In times of disbelief in Brazil, of the kidnapping of our national symbols by the most violent and reactionary extreme right, it may be a good strategy to revisit a past in which we had a future. Let’s remember Darcy Ribeiro (1922-1997), whose birth centenary should be much celebrated next year. There are plans ranging from an International Seminar (entitled “100 years of Darcy Ribeiro: intellectuality and Latin American critical thinking”) to re-editions of his work and book launches that will reflect on his creative legacy.
Darcy deserves to be read and reread. He was more than the inventor of the University of Brasília, the Museu do Índio, the Sambadrome of Rio de Janeiro, the Memorial da América Latina, the Law of Guidelines and Bases of Brazilian Education. He was one of the most creative thinkers in Latin America. Reading Darcy rescues the faith that Brazil and the region can be viable, that we can have a place in the future.
A Brazilian who discovered himself as a Latin American
Darcy was one of the first Brazilians to assume a Latin American identity, breaking with the Brazilian tradition of isolation in the region. This happened after his exile in several countries in the region between 1964 and 1976, through Uruguay, Chile, Venezuela and Peru. Minister of Education and Chief of Staff of João Goulart, he went into exile immediately after the military coup of 1964. From then on he developed his Latin American identity, for him compatible with the Brazilian one.
For Darcy, what guaranteed Latin American unity would be the Iberian heritage of colonization, which bequeathed us a subordinate role in the world. But the Iberian heritage has left something positive, in addition to the unity among so many peoples, among so many people in such vast territories, the result of the same Iberian civilizing process: miscegenation.
Occurred on the basis of violence and racism, this miscegenation produced mestizo peoples, who would therefore be well-positioned for the future. By having received the best of white, black and indigenous heritages, Latin America could save the West, generating here a new civilization that is more solidary, more open, more loving. We are poor, but we are just getting started. Better an “inaugural poverty” than a “terminal opulence”. “We have a whole world to remake,” said Darcy.
Not that this fantastic future projected by Darcy was the original project of Portuguese and Spanish settlers. His intention was to explore and exterminate the lands and peoples found here. The mestizo peoples derived therefrom were not born from any kindness or sweetness of the Portuguese and Spaniards. Darcy considered that our elites were and are scoundrels, ethnocidal and genocidal. The luminous future we would have would then be an unintended consequence of colonization.
The last great interpreter in Brazil
His greatest work, “O Povo Brasileiro” (1995), was also his testament. He had been writing, rewriting, and throwing away portions of this book since the 1950s. When he realized he was seized with terminal cancer, he fled the hospital by jumping out the window to finish the book. Ali Darcy is anti-colonial, sometimes anticipating decolonial thinking. It produces a decisive denunciation of colonialism and Eurocentrism, which are still in force through an old and ignorant Brazilian elite, which seeks only to copy other people’s thoughts.
To understand the formation of Brazil according to Darcy, it is essential to understand that the meetings (with or without consent) between the Portuguese and the indigenous formed that first “nothing man”. The children of these meetings could not identify themselves as the indigenous people they despised, nor the Portuguese who despised them.
This “nobody” that is the “brasilindian” later received the contribution of another “nobody”: the descendants of enslaved blacks. De-Africanized by slavery, “they were either Brazilians or they were nothing, since identification with the Indian, the African or the Brazilian Indian was impossible”.
Thus, a new identity was formed: the Brazilian. A new people that did not share the European past, that did not have in its present a backward repetition of the European past, and that in this way could only have a new future. Darcy understood history from multiple developments. One of them was precisely the Brazilian civilization in formation, part of a Latin American civilization also in formation.
All the violence in Brazilian history forged something beautiful for Darcy, but it was riddled with contradictions. Darcy reminded us that we are children of violence, descendants of slaves and slave masters, “flesh of the flesh of those tortured blacks and Indians” and at the same time “the possessed hand that punished them.” “The most tender sweetness and the most atrocious cruelty have come together here to make us the felt and suffering people that we are and the insensitive and brutal people that we are too.”
However, so much violence could be overcome in the process of building the “New tropical Rome” that would be Brazil and Latin America, that “new mestizo and tropical civilization, proud of itself. More joyful, because more suffered. Better, because it incorporates in itself more humanities. More generous, because it is open to coexistence with all races and cultures and because it is located in the most beautiful and luminous province on Earth.”
Darcy died considering himself defeated: “I tried to make Brazilian children literate, I couldn’t. I tried to save the Indians, I couldn’t. I tried to make a serious university and I failed. I tried to make Brazil develop autonomously and I failed.” But he added: “The failures are my victories. I would hate to be in the shoes of the one who beat me.” If he were alive, he would feel even more defeated in today’s Brazil – and even happier for not being in the shoes of those who beat him.
Although some of his uses of notions such as miscegenation and civilization can be criticized (and they are), Darcy’s vision of Brazil and our region allows us to project some future that is ours. May a rescue of Darcy’s utopia be one of the bases for resuming our hope in better days, and may his centenary in 2022 be commemorated as a reminder that this country and this region can still dream of a bright future.
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