Our future in Brazil

Rio de Janeiro's bookstores are full of clues, signs of political resistance. Folha Seca has left portraits of Lula demanding his release from prison in various corners of the store and is proud that its anti-fascist (and beer-drinking) street soccer club has been symbolically fighting Bolsonaro for twelve years. Another classic bookstore in the city center, Leonardo Da Vinci, which displays an "anti-racist library" on one of its tables, calls itself a "Place of ideas, freedom, resistance, and utopia."

When on the return flight, at the recommendation of cultural critic Cora Rónai and bookseller Rui Campos—whose Travessa bookstore chain celebrates half a century this year—I read O primeiro leitor. Ensaio de memória, the celebrated memoir by Luis Schwarcz, the editor of Companhia das Letras, I came across several pages dedicated to the far right: “Unfortunately, in recent years there have been frequent attempts at censorship for moral reasons in Brazil,” both in private schools and in the public sphere, at the initiative of Bolsonarista deputies. Jeferson Tenório received death threats on his Instagram account in 2022 for his novel El reverso de la piel (Textofilia / L'Agulla Daurada), which had won the prestigious Jabuti Prize. It was withdrawn from schools in several states: “Behind all of this lies hidden racism, transforming a work that denounces police violence against Black people into a pornographic novel.”

Stefan Zweig did not suspect the two paradoxes that would come

Schwarcz then evokes the desire for editorial and media control of the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, whose existence has been reminded to us by the Oscar for Best International Film for Walter Salles's moving I Am Still Here , but my head was already elsewhere, he had traveled back to the early 1940s, when Stefan Zweig published Brazil, Country of the Future (Capitán Swing), a very enthusiastic essay, in which he noted the absence in his adopted country of the demons that had expelled him from Europe: fascism, exclusionary nationalism, racism. This, obviously, was structural, but could not be compared at that time with what Hitler had turned into a systematic extermination.

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The author of The World of Yesterday (Acantilado / Quaderns Crema) saw in Brazil a possible future for humanity, unaware of the two paradoxes to come. The first was that fascism arrived there after the writer's suicide, first with Nazi refugees, then with a coup d'état; the second was that what is happening here now, the rise of the far right, is already partially a thing of the past. That's why we can find advice and possible paths from Brazilian booksellers and publishers, like this one from Schwarcz: "Right-wing books that express positions different from mine are part of the publisher's catalog. Anti-democratic texts are not."