way they dressed and acted and all of that – it terrified me. I remember that I stayed completely silent. I got 100 on behavior and bad grades in every other subject. That affected me psychologically, and I had to repeat first grade.

My dad was a visionary, taking me out of that school. He enrolled me in a Catholic school and that’s when I began to shine. I sat in the first row and the teacher loved me. It’s so important to be loved, to understand that others like you, to discover that people see you as an important, beautiful, and vivacious child, someone who can learn and go somewhere in life. I remember that the desks in that school weren’t in rows. We had big tables, and a few different girls could sit at each one. That was such an important phase of my life. During those years, I became best friends with other black girls. I remember how they made me feel comfortable in that context. In that school, I was around people who were like me.

I grew up in an environment in which my dad, poor thing, denied racism. He saw racism as something destructive to black people in every way. He thought black people had to adapt in order to join society in order to not suffer, in order to be accepted. I was educated along those lines: you have to be a good girl, you have to be a good student, you can’t have an afro. But the thing is, my grandmother also raised me, and she was old school. She never told me to straighten out my hair. She always kept my hair in braids. And when afros were in fashion, I had one, and it was huge! That’s because my grandmother took good care of my hair, respecting it for the way it is. She would never, ever comb my hair and say, “such coarse hair, such difficult hair.” I never heard my grandmother say that. She did it up nice. She identified completely with the person who she was, and that’s what she passed on to me. “You are black, you have these characteristics, and you should never disrespect them. You have this kind of hair, here’s the way to care for it, and it’s not a bad kind of hair.” I even wrote a story about this, called Pixaim, on the site Blogueiras Negras.

I started to become conscious of racial issues when I turned 16, but even then it wasn’t fully clear to me. My dad got me a scholarship for me to study at Mackenzie, an American school. Only the most elite students attended that school. The other girls who studied there had been studying at Mackenzie practically since they were born. A lot of them spoke English at home because they were foreign. I was one of two black students, and the other was a boy who studied engineering. The school is in the Higienópolis neighborhood, which was another shock for me. I had to go from the periphery in the North Zone to study there in Mackenzie. And just getting to Mackenzie high school would take two hours. Two hours to get there, two hours to get back home. I barely had any time to study.

I started to feel racial discrimination when I studied at Mackenzie. The teachers didn’t discriminate against me, and a lot of people at Mackenzie liked me, but it was because of the way men acted. One of the boys was part of a group called the Incríveis, which was a rock band at the time, and once, when I was going down for recess, I heard him shout: “mon-key, oo–oo—aah–aah, mon-key, oo—oo—aah–aah.” I was 16 years old and, as you can see, I still remember that to this day. Men are manipulated to reproduce all of the values of the dominant class. And one value of the dominant class is that women are inferior, and black women more inferior still, so they have to be even more disrespected. Once, when I was 16, I went to the movies. I was wearing a blue shirt and sat with a friend. I heard a boy say, “Those two are cute. The one wearing blue is pretty, but one thing’s wrong with her.” What was wrong with me? The color of my skin. Boys were always the most discriminatory, the ones who were the most explicit in their racism. It’s still like that. They continue to reproduce the values of the dominant class, which is the way they were raised. Imagine taking a black girl home back then, more than 40 years ago. Even friendships were questioned. Imagine a black girlfriend. It was impossible in the world we were brought up in, in which standards of intelligence and beauty were defined by whiteness.

I didn’t have time to rationalize these racial issues back then. I felt different than other people, but I didn’t necessarily feel inferior. I was afraid to speak up in certain situations. I felt like I had to stay quiet, that I had to study more, but all of that was a product of my background. My dad would say, ‘black people have to study, they can’t mess up. If you want to achieve something, if you want to have a decent job and survive, you need to study.’ He didn’t speak in terms of, ‘look at how racism –’ No. And he never said, “you have to present yourself as white as possible,” but today I understand that that’s what he meant.

I think that’s why I write. I write more than I speak. Black people didn’t speak, they listened. That was a huge barrier. Sometimes, you wouldn’t understand something and you didn’t have the courage to ask a question because there was this notion that black people were intellectually inferior. You had that idea in your head without reading anything about it, simply because white people were the ones who raised their hands, the ones who were confident in their argumentative power, the ones who could say whatever nonsense they wanted in class and no one would pay any attention to it. But if a black person raised their hand, the entire class would turn to see what they were going to say, to see if they were going to say something stupid. That was intimidating.

Artememoria: It sounds like a long process of growing conscious about racism. 

Pereira: Very. A process of becoming conscious about what racism is and how it relates to those who want to maintain ideologies of white supremacy. Racism became apparent to me from that boy at recess, from what that other one said to me at the movies, from a friend of mine who was just as tall as me and who said, “eesh, you are just so tall.” She was just as tall as me, but she wanted to make me feel inferior because of my height, just because everything that is black had to be ugly. I knew all about self-acceptance because of my grandmother, so this was never hugely traumatic for me. I lived with her until I was 27 years old. But when I went to that other world, I did start to feel that kind of discourse.

But then the era of the student movement began. In the midst of dictatorship there were marches demanding that the regime be toppled, that the oppression of all different social sectors had to end. A branch of the University of São Paulo was right in front of Mackenzie. I was studying next door during one of the most intense crackdowns of a dictatorship that lasted for two decades. There were bombs, the police were always there. And I came from the periphery, witnessing those historic events as I entered Mackenzie high school.

Artememoria: Did you participate in the movement against the dictatorship at that time?

Pereira: I did. Alone, too, because I was the only one who studied in Mackenzie from my neighborhood in the periphery. I would go to the marches out of curiosity, not because of ideology. I was also a student and I wanted to know what was going on with those other students and workers holding signs. All of that started waking me up to the fact that society was not equal, and that’s why groups were protesting.

I also started to see what was going on with the civil rights movement in the United States. That really woke me up. You’re American, your country is an imperial power. It’s the developed world, the country that dictates the behavioral norms for the black diaspora in a lot of other countries. Our media gave airtime to the civil rights liberation movement because it was American. And I started paying attention to these movements in the United States, since I already identified with what was Americanized. What music did I listen to? American music. Which artists did I know about? American artists. Who was the king of my generation? Elvis Presley. Of course, no one said that everything Elvis learned came from Harlem, that he went to Harlem and found rock music, but that he was accepted because he was white.

When I started researching more about these US liberation movements, I identified with the Panthers. My world started to open up. They’re black just like me, they are part of the diaspora just like I am, and they’re doing this, they’re feeling this, imagine what we’re dealing with! We were the lowest of the low in Brazil because that idea of racial democracy reigned supreme. “Brazil isn’t like that. There’s no racism here. We’re all equal.” Why wasn’t there racism? Because black people were never at any negotiating table, because black people were unemployed, because they were drunk on the street, because they faced barriers at every turn – that’s why there wasn’t racism. That’s what a racial democracy is: black people in their place, which is no place at all.

Now, the way the TV portrayed what was going on in the US – everything except for Martin Luther King – made black people seem like troublemakers. That’s also interesting in light of Brazil. Television and media only represent a specific sector of society, that of the dominant class. They won’t open peoples’ eyes to the fact that black people are fighting because they want to be treated as equals, because they also want to have power, because they want everything that white people have. Angela Davis is practically a banned name in mainstream circles in the United States, and that’s because she openly identifies as a communist.

Artememoria: That last comment is an interesting point of intersection between racial struggle and class struggle. How did you see the dynamic between movements for racial justice and socialist movements in Brazil during the dictatorship? 

Pereira: We were a leftist black movement, and our demands didn’t clash with those of the left. But we were seen as entirely communist. The dictatorship lumped those of us involved in the black rights’ movement in with the socialists because we were seen as people who wanted to disturb public order, because we were seen as bringing up a problem that didn’t exist.

I thought Martin Luther King was so wholesome. He was a person with really excellent principles who believed in humanity, so much so that he was assassinated. Malcom X, who later would become one of my idols, was also assassinated. But he provoked society, he attacked society. He even argued for separation, a black United States and a white one, because there was never going to be equality and there was never even going to be dialogue. I thought that Malcom’s ideas were very relevant here in Brazil. Here, nothing came close to dialogue because the dictatorship implanted racial democracy as public policy, and various thinkers corroborated that philosophy. So what did we have? We didn’t have any thinkers to unmask that idea, we didn’t have anywhere to publish our ideas, we didn’t have space on TV to speak out, we didn’t have a radio station that would air us. We had a few newspapers, some pamphlets called Árvores das Palavras, and we would go out onto the streets distributing them to try to help black people see that what they were suffering wasn’t because they were incompetent, it wasn’t because they were less intelligent, it was because they had been inserted into this post-racist, post-slavery social structure.

Artememoria: In 1977 you published a manifesto about the discrimination against black women in the newspaper Versus entitled “Em defesa da dignidade das mulheres negras em uma sociedade racista” (“In Defense of the Dignity of Black Women in a Racist Society”). Was it this national and international context that led you to write that piece? 

Pereira: What led me to write that article is the fact that I really started to feel racism. It was very hard for me to get a job as a journalist, and I needed to work. I had been part of the counter-culture. When I discovered the hippie movement, I really identified with it because it was a movement about all kinds of freedom for young people. They had those beautiful clothes, amazing musicians, Woodstock. I started to go camping with friends on far off beaches and wore long colored skirts. We would date around because we were in favor of free love. But then I said no, I can’t keep following this movement because I have to work.

In Brazil, journalism is a white person’s profession. A profession for upper-middle-class white people. I would spend time with excellent journalists, but that wasn’t enough because I needed to make money. I got a job at the newspaper Diário Popular. I was thoroughly mistreated and was assigned the worst stories and the worst hours. Journalism in Brazil was, as it is today, an entirely unstable profession. When there were cuts, who was at the top of the list? I was. I moved from newspaper to newspaper, and it wasn’t possible to make a living. I went to local papers and worked in revision. I had a few extremely intelligent black friends who worked as editors, but because they were black, they weren’t able to work as reporters. All they could do was stay there, editing other journalists’ writing.

Once, the editor-in-chief and director of Diário Popular treated me extremely badly. I heard him say, “working at a newspaper isn’t for black people.” I told my dad about it, and he scheduled a meeting with the director. He said, “my daughter is an employee here, and in addition to working very hard, she does everything that the editors ask of her. She does not like that she is treated differently. She heard the editor-in-chief say that journalism isn’t for black people, and it’s not the first time she’s heard that.” And guess what happened. The boss said, “come on, that doesn’t exist! There’s no racism here. Look, let’s ask someone who knows us best. We really like her, she’s like family,” and he called over the black girl who cleaned and served coffee in the building, someone who I had barely spoken to before. ‘Isn’t that right? Girl, do you feel any sort of racism here?’ She said no. I don’t think she was even aware of what racism meant, you know? She was working for a boss who maybe treated her well, who paid her salary on time. My dad and I just looked at each other. That confirmed it.

They saw black women as domestic workers, prostitutes, or people who would serve you. So they would ask themselves, how could I, as a white person, me, as the owner of this newspaper, send this person out to cover a business meeting? How could I send her out to interview a doctor? I had a friend who was a photographer, one of the best, and he worked at Jornal da Tarde, the most revolutionary newspaper in the Brazilian press in the 70s. His name was Laércio and he kept his hair natural and wore sandals. He had to work on a piece about Erasmos Dias, who was a terror during the dictatorship. He was the man who invaded the Pontifical Catholic University. Laércio went with the team to report on the article. Erasmos Dias looked at the photographer and called the newspaper to say, how dare you send me this unkempt black person in sandals? Send him back.

It was in this context that I identified with the counter-culture aspect of the Black Panthers. I shared their socialist views, because I wanted to change society and was not in favor of capitalism, but I also saw the new aesthetic they had, the way they did their hair, wore leather jackets, celebrated the idea of black is beautiful, you know? It valued our culture. All of this went into my head when I was 18, 19, 20 years old. And all of it was new: I was discovering counterculture, the hippie movement, civil rights, resistance to the dictatorship here in Brazil, a movement that permeated all social classes. It involved action from the church, from the student movement, from the workers’ movement in São Bernardo. All of these sectors were struggling against the status quo, which was a state of exception that was arresting, killing, cornering everyone, that was censoring all of the art and writing. There were a range of independent leftist newspapers that were pushing against that and that worked to denounce the dictatorship’s arbitrary acts of violence. I thought, this is the kind of paper I need to work at. These are the people who I need to align myself with if I’m going to have a voice because I am a woman who is the target of a racist society.

Artememoria: What brought you to Versus specifically, and what the environment of that publication like? And, once in Versus, you came to develop your own insert for the newspaper called Afro Latino América. How did you organize that initiative?

Pereira: I started to take a look at the independent press, which had communist, socialist, Trotskyist, or anarchist editorial lines. They were the publications I identified with most. I went around to various leftist newspapers. I remember going to Opinião, to Movimento, and when I showed them my manifesto they wouldn’t take it. They said they didn’t want to raise a new issue that would divide the greater struggle, which was the class struggle and not the racial struggle. You’re bringing up two things that will divide the movement, they said, you’re bringing up race and gender. There are people on the left who think like that to this day.

I read Jornal da Tarde, which was a very liberal paper with excellent writers who had almost a literary approach to journalistic writing, and the editors of Versus were from Jornal da Tarde. Versus was a Trotskyist newspaper, but it was open to any journalism that had freedom of expression as its goal. It was an open-minded publication. So I brought my manifesto there, and I remember that Omar de Barros Filho, one of the editors who was most present in the newsroom because Marcão [Marcos Faerman] was always traveling, told me to leave it there and that they would read it. At least they kept the thing instead of sending me away with an apology. After three or four days they told me that they thought it was a great piece and that they were going to publish it. And they did publish it: an article written by a woman, discussing discrimination.

I want to be clear that I didn’t have a clear feminist vision when I was at Versus. I wrote the manifesto about discrimination against black women, something that I, as an individual, felt. I thought that other women would think, “I’m in the same position, I have a diploma and still I go through that, imagine what women who aren’t in that position must feel like? They must suffer more than I do.” I also wrote it because I was outraged. It was a way for me to vent about the way I felt treated in the world and why I refused to accept it. The interesting thing is that I went to a feminist newspaper and they didn’t accept the manifesto. The people who ended up accepting it were men. White, bourgeois, intellectual men from Rio Grande do Sul.

My feminism doesn’t come from Simone de Beauvoir, it comes from Angela Davis. She is almost my contemporary and, like me, she was thinking about racism. I broke through glass ceilings because I had to. I had to work, which meant working with others. I didn’t go to Versus to champion an ideological debate about gender. I didn’t have the time or the intellectual grounding to start that kind of discourse. I wanted them to give me space because black people needed to speak out. We needed to join the resistance movement that was growing in every sector of Brazilian society.

There was a writer at Versus, Oswaldo de Camargo, who worked in the newsroom along with Marcos Faerman. He said that he felt it was the moment for black people to speak out because, at that moment, every social group was unified in one common goal: to take down the dictatorship, the state of exception. Black people made up the only identity group that hadn’t organized. He talked about this in the newsroom, and thank the orishas, I walked in with my manifesto, my article. After that, I was always in the newsroom because I liked the environment. There was an influx of visual artists, writers, journalists, and musicians that came from all over Brazil. I stayed there, observing that space, and then the editors came to me and said: we want to give you space to work here with us. Do you know any black journalists? We want to give you guys stories. They didn’t know a single black journalist! I was the first black journalist that they had seen.

Versus was an intellectual, Trotskyist paper, so I had to find black writers in line with the publication’s philosophy. I remember going to Hamilton Bernardes Cardoso, a poet who made a living reciting his poetry in bars. I found him at the University of São Paulo and said, “Hamilton, let’s go do this, they’re going to give us space.” And he said, “Ah, Neusa, I’m not going there. With white people, when you get there, you actually can’t do anything.” I managed to convince him: “let’s at least try, these guys are giving us an opportunity. They’re going to give us four pages of the paper, the last four pages for us to talk about our concerns as black people.”

So I called up these friends and they agreed, and that’s how the Afro Latino América supplement was born. We made sure the name would incorporate Africa, Latin America, and North America. We would look at revolutionary movements in Brazil, Latin America, the United States, and Africa from a black perspective. The newspaper approached Latin America as a whole. Eduardo Galeano would frequent the newsroom and all Latin American writers had a voice in the paper. We were Trotskyists and what is Trotsky’s central philosophy? Permanent revolution. Trotsky said that socialism will never succeed unless it spreads globally.

Inside the Afro América Latina supplement in Versus.

The subtitle reads, “This newspaper is my revolver and my smile.”

Inside the Afro América Latina supplement in Versus.

The writers covered liberation struggles in the United States, as shown by this article on Martin Luther King Jr.

Inside the Afro América Latina supplement in Versus.

An article questions the myth of racial democracy.

Inside the Afro América Latina supplement in Versus.

A poetic homage to a Cuban boxer.

Versus was key to my intellectual and political education. I had access to so many books there. I read Dostoyevsky, The Insulted and Humiliated, which changed the way I thought about the world. I discovered Frantz Fanon, who was maybe the first black psychiatrist who discussed the psychological consequences of racism, not only for black people, but also for white people. It was because of the Black Panthers that I was able to reach the conclusion of my blackness, and my blackness was made up of black literature. I became an urban woman. I had this desire within me to explore the world, to discover the transformative power of human thought, one that sought to change the society in which I found it so hard to circulate, to act in a profession for which I had all of the requirements. When I went to the independent press, my goal wasn’t to start a fight. It was to take a stance, to speak out about what the official press wouldn’t publish. When you want to fight a system, you need to have another one to put in its place, and what did we want to put in its place? Something that we thought was more just, that would give more opportunities to people, that was less racist, that was more tolerant, that understood difference, that would create a new Brazil, that would expand our knowledge on an international scale, that would create an exchange of knowledge. If that’s what socialism means, then I’m a socialist.

Artememoria: You were arguing for all of these changes in the context of a military dictatorship. How did you manage to communicate openly about these issues while the dictatorial regime was in power? 

Pereira: Our goal was to end the dictatorship. We managed to do it, and we were persecuted, but we resisted. What I always say is that if you, in your internal ideology, manage to see and reject the inequality that exists in the world, then you have to act. It can’t just be discourse.

When I started at Versus I almost joined the Liga Operária.⁸⁹ I was a member of the convergência socialista,⁹⁰ I was in a cell of the convergência, which is why there was a file on me at the Department of Political and Social Order (DOPS). Beyond working at a leftist newspaper, they followed me because I was part of a cell associated with the socialist party. We were already being watched, but they really started to persecute us after we organized the public demonstration against racial discrimination. The regime said, ‘they’re bringing up an issue that doesn’t exist, they’re trying to disrupt public order.’ We denounced things that had never been openly discussed before.

Artememoria: Let’s turn to that public demonstration against racial discrimination in 1978. Can you describe how all of these ideas came together in that moment, leading to the formation of the Unified Black Movement in Brazil?

Pereira: The Unified Black Movement started within Versus. Afro Latino América woke young black people up to the fact that they didn’t have a voice, people who wanted the same things that we, young black journalists, wanted at the time. The white people from the paper had never seen so many black people inside the newsroom. It was a constant flux of young black people in and out of the building. There, we had an opening, a space to discuss everything.

Then a policeman killed a black worker, Robson Silveira da Luz. And there were four black athletes who were discriminated against in Clube Tietê. They weren’t allowed to enter the athletic club because of an idea that black people couldn’t go in the pool because their skin would infect the water. Versus was our bunker, and we on the left decided it was time to do something. It wasn’t enough to just write about it, because the paper had a limited circulation. It was sold in newsstands, the audience was white and intellectual. Our black audience was also intellectual. It wasn’t a newspaper of the masses in urban peripheries.

I think it was the first public demonstration against racial discrimination in Brazil that had an international response. Why? We were with white people. We were part of a multiracial organization. We were black journalists and white journalists, and the white journalists were from a major paper, Jornal da Tarde, and had international contacts. They told those contacts about the event. More than two thousand people were present at a demonstration on a weekday afternoon. Milton Barbosa, an activist who worked with black communities, Jamu Minka, and I went out onto the streets. In addition to guiding the demonstration intellectually, we had to write the articles that would be published on that day. We were able to get black organizations to support the demonstration, even though they were afraid. Speaking in any way made us a target during the dictatorship. Imagine going out onto the streets in the middle of São Paulo, with the DOPS right there next to Luz Station, where they were arresting people, killing people, and beating everyone up. Even though the black organizations were not leftist organizations, we managed to convince them to support our movement because it would be very important for black people. We printed pamphlets and distributed them at bus stations. We chose a location for the march where black people were used to meeting, in front of the Municipal Theater. There, every Friday, black people would come together there, everyone, the kids who were starting to get information about black music. For them, that place was already known.

It was bombastic. It was historic. The theater was hosting a big opera that day, and perfumed white people were leaving in their fancy cars, stepping on our signs, but it was wonderful because participants in the demonstration came from all over the state. People from the black movement from the entire state of São Paulo found ways to get there that day. Lélia Gonzalez was there, Abdias do Nascimento, Hamilton Bernardes Cardoso, all of the Versus team, international journalists, students, workers, and we spoke for hours, talking about all of the issues that were impeding our social, economic, and psychological process.

Women read a manifesto against racism suffered by black women at the public demonstration in 1978.

Photo by Rosa Gauditano. Used with permission.

Women hold a sign denouncing the “triple oppression” of race, gender, and class during the public demonstration in 1978.

Photo by Rosa Gauditano. Used with permission.

Artememoria: If you had to summarize, what was the Unified Black Movement’s goal in that first, incipient moment?

Pereira: To rediscover our true history. To demystify what official history said about us, for us to see ourselves as producers of knowledge, as beings capable of social transformation, and, above all, to expose the fact that Brazil was not a racial democracy. Much to the contrary, it was one of the most racist countries in the world, if not the most racist.

That is why we went out onto the streets. We went to expose the dictatorship, whatever the consequence. We went to question official history. Our liberator is not Princess Isabel because we’ve been fighting for our freedom since the moment we were put onto the first slave ship. We do not compromise. Our liberator is Zumbi, Zumbi dos Palmares! He established Brazil’s first socialist republic where black, white, and indigenous people lived together with common goals. Like us, he rejected the status quo of his moment. We also wanted to reject the status quo of our moment, refuting all that we had been taught in school about how black people are lazy, how black people aren’t smart. What had we done in our pages in Versus? We started to highlight black artists, we started to rediscover and rewrite society, thinking of a new society with participation from black people. We started to value Afro-Brazilian religions, we started to frame Zumbi as our hero, we started to talk about diversity quotas, we started to write about black workers who fought for labor rights. I wrote a story about that, called “Tião Tião.” The working class had so many black people that official history does not show.

Racism is a psychological and educational issue. Changing a political system will not end racism. But, at the time, we needed change to an open government in which you could say that racism exists, in which the state will revisit education. You have to show people that the black person is someone who thinks, who contributes to the social development of humanity. You need an education that revises the way in which history is told, that revises our values.

Artememoria: How do you see recent political events in Brazil in light of the history that you just laid out?

Pereira: In the 1970s, we went onto the streets because one black person was killed. How many are killed today? So many, because it is a way to end the black male population, to kill black men or put them in jail. Mass incarceration mostly affects black and mixed race people in Brazil, and society will not accept you if you are an ex-con. If people with PhDs can’t find jobs in Brazil, imagine someone who just got out of jail, with all of the stigma tied to that condition.

The shift to the far right in Brazil happened just when we started to see changes. Where did those changes come from? From social movements that began to make demands. They wanted a more equal society with more opportunities for education and work, with quality universal health care. They started to recognize the importance of environmental preservation in a still non-industrial, developing world context in which we still depend on the environment so heavily.

Artememoria: What does your activism look like in this new context? Do you have any advice to pass along to someone who is in social movements in the current moment, struggling against the immense challenges that Brazil faces?

Pereira: Something I always say is that the revolution starts within you. What I demand is education. I demand schools that are open the entire day, where materials, food, and extra curricular programming are provided. I demand that businesses provide language study to their employees and leave a few spots open for those who are not in their company. I demand universal health care.

Right now, I organize a publication called Escrita Feminina. We’ve only published one issue of this paper for women who are in Class C and nearly Class B⁹¹ and who live in the periphery. We talk about the needs of these women. I also give lectures and work with neighborhoods to make demands. For example, in the neighborhood where I live, we need more doctors to work in the clinics. We need our bus stations to be covered for the rain, because when you live in that part of the periphery, they put a covered bus station on one side of the street and not the other. I’ve worked on education at the CASA Foundation,⁹² where I taught classes that value our culture and show students the racism that they didn’t even realize was happening, because it happened inside of them.

Under the dictatorship, we came to the conclusion that we needed to be out on the streets. Writing isn’t enough. As a friend of mine once said, everyone writes. I want you up in arms, I want you organizing a protest, I want to see you occupying space. We came together and, in addition to our intellectualized motives, we made sure to have a concrete reason to do so. For us, that reason was the death of the black worker and discrimination against the athletes. So we came together with core demands because things like killing young boys will only change if society changes. These were our concrete reasons for going to the streets.

When I was brought up, black people were made out to be victims, but they were also made to feel guilty for being black. We showed our pride. We do not have any shame in saying that we have suffered from racism and that we are discriminated against. And today, our struggle continues.

Neusa Maria Pereira is a Brazilian journalist and educator. After graduating from the Cásper Líbero University in São Paulo, she worked as a journalist for major media outlets as well as for the newspaper Versus, an important publication in the alternative press under Brazil’s military dictatorship. She was part of the circle that founded the country’s Unified Black Movement and has also mobilized black women through various other groups. Currently, Neusa Maria Pereira directs the publisher Abayomi Communications, which she founded, and continues to fight for the rights of black Brazilians through educational initiatives.

1. Machadiano: a scholar of the works of famed black Brazilian author Machado de Assis. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machado_de_Assis.
2. Liga Operária: a socialist and Trotskyist worker’s organization that existed in Brazil from 1972-1978.
3. Convergência socialista: a Trotsykist organization that existed in Brazil from 1978 to 1992.
4. Class C and B are categories in Brazil’s socioeconomic class system defined by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. In terms of access to education, members of Class C have generally finished high school and even some technical training; members of Class B have attended university. For more, see: https://thebrazilbusiness.com/article/social-classes-in-brazil-1453802521.
5. CASA Foundation: refers to the Centro de Atendimento Socioeducativo ao Adolescente. For more, see: http://www.fundacaocasa.sp.gov.br/.

What does it mean to live through a period of state violence – and then write about it from a distance? Ivone Benedetti’s 2016 novel Cabo de Guerra (Tug of War) represents what happened during Brazil’s military dictatorship through a male narrator who, in 2009, deliriously looks back on his experiences as a double agent for the leftist resistance and the repressive State during the dictatorial period. Here, Benedetti speaks with Artememoria about her experience writing that book as someone who experienced the dictatorship firsthand. The resulting conversation about issues ranging from political memory to religion to gender in first-person narration is key to understand representing histories of violence through fiction.

Artememoria: One impressive quality of your novel Cabo de Guerra (Tug of War) is the way in which the book approaches time. The narrative includes the beginning of the dictatorial regime and stretches all the way through the period of amnesty, and then it also takes on the memories of that era in the 21^st century. How did you get the idea to write about the military dictatorship with such a vast scope?

Ivone Benedetti: The book actually deals with two moments in time. There is time in the present, which takes place over three days, and then there is the character’s memory, which stretches from 1969-1984 and contains the majority of the action. In a sense, this was a way for me to express something that existed inside of me as memory. I lived through the period of military rule; the 1964 coup happened when I was seventeen years old and I started college at the height of it all. And then all of those years passed until 2009, which is when the narrator remembers the dictatorship.

Writing about that period was something that I always wanted to do. I wanted to and was afraid to at the same time. Even though the book has a lot of my memories and experiences, I also separated myself, as an author, from what takes place. I use the intermediary of a first-person male narrator who remembers what he experienced, and that’s what distances me from the plot. Maybe this indirect way of discussing the period represents the ambiguous relationship I have to that moment in time, a relationship of both attraction and avoidance.

I think that what we are experiencing now is a more frenetic continuation of the military dictatorship that lasted from 1964-1985. If I had written the novel now, it might be very different.

Artememoria: The fragmentation between the two moments in time, 2009 and the dictatorship, is an important aspect of the text. Often, memory triggers, like images, sounds, and smells, are what inspire the transitions between the text’s two temporalities. Did you source these physical traces of the dictatorship period in the text vestiges of your own memories?

Benedetti: Cities live in our memories. We have a geography of memory that differs from physical geography. You feel that when you visit a place that you know really well. You get there and see that some buildings have been demolished and others have been built in their place, but inside your mind the city is how it was before. You ask yourself that old, poetic, philosophical question: where did it all go?

When I was writing this book, the sounds, the smells, the environment of the city from that time arose within me. If you look closely at the text, the events in São Paulo all take place in a small section of the city, which is more or less central, and runs roughly from Vila Buarque to Maria Antônia Street. I have so many memories from that part of the city. The part about the popcorn man is true, for example. He really existed. The tram tracks that went to Liberdade Avenue were really getting torn up. It was a moment when the city tram system was being phased out as part of the modernization project that the military was trying to do at the time. The huge influx of cars into the city, of gasoline, that was all part of pulling out all of the city trams. It was almost a vision of the apocalypse. Wherever you went, all of the streets were ripped up, cobblestone streets pitted, metal tracks resting against walls after having been pulled from the ground. These were the sorts of fragments that I began putting together in the book.

Artememoria: How did you go about structuring the various fragments, both in terms of memories and the fictional components? What were some of your major decisions as an author?

Benedetti: I often say that the most difficult thing for me is to find the tone of a book. It’s like how a musician who composes music has to choose the key in which he will write the song. This is the same thing. The book started out in third person. I knew that there would be a man who would witness an event by accident, and that he would use that to blackmail someone. From that start the events that happened in Santos started arising, the fact that a soldier was involved. After writing for a while in third person, I realized that it wouldn’t work because I wanted to enter the intimate thoughts of the narrator. I needed to use first person.

When I started writing in first person. I began to worry if I would know how to write in first person from a male perspective. I began to situate the character, thinking, this is a guy who isn’t from São Paulo, and then the great idea of using my husband’s experiences came to me. The region where the character is from is where my husband is from. For years, my husband would wake up and say, “I dreamed about Nazaré.” He would tell me, “Nazaré is a magical city, Nazaré had haunted factories, in Nazaré there was a train that went up a hillside, but it couldn’t make it up so it had to come back down and then build up speed in order to go up the slope.” I would ask him why he didn’t write about it, and he said he someday would. He never did, and so I told him that I would. I absorbed all of Nazaré from him.

In Bahia there was a lot of immigration from Spain, so I added a Spanish grandfather and former priest, which began forming the aspect of the novel that deals with religion. That’s a very important part of the book. It is the mystical and metaphysical dimension that underlies the text, which is something people often don’t notice.

Artememoria: That religious dimension also has an interesting parallel to the political themes at hand. In the same way that the narrator has flashbacks to the past, he hallucinates more religious, mystical images.

Benedetti: Exactly. There’s an issue of ambiguity at hand, of how certain things are indecipherable.

Artememoria: It’s an interesting choice to use such an unreliable narrator, in fact. The main character is not the typical protagonist of the military dictatorship, regardless of whether you are leftwing or rightwing in Brazil. He isn’t a hero, he isn’t brave. He is weak and has serious mental health problems. Why did you choose such an ambiguous, untrustworthy narrator?

Benedetti: That ambiguity, that lack of clear-cut decisions, is very specific to Brazil. To be clear, I don’t mean that this character is a typical Brazilian, but rather that the confusion he experiences is our nation’s confusion.

During the dictatorship, I lived in a student bubble with grand revolutionary aspirations. Countless friends of mine joined the guerilla resistance and died. I chose not to join. I knew that I wasn’t made for that, but so many people went, brilliant people who, had they lived in a freer, less tumultuous moment, would have contributed so much to the development of this country. However, we were living an optical illusion. That bubble was much smaller than we thought it was. So much of the country was unaware of what was going on, in part because of censorship, and in part because of support for the regime.

You may have noticed that there is a tendency in Brazil to accept or even wish for strongman regimes. There is a video in which Christian Dunker analyzes this fact. He says that Brazilians desire these strongman systems because they feel that our institutions do not work. They think that democracy makes institutions lax, and so they want someone to set up a tight-fisted regime that will force everything to work. That’s his analysis. I think it goes even deeper. I think that religion, for many sectors of Brazilian society, ends up being a way to delegate responsibility to a higher power. Brazilians are not the agent in their own stories. A higher power resolves all of the problems in their lives, down to the simplest things, like a bus coming on time.

Artememoria: That notion is certainly present in the novel. The main character needs religion in order to chart out a path as his mental health deteriorates.

Benedetti: But he’s also dense. For example, when he leaves the Praça da Sé, he remembers a passage from John in which Jesus argues with a priest, and both accuse the other of being the Devil. The narrator had just had a conversation with a policeman, and it’s at that precise moment that the passage he and his grandfather had talked about comes back to him. But he’s incapable of understanding why, he’s incapable of understanding anything. It’s too complex.

Artememoria: Let’s turn to the choice to use a male perspective. Even though that choice distances you as an author from the plot of the novel, there are a few interesting moments in which the reader can tell that the writer is a woman, specifically in how the female characters in the text are represented as complex and vivid characters who constantly surprise the sexist, male narrator. How was your experience of writing women through the male eye?

Benedetti: I was outside of the female perspective, writing the women through the male point of view. Do you think my construction of the female characters was artificial?

Artememoria: No, it was very much within the male point of view. The narrator, even the women, form a very sexist lens, like when he sexualizes Samira as she expresses her pain. That’s something that a typical, uncritical male character would definitely do. But, at the same time, details arise that most male authors would often fail to note, like the fact that Samira doesn’t orgasm during sex.

Benedetti: I’ve noticed that. A lot of male authors replicate this idea of their own sexual prowess, their ability to make a woman have amazing orgasms. Female characters written by men can be orgasm machines.

Artememoria: So when you wrote the actions of women in the book, were you just thinking about how women would act in that context?

Benedetti: Yes, I was. On the other hand, for the male side of things, I was often unsure. Would a man act like that? But I had my consultant, my husband. We would have long conversations about how the narrator would react in a given moment. One thing I had a lot of fun with was writing the scene when he meets Jandira, who had just gotten promoted. He’s pissed off, because she suddenly has higher status than he does, and so when he goes out with her he makes a point of checking out other women and not sleeping with her. In a way, he’s trying to maintain his power in the relationship, but he ends up regretting it the next day, since he didn’t get any. It was fun to write because I really do know men who act like that.

Artememoria: Did you have any important literary influences that affected the way you constructed these characters or the way you wrote about the military dictatorship more generally?

Benedetti: I wasn’t reading anything at the time. It was very hard to write this book, and I took a deep dive into this unconventional character, psychologically speaking. There was definitely some long-term influence from Russian authors like Dostoevsky, but that was just an echo of my past reading.

Artememoria: At the beginning of this conversation, you mentioned if you were writing this novel now, it might be a very different book. And, in fact, you begin one of the novel’s chapters by discussing the intertwined relationship between past and present: “On this morning in 2009, it reality hits me: this story is forty years old. It’s in the past. Or it should be. Because the past that never happened just won’t go away, it stays on to torment you, demanding to be called the present, occupying closets, chairs, always there, always here.” How is the military dictatorship occupying space in the current political moment?

Benedetti: The past is always affected by the present. It should be the opposite. The present is a continuity of the past, but at the moment that you start dealing with the past, it changes based on the moment that you are currently experiencing. That is essential. When I wrote this in 2009, it seemed as though democracy was consolidating in Brazil. A regressive shift to an authoritarian system wasn’t on the horizon. But after 2009, and specifically during the political shift from 2014-2019, it has been crucial to revisit memories of the past in order to understand what is happening at a national level.

Some small details of the book, like the conversation between the narrator and his handler at the end of the amnesty process, are aspects of the text I would develop further. It’s because of that moment that there are such grave continuities with the dictatorship. There was never a cathartic break in the system. In fact, a lot of the figures from the 1964-1985 military dictatorship are long-term character types in Brazilian history. Since there were never any real ruptures, figures in Brazil pass from one period to the next. In 1964, you had actors who were also active in the 1930s [during the Estado Novo dictatorship]. From 1964 to the 21^st century, you also have continuity because there was never a real rupture. The president just ordered the military to celebrate the day of the coup. This resurgence of the past, which has now appeared with force, wasn’t on the horizon in 2009. But I always thought it could return, and today, I still know that it could happen again..

Ivone Benedetti is a novelist, literary translator, and academic from São Paulo. She received her PhD in literature from the University of São Paulo and has translated authors such as Umberto Eco, Mario Vargas Llosa, Leonardo Padura, Michel Foucault, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Her debut novel Immaculada (Immaculate) was a finalist for the São Paulo Prize for Literature in 2010, and, in 2011, she released a book of short stories entitled Tenho um cavalo alfaraz (I Have a Nimble Horse). In addition to her fiction, Benedetti has published a variety of books about the craft of translation.

For Adriana Lisboa, feminism and politics are not an intentional part of her literary project. And yet, while exploring affective relationships, journeys, and personal transformation, the contemporary novelist writes narratives driven by independent female characters that explore the political contexts of Brazil and the United States. One of her books, Azul Corvo (Crow Blue), published in 2014, follows a young teenage girl who travels from Brazil to Colorado alone. Displaced from her home, culture, and language, she meets a former member of the armed guerilla resistance during Brazil’s military dictatorship, who provides a new lens on her country of origin. In this interview, Lisboa speaks to Artememoria about the relationship between politics and the personal and how writing gender and dictatorship has changed in recent decades, all in the context of her uniquely transnational perspective.

Artememoria: Can you speak to the experience of writing so many independent female characters in Azul Corvo? Was focusing on female characters one of ideas behind the book, or did that dimension of the work arise as you were writing?

Adriana Lisboa: Ever since I published my first novel twenty years ago, the question of female characters was always central for me. Not necessarily in the sense of me championing a cause, because it was never a political project. I started writing female characters because of my own experiences as a woman. I don’t write auto-fiction and I don’t intend to, but I do think that my experience of motherhood, of the relationship between mother and child, is very interesting to explore in fiction. The question of female autonomy is also very present, perhaps because I grew up at a moment when my family transitioned from women who were not autonomous to women who managed to become autonomous. That stays with me. In a sense, I am always creating a single mother or a daughter who travels alone to another country. There is some sort of cry for independence in almost all of my novels, but effective relationships rather than a specific political goal are what interests me in fiction.

Artememoria: Those relationships are certainly interesting, also in terms of the different historical moments you explore in your novels. Many of your books are contemporary, but Azul Corvo has a plot that spans across generations. Do you think that the characters in that novel reflect a specific moment for feminism?

Lisboa: That’s interesting, because I was born in 1970. I grew up and spent my teen and adult years in a generation that didn’t discuss feminism very much. It’s as though my generation – and I mean that concept of generation in a very narrow sense – saw feminism as something that had already happened, which was incorrect, of course. When I published Sinfonia em Branco (Symphony in White), which in my opinion is my most feminist novel, that dimension of the text was hardly discussed. Beatriz Rezende, a critic who explores feminism in literature, was one of the few people who did comment on it, but other critics did not read the book from that lens.

Feminism and the memory of dictatorship can actually both be explored simultaneously. When I started writing and publishing books, both were seen as issues of the past. There was an idea that we needed to turn the page and begin a new generation. And now, we suddenly saw the world turn upside down as so many countries in the world regressed, perhaps following the path of the United States. I think that Trump’s election opened up a Pandora’s box, and we saw other leaders come to power since. However, the issues of feminism and historical memory have returned to the spotlight after remaining buried and hushed for so many years

It’s interesting to see how so many women writers define themselves as feminists today. If you go on Mídia Ninja and read the columns, almost all of the female writers begin by saying they are feminists. Ten years ago, that wouldn’t have happened. Brazilian women who were intellectuals, writers, and artists didn’t define themselves as feminists, maybe because it would have sounded a bit passé if they had. “What is that woman doing? Does she think she’s in 1960?” it was a different time. Suddenly, this topic becomes prominent in a very affirmative way. That is a change that I’ve seen over my twenty-year career. Feminism has returned and assumed a central role, alongside historical memory, especially in terms of dictatorship memory. It’s as though our context has demanded that shift.

Artememoria: Yes, there is certainly an immediate relevance to the historical memory of the dictatorship in the present moment. Interestingly, though, you wrote Azul Corvo at a moment when its relevance wasn’t immediately apparent, when it wasn’t a popular topic. Why did you choose to make one character a former member of the guerilla resistance when you were writing the book?

Lisboa: Azul Corvo was the first novel I wrote after having moved to the United States. It was my first experience as an immigrant while I was a writer. I had lived outside of Brazil as a teenager, but I of course wasn’t writing professionally at that point. The novel was a milestone in my personal trajectory. It marked the moment in which I arrived in a new country and saw everything through the eyes of someone who understands almost nothing and who, at the same time, looks back in an effort to understand what is no longer their everyday reality. It was a limbo of sorts, and that’s why I made the narrator, Vanja, a teenager. I think of adolescence as a kind of limbo between childhood and adulthood, a gray zone, a bit undefined.

Since Vanja looks back to the country she left behind, I wanted her to have a dialogue with another character who could explain what that country was. She might not have really understood Brazil, just as a lot of people from her generation didn’t. That was the case for me. I went to school in the 1970s and 1980s. So much of my official education happened under the dictatorship. We learned very little in terms of critical thinking. We didn’t have philosophy classes and, because of censorship, the national history that we were taught was very constrained and scripted. Vanja is heir to all of that. When she arrives in a new place and looks back to see what exactly she had left behind, she needs a kind of translator, you could say. That’s Fernando, who is the polar opposite of not knowing. He’s a character who had physically been there, who knows about everything, who even knows more than he’d have wanted to know. He was so involved that he ends up isolating himself, fleeing in the name of self-preservation.

For me, writing about that period was a way of settling the score with myself, with my own education, and with the way I had been raised. I am from a middle class family, one that wasn’t a family of activists against the system, even though it was by no means right-wing. I studied in a Catholic school in Rio de Janeiro. When I started thinking about Azul Corvo and how I would return to that time in history, I realized that the guerilla movement in Araguaia was almost a myth. It was rarely discussed, badly explored, and history books hardly discussed that specific guerilla movement. Because of the lack of references to Araguaia, especially in fiction, I decided to go back to that particular moment in the past, which was something that happened right around the time I was born, in fact.

Artememoria: A few issues you bring up here are actually key to the question of how to build collective memory. You learned about something you did not directly experience, even though you were in the country. It is a memory, but it is a bit distant. That notion is especially present in Vanja’s character. She’s young enough to experience “post-memory” – memory that is passed down from earlier generations. When you wrote this kind of distanced memory, how did you go about researching the topic in order to represent it?

Lisboa: I was lucky enough to meet a journalist named Taís Morais, who wrote a book that was an essential reference for me. She and Eumano Silva wrote Operação Araguaia (Operation Araguaia), which launched right at the moment I began writing Azul Corvo. It’s a historical book, a nonfiction investigation, but it reads like a novel. It has a kind of journalistic rendering of events that is very detailed and very well done. It’s an account of what the guerilla movement was, how it started, and what happened afterwards. Taís Morais had access to all of the files that the military had released up until that point. I sought Taís out, we chatted and sent some messages back and forth, and I ended up basing one of my characters on a real person. He was someone who didn’t leave Brazil, but ran away, deserting the guerillas, and to this day doesn’t want to discuss what happened because of deeply engrained fear. I think these things are always complex, and I tried to make that appear in my construction of Fernando, too, a character who escapes to save his own skin, but who leaves a lot behind in the process. He leaves behind his ideological commitment, his ethics, and love. Taís read Azul Corvo after I had written it to see if I had rendered the period well.

Artememoria: Let’s return to a topic that you mentioned earlier. You said that the book is centered on a kind of limbo, an in-between. Another closely related theme is the question of a search for identity. Almost every character seems to be searching for something, sometimes something that disappeared, and often that search is very specific, personal, and internal. How do these individual searches tied to identity relate to the more political dimensions of the book, such as dictatorship and feminism? 

Lisboa: I think that political life and personal life can only be separated in the abstract. How is it possible to be apolitical? People say that they don’t like to talk politics, but how can you not exist in the world? Everything that happens politically relates to each of us on the most miniscule level of our lives. A decision in Washington affects health care, which affects if people can go to the doctor, buy medicine, and take care of their family. There isn’t that distance that so often seems to exist, as though our personal issues were somehow in opposition to a political collective.

The searches my characters embark on are very personal, as you said. These searches are fundamentally seeking a place, not necessarily a geographical place, but rather an affective place. A home in the sense of affection, not romantic affection but that of family and close friends. The characters are seeking that place, and everything in this world is relevant to their search for identity. It’s as though the macro, or the collective, and the micro, or the individual, are always in exchange, constantly communicating across a porous border.

Artememoria: The search for this abstract, affective place is set in a geographical in-between, in the immigrant experience to a new country. As an author, you also occupy that limbo between Brazil and the United States. Do you look to Brazil or the United States when you write novels that are set between the two countries? What are your literary influences for writing these transnational novels?

Lisboa: That’s a question that has always been difficult for me to answer, since for every project I don’t know whether it is my choice of reading that came first, influencing my literary project, or if it is the project that influences the reading.

But this idea of spatial displacement has been with me for many years and began with my novel Rakushisha (Hut of Fallen Persimmons). The starting point of the novel is a trip that the poet Basho took through Japan 400 years ago. I found Basho’s travel diaries from when he traveled by foot through Japan. The diaries are beautiful and I got very interested in fictionally working the diaries into a book. Rakushisha is about a trip to Japan, and ever since, the theme of displacement has been with me, growing more profound in every novel. The first novel on this theme is simply about a trip to Japan in search of the poet’s memory. Azul Corvo came next, and it’s another trip, but one that involves the theme of migration, the question of what it means to be an immigrant when you are in a comfortable situation versus when you don’t have the legal permission to be where you are. It also involves a journey to the past, that act of looking back towards the historical past of the country that was left behind.

Influences come from the most unexpected sources, you know? Reading a Japanese poet from 400 years ago generated ideas that I have explored for twelve years. Voyages and migration are very important themes for me in increasingly sophisticated ways. In my new novel, I even talk about animal migration: the living body of either human or animal that moves and what that means, what that represents.

Artememoria: How does the current political context in the United States influence your approach to the theme of immigration?

Lisboa: I see migration as a consequence of certain issues that maybe don’t seem so urgent. For example, issues related to ecology are being ignored, as well as actively dismantled, by the current administration. Once again, we know that there are huge repercussions throughout the world. Climate change and the effects of climate change will likely result in groups of people who have to leave their home countries because of natural disasters. Once again, we see how certain political decisions have personal consequences at an individual scale. And this is a global problem, not something limited to the US or Brazil.

Another issue tied to living in the United States is seeing the US ordering or carrying out wars under completely pro forma justifications and then watching as refugees that these wars have generated try to reach Europe, simply in order to live. They want to get to a place where they can have the basic minimum of existence. All of this used to be very circumstantial, but the events are becoming epidemic rather than endemic. They’re no longer issues that relate to a specific society, to a country. Now, they relate to the entire world. I have been reflecting on the question of migration in that sense, and exploring how our presence and decisions as humans on the planet don’t only affect us, but other species: there are a variety of animal species that will also suffer the consequences of our decisions.

Artememoria: Your work traverses borders – between countries, languages, species. However, not everyone looks across borders in the same way. While many people in Brazil look towards the United States as a result of global, imperialistic power structures, few people in the United States look towards Brazil. When they do, it is often because of a very specific situation, like the Rio 2016 Olympics. In this context, when you write books that move between Brazil and the US, how do North American readers receive the content about Brazil?

Lisboa: It’s usually a big surprise for readers. Generally speaking, people in the US don’t read very much translated literature. Brazil is very distant. It might conjure up some associations, maybe people think a bit about nature or about the violence that gets on the news. The elections last year were very peripheral in terms of news coverage here. There are some news outlets that covered it, like Democracy Now! and Glenn Greenwald, a journalist who consistently speaks about Brazil, but mainstream media, highly educated people, and people who could be considered leftists didn’t really grasp what was going on.

When Azul Corvo came out, I had the chance to do some readings. When I wasn’t in academic environments with people who already studied these issues, readers were really surprised. They said, oh my god, there was a communist guerilla movement in the Amazon rainforest? That’s so exotic. Everything was taken as a bit surreal, supernatural. Brazil is far into the periphery, especially in terms of our literature.

Artememoria: Zooming out, how do you see the role of memory in your overall work?

Lisboa: Lately I’ve been reading about the Buddhist concept of time, which differs from the concept in western philosophy. In the west, time is a continuum. Past reaches the present and the present evolves into the future. In certain eastern philosophies such as Buddhism, time is only the present. Past and future exist only as components of that present. There isn’t anything that you could call the past or anything that you could call the future without recognizing that these two concepts are contingent on the present.

I have always tried to work with the idea of memory in what I write. Because it is a component of the present, memory is a way of giving body and substance to the present. In that sense, my characters are who they are and do what they do because of a past, because of memory, a kind of memory that is relevant to their present-day lives.

Adriana Lisboa is a writer from Rio de Janeiro who publishes fiction, poetry, short stories, and books for children. Her novel Sinfonia em branco (Symphony in White) won the José Saramago Award, and her novel Azul Corvo (Crow Blue) was chosen as a book of the year by The Independent. A widely translated author, Lisboa has work published in over twenty countries, and her poems and short stories have appeared in a range of publications including Modern Poetry in Translation, Asymptote Journal, and Granta. Lisboa received her PhD in Comparative Literature at the State University of Rio de Janeiro and has been a visiting scholar at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, at the University of Texas at Austin, and at the University of New Mexico, as well as writer in residence at the University of California Berkeley. She currently lives in Austin, Texas.