Most of us will never experience what young Valdeck Almeida de Jesus experienced. From falling into a cesspool and playing among garbage to collecting bones to sell and avoiding snakes on his walk to school, Valdeck recounts his family's hard life day by agonizing day in this moving memoir. Translated from Portuguese, Memories from Brazilian Hell follows Valdeck, his parents, and his seven brothers and sisters as they survived poverty, class and racial marginalization, debilitating health problems, and financial crises while living in the Bahian region of Brazil. Amidst these hardships, they struggled to meet their basic human needs for shelter, food, and medical and dental care. Despite the overwhelming odds, Valdeck and his family spectacularly overcame the obstacles they faced. Without losing faith in the future, despite uncertainty and doubt, every member of the Almeida family achieved his or her goals; each making a mark on the world. As Valdeck's history unfolds, his story becomes one of self-realization, knowledge, and empowerment. Valdeck's memories are infused with hope and illustrate that if anguished Brazilians can believe in their country and be resilient, they can fight for and achieve their ideals. This book gives voice to all those who have suffered society's inequities.
Summary Valdeck Almeida de Jesus s Memorial do Inferno: A Saga da Família Almeida no Jardim do Éden, now thankfully translated into English, is a moving memoir of the author s youth, upbringing and early adulthood in his native Bahia. De Jesus s account is important for many reasons, but one of the most significant is its novelty: it is perhaps the first such work of its kind, a nonfictional, autobiographical narrative, written and published in Brazil, by a self-identified black, gay, and working-class Brazilian. It consequently occupies a keystone place at the point where Brazilian, black, LGBTQ and working-class literary traditions intersect. Novelty of topic, however, is only one noteworthy aspect of Memorial do Inferno: it is a vibrant and affecting narrative that does not stint in its portrayal of the struggles—and the attendant joy—that the political and social marginalization and oppression, in the forms of poverty, racism and classism, have imposed upon the vast majority of Brazil s people. The journey that de Jesus makes over his 42 years is one of increasing self-realization, self-knowledge, and self-empowerment. Memorial do Inferno is, then, a work of self-fashioning, in which a young man from a large and impoverished family living in Jequié, in the rural interior of Bahia, one of Brazil s best known and populous states, as well as the one with the largest percentage population of African-descendant people, manages to overcome the odds arrayed against him, eventually pursuing studies for a while in nursing and letters at a state university, before moving to the 450-year-old metropolis and first Brazilian capital of Salvador da Bahia, the Black Rome. One there, de Jesus is able to further his education, mature into adulthood, and launch his literary career, one of whose achievements is this book. The contours of de Jesus s story, whose parallels can be found throughout the annals of literature, are universal. The particularities of his experience, however, are his own, and crucial, given the national literary context, to establishing the memoir s singularity. Brazil s literary traditions span more than 500 years, making them among the oldest in the Americas. Over that period, however, the presence and prominence of African-descendant writers, especially before the late 19th century, has been relatively low, despite the fact that Brazil has had and continues to possess the largest population of people of African descent outside of continental Africa. This stands in contrast, for example, to the United States s literary traditions, to which black writers have made significant contributions since the 18th century and within which they have cumulatively created an internationally recognized literature. In his study Race and Color in Brazilian Literature, David Brookshaw attributes the Brazilian situation to several factors, identifying one of the most important as the absence of overt racial and ethnic segregation in Brazil, unlike in the US, where legalized segregation and oppression over centuries has had the effect of fostering political, social and cultural solidarity and autonomy for black Americans, with one of the results being an autonomous black literature (Brookshaw, 1986, 175-176). Brookshaw also notes that in Brazil, the related concept of racial democracy has been mobilized to downplay or hide racism, racial supremacy and the attendant ideology of social and cultural whitening (branqueamento), and structural racial discrimination, all of which have combined to disadvantage Afrobrazilians in political, economic and social terms, with the result that the absence or exclusion of black writers did not provoke much commentary, including from some of Brazil s most important African-descendant writers, such as the late 19th century literary titan Machado de Assis, until this century. While black writers are now recognized participants in the development Brazil s literary traditions, their prominence relative to the size of the Brazilian African-descendant population remains small. With Brazilian queer literature, which emerged as a distinct category in the latter half of the 20th century (though one of the foundational texts in this tradition, Bom Crioulo, by Adolfo Caminha, appeared as far back as 1895, and a mixed-race queer writer like Mário de Andrade played a foundational role in 20th century Brazilian Modernism), specifically during the period of the political opening, or abertura, in the latter years of the military dictatorship (1978-1984), the absence of African-descendant writers is conspicuous. In his discussion of the writings of the late Gaúcho writer, Caio Fernando Abreu, critic Fernando Arenas lists the important male Brazilian prose writers and poets who have dealt overtly with homosexual or bisexual themes. A study of his list reveals that only a few of these writers, such as the poet Valdo Motta, are black or of self-identified African descent (Arenas, in Canty Quinlan and Arenas, 2002, p. 235). It is probably adequate to say for now, though the situation will certainly change, that the pool of texts in all genres by out lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Brazilian people of African descent remains small, for many of the same reasons as those detailed above, with the added factors of gender and sexuality. An additional factor that should not be overlooked is class: De Jesus s narrative makes clear his family s and his own financial difficulties, the hell of poverty and purgatory of marginality, and he goes some way towards situating these facts within the larger historical and social contexts of Brazilian life touched upon above. De Jesus s memoir thus fills a gap in terms of Brazilian writing, giving voice to those who have not been listened to before; the book s social and political impact, then, mirror its evident aesthetic achievement. I want to register a final note, which is that the first portion of the book s Portuguese title loses a little something in English: Memorial do Inferno literally translates to Memorial of the Inferno, but the memorial signifies both a commemoration, with the various resonances of that term, of a life passed (successfully) and perhaps past, and simultaneously invokes, I think, its English cognate, the genre of memoir, or a nonfictional, textual remembering, a piecing together. The text, in both its Portuguese original and English translation, possesses aspects of both these connotations, echoing in prose form de Jesus s elegiac volume of poetry, Heartache Poems: A Brazilian Gay Man Coming Out from the Closet, which he published in 2004 in English first, to expand his potential readership. (It was through this volume that I first came to know his work.) The inferno of the title brings to mind not only Judeo-Christian theology and Dante s masterwork, but also translates more broadly and figuratively as hell, a term which de Jesus inflects throughout the book. The ultimate note one leaves with, however, is not of the hellish, of suffering or pain, but of personal triumph. These are the life notes of a lover of knowledge, of the arts, of life itself, who has transformed the difficulties of his past into the foundation on which he is building his future. Or to quote de Jesus s poem from the Heartbreak volume, I Am Nothing : I am not so small after all. References Almeida de Jesus, Valdeck. Heartache Poems: A Brazilian Gay Man Coming Out from the Closet. New York: iUniverse, 2004. Brookshaw, David. Race and Color in Brazilian Literature. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, NJ, 1986. Canty Quinlan, Susan and Fernando Arenas, editors. Lusosex: Gender and Sexuality in the Portuguese-Speaking World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. González Echeverría, Roberto and Enrique Pupo-Walker. The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature. Vol. 3: Brazilian Literature, Bibliographies. Edited by Roberto González Echevarría and Enrique Pupo-Walker. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Green, James. Beyond Carnival: Male Homosexuality in Twentieth-century Brazil. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999. Author John Keene is an author and translator, and Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Northwestern University.
The analyses of German and Brazilian cultures found in this book offer a much-needed rethinking of the intercultural paradigm for the humanities and literary and cultural studies. This collection examines cultural interactions between Germany and Brazil from the Early Modern period to the present day, especially how authors, artists and other intellectuals address the development of society, intervene in the construction and transformation of cultural identities, and observe the introduction of differing cultural elements in and beyond the limits of the nation. The contributors represent various academic disciplines, including German Studies, Luso-Afro-Brazilian Studies, Cultural Studies, Linguistics, Art History and the social sciences. Their essays cover a wide range of works and media, and the issues they address are relevant not only for each of the scholarly disciplines involved, but also in discussions of current cultural practices in connection to all forms of media. The collection thus serves as a model for further intercultural research, since it calls into question the very terms through which we understand the relationships between cultures, as well as their products, practices, and perspectives.
THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 'Truly fascinating.' Steve Wright, BBC Radio 2 - Have you ever forgotten the name of someone you’ve met dozens of times? - Or discovered that your memory of an important event was completely different from everyone else’s? - Or vividly recalled being in a particular place at a particular time, only to discover later that you couldn’t possibly have been? We rely on our memories every day of our lives. They make us who we are. And yet the truth is, they are far from being the accurate record of the past we like to think they are. In The Memory Illusion, forensic psychologist and memory expert Dr Julia Shaw draws on the latest research to show why our memories so often play tricks on us – and how, if we understand their fallibility, we can actually improve their accuracy. The result is an exploration of our minds that both fascinating and unnerving, and that will make you question how much you can ever truly know about yourself. Think you have a good memory? Think again. 'A spryly paced, fun, sometimes frightening exploration of how we remember – and why everyone remembers things that never truly happened.' Pacific Standard
If your memories aren’t your own, then whose are they? One man is about to find out, as he accidentally ingests a mysterious drug that throws him into a hallucination so vivid that it seems real. Now Dr. Taylor Briggs will embark on a journey to unlock the mysteries of his own mind—and to find the killer of the innocent victims whose last moments are being played out in his head, in a stunning psychological thriller that explores memory, its crucial role in our consciousness—and its power to deceive. Also a major motion picture starring Billy Zane, Dennis Hopper, and Ann-Margaret.
Since its inception, cinema has evolved into not merely a ‘reflection’ but an indispensable index of human experience – especially our experience of time’s passage, of the present moment, and, most importantly perhaps, of the past, in both collective and individual terms. In this volume, Kilbourn provides a comparative theorization of the representation of memory in both mainstream Hollywood and international art cinema within an increasingly transnational context of production and reception. Focusing on European, North and South American, and Asian films, Kilbourn reads cinema as providing the viewer with not only the content and form of memory, but also with its own directions for use: the required codes and conventions for understanding and implementing this crucial prosthetic technology — an art of memory for the twentieth-century and beyond.
A sweeping and absorbing biography of Brazil, from the sixteenth century to the present For many Americans, Brazil is a land of contradictions: vast natural resources and entrenched corruption; extraordinary wealth and grinding poverty; beautiful beaches and violence-torn favelas. Brazil occupies a vivid place in the American imagination, and yet it remains largely unknown. In an extraordinary journey that spans five hundred years, from European colonization to the 2016 Summer Olympics, Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling’s Brazil offers a rich, dramatic history of this complex country. The authors not only reconstruct the epic story of the nation but follow the shifting byways of food, art, and popular culture; the plights of minorities; and the ups and downs of economic cycles. Drawing on a range of original scholarship in history, anthropology, political science, and economics, Schwarcz and Starling reveal a long process of unfinished social, political, and economic progress and struggle, a story in which the troubled legacy of the mixing of races and postcolonial political dysfunction persist to this day.
Its nothing new that life is full of surprises, but learning from them and taking advantage of them to the best of your ability is an art in itself. In these pages, you will find a simple and inspirational story about life, love, and acceptance. From an unadorned life of a teenager, complete with insecurities, to a youthful existence where the insecurities dissolve and new challenges arise. In the middle of this journey, an unexpected event occurred that altered the course of his life. This unforeseen incident had ultimately intensified his will to live, love, and be happy! A declaration of self-love. Why not? This is the story of Paulo Castro (Paulinho) in his own perspective. It contains a special light that bestows on us a life lesson and the realization that everything is always worth it. Especially when you have a very selective memory!
Fragmented, dissociated consciousness can characterize the mind in both wake and sleep states. Dissociative symptoms, during sleep, include vivid dreaming, nightmares, and alterations in objective sleep parameters (e.g., lengthening of REM sleep). During waking hours, dissociative symptoms exhibit disparate characteristics encompassing memory problems, excessive daydreaming, absentmindedness, and impairments and discontinuities in perceptions of the self, identity, and the environment. Llewellyn has theorized that a progressive and enduring de-differentiation of wake and dream states of consciousness eventually results in schizophrenia; a lesser degree of de-differentiation may have implications for dissociative symptoms. Against a background of de-differentiation between the dream and wake states, the papers in this volume link consciousness, memory, and mental illness with a special interest for dissociative symptoms.
Unexpectedly Rita survives, building a strong will to stay alive. With help of some inmates she can make it through the hell of Aruja. But the grief over her son keeps throwing her into deep depressions. Her soul is ill and so becomes her body. Even though it is the living hell she learns real friendship and people caring for one another. Then new hope arises by the transfer to the State prison of Säo Paulo where she has the opportunity to work and study. But first she has to stay with all other new inmates in the Estágio, the isolation from other prisoners. Here Rita learns that this place is not like Aruja and has to cope with terror, jealousy and hatred of others. Constant bad news about her son are bringing her more down than she already is. After moving to another cell she begins to work but it is not what she expected. Beside her work she has to cope now with every day terror inside the cell. Soon she realizes that nothing here is better than Aruja, contrary, it is far worse....
