I'm Still Here — The Book

Gerth Kuusk, On the road, 2015
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By DENILSON BOTELHO

Considerations on the novel by Marcelo Rubens Paiva

For historians interested in literature like me, the most common thing is to read and hear about how much literary text contains representations of reality and its context of production. In fact, many studies in this area, perhaps the majority, seek to identify and analyze the representations contained in literature. And it is worth mentioning that identifying such representations is not the most complex task; you just need to be literate and a fluent reader to do it.

Working in the field of social history, I am particularly interested in approaches that allow us to go beyond the so-called representations of literary texts. I see literature as a document and testimony of a time or society in which a given work was produced. And here we must consider literature in its most varied genres, including not only novels, but also short stories and chronicles, among others, published in a variety of forms, such as newspapers, magazines, or books.

What is important to do is to subject the literary text – whatever it may be – to the interrogation that historians usually subject any of their research sources to. Who produced the text? When? Under what conditions? With what objectives? What did they intend to say about their time with their text? With whom are they dialoguing? These are some of the questions that make up the interrogation I am referring to. And for those who don’t know, an important part of the historian’s work consists of a dialogue with sources, talking to documents, even if they don’t always get all the answers they want.

And these procedures must always be guided by a commitment to verisimilitude or truth, or at least to the reality of the facts. If a short story or novel is a work of fiction, the book or its publication in a newspaper or magazine, as well as its content, are concrete elements that cannot be ignored. Therefore, literature retains a certain materiality that should not be ignored.

Every now and then I come across some question about the importance of literature and the social relevance of transforming it into an object of research and knowledge production. After all, in common sense, literature is often just entertainment, distraction, a way to pass the time without having to deal with the hard daily lives of most people. Or else reading is seen as an elitist habit, which only those who can go into a bookstore and buy a book – expensive, very expensive – would be able to enjoy.

As a professor at a federal public university, who teaches about the history of republican Brazil and sometimes offers a course on history and literature, and who has dedicated himself for a long time to researching the work and trajectory of the writer Lima Barreto (1881-1922), I always try to encourage among my students – and also in the texts I publish – the importance of perceiving literature as a concrete act.

Writing and publishing an article, a chronicle, a short story, a novel, a memoir, or whatever, is also a concrete act, a way of participating in the movement of history at the moment in which the author experiences it. It is a way of being in the world and of influencing the course of events. After all, those who write and publish their writings want to be read. And they know that they can influence both the way their potential readers think, as well as the way a society deals with reality and its own history.

I'm still here, the book by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, published in 2015, is a good example of this. It is not a novel – like the Happy old year (1982) reprinted countless times, which was part of my formation as a reader –, but it is another literary work produced by this author. It is literature that has as its central object Eunice Paiva, his mother. It is a text that has a certain autobiographical character and a confession upon seeing his own mother suffering from Alzheimer's disease, a disease that imposes progressive alienation and absence on its victims, even though they remain here, among us, alive.

The recently released film has been adapted for the big screen and has attracted millions of viewers. It has gained even more notoriety with Fernanda Torres' well-deserved award for best actress at the 2025 Golden Globes and now with the nomination for the Oscar for best film last year. Who knows how many new readers the book has attracted as a result of its success in the cinema.

In any case, it is worth paying attention to how much I'm still here (the film, based on the book) has fueled the debate about amnesty today and yesterday. Amnesty today for all those involved in the attempted coup carried out on January 8, 2023, and also the amnesty promulgated in 1979, which prevented us from knowing the circumstances in which the father of the author of the book in question, the impeached deputy Rubens Paiva, was assassinated by the military during the dictatorship that began in 1964.

It is undeniable that, in some way, with his book, Marcelo Rubens Paiva is interfering in the course of events in the country, especially as the conclusion of the investigations into the attempted coup that would prevent Lula from beginning his third term as president elected by popular vote approaches. If we were unable to investigate and punish those responsible for the crimes committed by agents of repression during the dictatorship that began with the coup that occurred 60 years ago, the clamor for justice and punishment for those who attempted a new coup two years ago is growing. And who can deny that “I’m Still Here” – the book and the film – are a significant contribution to preventing the same mistakes made in the recent past from being repeated?

We should not disregard the power that art and culture have to transform reality. Although many people undervalue the importance of cultural production, it is unquestionable that it can make many people think differently and influence the course of history. In addition to containing representations of reality, literature is a concrete act. It is also a political act that not only historians are aware of, but also the common reader who reads this and many other texts.

*Denilson Botelho is a professor in the History Department of the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp).

Reference


Marcelo Rubens Paiva. I'm still here. New York, New York: Routledge, 2015, 296 pages.https://amzn.to/4asx8JD]


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