Where do they come from -

Where do they come from?

08/11/2024

Culture • Education • Literature • Books

By LUIZ MARQUES*

Commentary on Jefferson Tenório's recently released book

Jefferson Tenório's most recent work, Where do they come from?, highlights contemporary crossroads and, in particular, the anxieties experienced by young quota students at federal universities. The novel's central character, Joaquim, resembles a ideology tear by Paulo Leminski: “1st day of class / in the classroom / me and the room”. The difficulties of black people in institutional structures, dominated by racism, have in knowledge and intellectual activity only a palliative for strangeness – their “place of speech” – in society and in history.

Social mobility through formal education creates new thorns in my skin. “So I was placed in a specific place in their imagination: a poor guy without much culture, without much reading, who didn’t know how to speak English” (p. 26). In the face of this uncomfortable feeling, relief appears in the providential discipline of producing fictional texts. Literary vocation works like a miracle performed by the imagination to sublimate the violence, without warning, of reality. “I mixed passages from books with events from my own experience, as if literature and life were the same thing. But they weren’t” (p. 21). At this point, the trajectory of the creature becomes confused with that of the creator.

“It was impossible that the summary of my life was a crowded bus in the middle of an unbearable summer heat… There must be some beauty in this shitty, fucked-up life, I thought. I closed my eyes. I was an idiot groping in the dark in search of beauty on a smelly bus… on the way to Alvorada. I realized then that beauty was the most imprecise thing in the world” (p. 35-6). The nightmare takes place in Rio Grande do Sul, in the metropolitan region of Porto Alegre. Nevertheless, the story transcends the local topography, applying to any Brazilian urban center today.

The cost of getting to the capital is a constant complaint among students. The coronavirus pandemic and the floods have worsened the problem in Rio Grande do Sul. Economic justification for not attending classes is common. Poverty is an unavoidable factor in school dropouts today. The city government is responsible. It has cut student passes and increased bus times.

It is common to allude to suffering as the key to artistic creation in narratives. For example, in a poetry reading that evokes a poem by Afro-Peruvian folklorist and activist Victoria Santa Cruz: “I was only seven years old / Seven years old, nothing! / Suddenly some voices in the street / shouted at me: 'Black!' / 'Black! Black! Black! Black! Black! Black! Black!' / 'Am I black?' – I thought / YES! / 'And what does it mean to be black?' / 'Black!' / And I didn't know the sad truth that was hiding. / And I felt 'black' / 'Black!' / Yes / 'Black!' / I am / 'Black!' / Black / 'Black!' / I am black!” (p. 86). Catharsis denounces the pain in discriminatory acts, “racist motherfucker”, without which poetic verses do not exist.

Suffering never lies; but not that of superficial or futile circumstances. Torture is caused by the silence of inequalities. “I write with my body,” exclaims an Angolan, rejecting the childish and foolish belief that “poetry is only a mental thing, as if thought were superior to our physiology. This separation between body and mind is so strange. Don’t you think so, Joaquim?” (p. 202).

The notion of suffering as a stage for the unveiling of truth in artistic form we owe to the ancients, for whom melancholy produces good art. A product in short supply on the shelves of moderns, who return to Eden in shopping malls with a credit card platinum. Aldous Huxley, in Admirable new world, makes the administrator remove art from the human panorama in order to simultaneously eliminate suffering in society: “We have to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We sacrifice high art.” No art, no pain; and vice versa. Here, dystopia is equivalent to the perversion of the neoliberal manager by silencing social rights.

In the middle of the books

Jefferson Tenório's text does not shy away from presenting the harsh criticisms that still echo in the campus university and in the teachers’ lounge: “I feel powerless in the face of the cruelty of this education system (with ethnic-racial quotas). They want to cover the abyss with a patch. History has already painfully condemned these attempts. We should be concerned with basic education, and not putting unprepared people in here” (p. 42). Skepticism reeks of prejudice. Research shows that, once the first scares are over, quota students achieve excellent performance in their courses.

Initially, certain subjects are within the domain of normal students; not for the exceptional ones. “I myself thought that quotas were a kind of handout, you know? As if it were an easy way for black people, as if we didn’t have the ability to take a test like everyone else. But I understood that this wasn’t quite the case. I understood that I didn’t have the same chances. I finally understood that a college entrance exam didn’t prove anything. Nothing about my abilities” (p. 133-4). Later: “I no longer saw myself as an intruder for having entered through the quota system. Besides, I started to stand out in class. Which earned me respect from my classmates” (p. 85). Hopefully.

Joaquim speculates about what his grandmother might think about his desire to be a writer, projecting onto her the doubts that also plagued him, deep down. “Look, kid, we’ve been screwed our whole lives. My grandparents were screwed. My parents were screwed. Your mother was screwed. An entire generation was screwed. For centuries, black people were screwed so that you could get to this point. And now this is what you’re going to do with your life? A literature course? A course that won’t help black people get out of all this shit? Won’t you become a lawyer? A doctor? An engineer? How far are you going to go with this?” (p. 61).

Power is not only that which we oppose, but also that which we depend on for our existence and which we harbor and preserve in the beings that we are. “The usual pattern of the process is – power imposes itself upon us; weakened by its force, we internalize or accept its terms,” emphasizes Judith Butler, who dissects the dialectical phenomenon in The psychic life of power. Yes, “subjection” is paradoxical. Artistically, it makes the subjects’ desires complex. In politics, it converts tactics into a lasting and organic strategy of rapprochement with the Centrão, to alleviate contradictions.

In reading, epiphanies act as a sentimental declaration of war on the alienation of the spirit. See the symbolic episode of the discovery at the faculty of The words, by Jean-Paul Sartre, a sort of autobiography of the French philosopher’s childhood. “I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. In the library I saw a temple. I began my life as I will undoubtedly end it: among books” (p. 64). “I believed with all my strength and sincerity that books could save me” (p. 135). The fact that Jorge Luis Borges or Alberto Manguel are not mentioned proves the Eurocentric tic of academia, and how distant it remains from the global South.

The recipe for writing is attributed to the Egyptian god Theuth. A paradise for memory and wisdom, although the Pharaoh was not convinced and claimed that it was not a medicine for memory, but simply an aid to remembering and that, unlike wisdom, it served to stimulate the presumption of wisdom. Writers have long debated whether literature has any practical effect on changing the world. Adversity shows that the debate is far from over; resilience to obscurantism and denialism, too.

The author awarded with the Jabuti, in The reverse of the skin (2020), delivery with Where do they come from? a beautiful and moving final piece of work in a society governed by the tyranny of merit. “No one had educated me for failure. No one had told me that in life there are few rewards for being good people.” (p. 187). Quotas are not enough to make up for 350 years of slavery. Student organizations and rectors are gradually taking initiatives to better welcome quota students and provide them with better conditions to remain at the university. “I kept getting screwed like all other black people had always gotten screwed. That was our destiny” (p. 169). Really?

Read the book.

* Luiz Marques is a professor of political science at UFRGS. He was Rio Grande do Sul's state secretary of culture in the Olívio Dutra government.

Originally published in the magazine Theory and Debate.

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