When Afifi died in 2003, aged 96, his granddaughter Heloisa Abreu Dib became the guardian of his photo album. It’s a faded leather tome assembled by Grandpa Zaki. A treasure. It is one of the only records of the family’s history, which came to Brazil from Syria in the early 20th century. There is almost no other document, nothing that helps Dib understand the adventures of his ancestors.
The documental silence experienced by Dib is common to the rest of the Syrian-Lebanese community in Brazil, despite its political, economic and cultural weight in the formation of the country. Much of the history of these immigrants — who celebrate their arrival every March 25 — has disappeared over time.
To solve this problem, Dib has dedicated himself to gathering and preserving what can still be saved from this central episode in Brazilian history. She coordinates a project to digitize documents from the memory of Syrian-Lebanese immigration in the country, including photographs, letters, certificates, diaries and newspapers. The initiative is a partnership between the Arab Brazilian Chamber of Commerce and USEK (University of EspÃrito Santo de Kaslik, for its acronym in French), in Lebanon. The bridge between Brazil and Lebanon is made by the Brazilian-Lebanese professor Roberto Khatlab.
The project is part of a broader effort to preserve the memory of Syrians and Lebanese in other Latin American countries. In this year’s celebrations, scheduled for Saturday (26) at the Immigration Museum of the State of São Paulo, Dib should reinforce the request for community collaboration.
The Arabs began to arrive in Brazil in the 1870s. Most of them came from what later became Syria and Lebanon — at the time, territories under the Ottoman Empire. About 140,000 of them arrived here. The community says that today there are millions of descendants.
Syrians and Lebanese innovated in popular commerce, studied in elite schools and some of them rose to the top of national politics. Michel Temer, Fernando Haddad and Guilherme Boulos are some of the examples of the many descendants who made history in these decades.
Despite being discriminated against in Brazil, however, many insisted that their children not learn Arabic or cling to this past. “The first generation born in Brazil was not taught to value this history”, says Dib. “When the first immigrants began to die, the tendency was for descendants to throw everything away, including getting rid of libraries. You rarely find a family that has a passport, a birth certificate.”
Discarded documents included newspapers and magazines published in Arabic in Brazil in the early 20th century. As the Ottoman Empire censored the press, much of the intellectual production in Arabic took place in the diaspora, in places like São Paulo, Buenos Aires and New York. Some of the classics of this period were the newspaper A Esfinge, by Chucri Curi, and A Vinha, by Salwa Salama Atlas.
File loss has not just happened in homes. Community institutions were also getting rid of their documents and libraries. Books ended up in second-hand bookstores — but, because they were in Arabic, they were never catalogued. “Then we have loss, theft, poor conservation.”
Dib’s work started with his own family. With Grandma Afifi’s album in hand, she sat down with her father and uncles and began asking who was who in each photo. “I was remaking our history through photographs, clothes, scenarios, social events”, she says.
In recent years, Dib has been preparing herself, through courses in oral history, restoration and digitization. After locating the scattered family members, the researcher threw a party. Long-time friends ended up discovering, at the time, that they were cousins. “It was very exciting,” she says.
In his work with the Chamber and USEK, Dib had the support of intern Mirna Nasser. They have digitized 100,000 images since June 2018. They are documents from institutions such as Clube Homs, founded in 1920, and Lar SÃrio Pró-Infância, from 1923. Paul. In the latter, there are some editions of the oldest Arab newspapers in Brazil, such as al-Assmahi and al-Fayha, from the end of the 19th century.
“One of the first things we did was to go after these publications,” says Silvia Antibas, the Chamber’s cultural director. “We were desperate, trying to retrieve magazines and newspapers. Then people started to get interested and called us, telling us what they had.”
The work, according to Antibas, “has no end.” For now, only documents from the city of São Paulo were collected and scanned, where immigrants were concentrated. But the interior of the state is missing — and the rest of the country, where they are also present. “It’s a sense of a story that is getting lost.”
There are still few studies on the history of Arabs in Brazil. Most are based on the same few books, such as “PatrÃcios: SÃrios e Libaneses em São Paulo”, published in 1997 by sociologist Oswaldo Truzzi.
Antibas hopes that with the conservation projects, researchers will be able to tell new stories, exploring other facets of this varied community.
“How do we stay if we don’t have documents to pull the thread of our history?” Dib wonders. “What are we going to tell our kids?”
