By WALNICE NOGUEIRA GALVÃO*

In total, USP has 39 deaths, across all Faculties and including 6 professors and 2 employees.

The 380-carat Bahia Emerald, stolen and taken to the United States 24 years ago, has just been returned. The saga of the 180-carat stone includes thefts, disappearances, kidnappings (even if fake), misdemeanors and all kinds of crimes. But now the US justice system has ruled in favor of Brazil, and the stone is being repatriated. It is worth 1 billion dollars. Its destination: the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, which has mineralogy collections.

Since they are stones, they probably escaped the fire that devastated the other collections. The insect collection, the largest in the world, had 6 million specimens, which were consumed by the flames in minutes. Among many other precious items that were irreparably lost, the collection included artifacts from indigenous peoples who are now extinct. And the entire estate of biologist Berta Lutz, who worked there for years, directing a department. As perhaps little is known, the National Museum is not just a collection of display cases, but a research center of global importance.

In the storm that is blowing over colonialism, of an inescapable justice, nothing seems to resist. The largest concentration of African objects in the world is found in the Tervuren Museum in Brussels, dedicated to the genocidal remains of the Belgian Congo. Even this museum is undergoing a “progressive” reform, which includes Africans in the management of the works.

In Africa, new museums have just been built to respond to critics who claim that there are insufficient facilities to care for the works, which would otherwise be deteriorated and ruined. One of them is the state-of-the-art Museum of African Civilizations in Dakar, Senegal.

Apart from Tervuren, certain houses specialize in African art, such as the Ethnological Museum of Berlin and the one in Arts Awards, of the Quai Branly in Paris. He returned 26 objects, to worldwide applause, but retained seven thousand, for example. Even so…

There is already a film on the subject, entitled Dahomey, which is receiving awards around the world, including the Golden Bear in Berlin. Dahomey is now part of the Republic of Benin. The director is a woman, Mati Diop: a good opportunity to celebrate the success of yet another female filmmaker, addressing substantive issues.

It is unbelievable, but the Hudson Bay Company (a Canadian variant of their West India Company) closed its doors after three centuries of systematic plundering and theft from the natives, guaranteed by the English crown, handing over the keys to its largest department store in Toronto to the Grand Chief of the First Nations, as compensation. Created for the specific purpose of pure extractivism, it exploited beaver pelts for European hats, forcing the natives to hand over the product of their hunts to the whites, but exponentially increasing them for about three hundred years, in a volume of millions of pelts. A scandal, as we now know, paralleled that of the Belgian Congo with ivory and rubber: in this case it was customary to amputate the right hands of natives who did not meet the quota.

But the Kunsthaus in Zurich sets a good example, establishing a project that researches the genealogy of works of art of dubious origin, including providing information on a card attached to the piece regarding its origin.

The general framework of reparations includes the broad movement that is spreading throughout the country to grant diplomas to students killed by the military dictatorship. The most affected in the country was the Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters of USP, with 15 students killed, with an emphasis on the Social Sciences course, the origin of so many illustrious figures in the arts, literature, science and politics.

In total, USP has 39 deaths, across all faculties and including 6 professors and 2 employees. The source is the Truth Commission Report, prepared over a period of ten years by the institution's historians, and our Philosophy School, due to the repression that has been inflicted upon it, received an entire volume, number seven. Well then: this school has just awarded diplomas of completion of course to all of its murdered students, arguing that it was the murder that interrupted their careers. The granting of doctoral degrees is being considered. Honorary to those who had already graduated and who were teachers.

The Tupinambá cloak at the Sambadrome

The repatriation of the Tupinambá cloak, part of the broader decolonization process that is currently settling accounts with the legacy of white imperialist violence, has reached its peak during Carnival. In São Paulo, the samba school Acadêmicos do Tucuruvi paraded with the theme “Assojaba – the search for the cloak”. The artifact made of red guará feathers returned to Brazil after 4 centuries of exile… It is only fair that it be honored at the Sambadrome.

Before that, the cloak toured Europe and adorned the Brazilian pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

The subject has been generating interest since Denmark lent the mantle to the 500 Years Exhibition (São Paulo, 2000), of which it was the main attraction, alongside the Letter by Pero Vaz de Caminha.

Although Denmark never invaded or plundered us, the fact that it possessed four more cloaks should not tarnish the luster of its gesture. It is a mantlet that covers the upper back and was taken over by the Tupinambá community of Olivença, in Bahia, recovering the secret of its manufacture. It is a matter of high science and art, requiring a meticulous braiding of fibers to which feathers are applied, with beeswax. Its name has variations, ranging from Araçoiaba in Pernambuco and Araçoiaba da Serra in São Paulo, to the assojaba of the samba-enredo, passing through the araçoia of the poem “Lito de folha verde” (Green Leaves Bed), by Gonçalves Dias (“… the araçoia on the belt tightened me”), exquisitely analyzed by Antonio Candido in Formation of Brazilian Literature. This spelling appears in dictionaries, sometimes with a slightly different meaning, but always in the sense of a feather adornment, as we can see in the illustrations of travelers and chroniclers.

The ritual significance of feather art in the Americas is no small feat. Mayan, Aztec and Incan monuments show how feathers enhanced the sumptuous ceremonial attire of kings and priests. Their pantheon includes gods such as the Aztec Quetzalcoatl and the Mayan Kuculcan, whose earthly form is that of a serpent covered in feathers, which can be admired in museums and on-site visit, adorning the splendid pyramids that pierce the jungle canopy.

The crown of Montezuma, the last Aztec emperor, features a meter-long blue-green feather from the tail of the quetzal, a sacred bird, on a gold base. A copy of the crown can be admired in the Archaeology Museum of Mexico, since, as an example of the barbarities of colonialism, the original belongs to Austria.

It is appropriate that the parade coincides with the restaging of the opera The Guarani, by Carlos Gomes, at the Municipal Theater, in early 2025. The new interpretation is already permeated by activism and emphasizes native elements. Indigenous people participated in the production, with a choir formed by Guaranis from the State of São Paulo taking the stage. The show was conceived by Ailton Krenak, a writer and activist, recently elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters.

Adaptations were already necessary when the opera premiered in Italy. How could the evil Loredano, a renegade priest, be Italian, as he is portrayed in José de Alencar's novel? Carlos Gomes made the arch-villain a Spaniard called González... He could not be Portuguese, just like Dom Antonio de Mariz, Ceci's noble father, who has a positive profile.

The insinuation of an idyll to be consummated in the future between Ceci and Peri was bold for the time, both in the novel and in the opera. The ending of the novel, with the couple disappearing on the horizon on top of a palm tree swept away by the waters, must be one of the most celebrated endings in Brazilian literature. It is clear that José de Alencar was thinking of a “Brazilian race” emerging from the mixture of indigenous people and Portuguese, which Euclides da Cunha called a “fierce embrace”, a euphemism for rape.

But Alencar changed the signs of what was happening in the historical process. In other words, miscegenation occurred between Portuguese men and indigenous women, and not the other way around. José de Alencar advances and inverts History. Both the novel and the opera are masterpieces of Indianism, a relevant aesthetic movement within Romanticism, a precursor of a very current trend.

*Walnice Nogueira Galvão Professor Emeritus at FFLCH at USP. She is the author, among other books, of Reading and rereading (Sesc\Ouro over Blue). [amzn.to/3ZboOZj]

the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE