Memorial From Brazilian Hell

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.