By LUIZ ROBERTO ALVES*
Anderson too. It's up to us to watch
In the last corner of Severe Death and Life there is: “…it is difficult to defend/with words alone, life (…)”. This is a time when there are many more speeches than themes, as these are suffocated by the elbows that mediocre subjects, facts and sciences. We watch, however. During the vigil, Marielle and her friend-worker appear, alive with an intensity that sheds light on countless unanswered deaths in the beautiful mediocre country.
Asphyxiating elbows, like projectiles, have produced their own narratives and also countless times have caused the gestures of family and social life to die through forgetfulness and fatigue.
This country suffers a succession of deaths, which does not guarantee that in the near future it will survive as an entity that shelters a people. One of the deaths is due to forgetfulness, which involves tiredness. An ancient saying from the Middle East reads that “Memory is the pillar of redemption and forgetting the beginning of death”. It is possible, therefore, that the dying dynamic is dying amid many speeches and certain gestures. Memory redeems because it pokes, moves, points, suggests, questions. Time can, however, bring boredom and lead to repetitive everyday gestures that are less alive and already muzzled by a weakened conscience. There you die, or you survive.
The oriental saying had a vital force in migrant returns, in poetic recoveries, in revolts and in the making of innovative discourses. Never forget is the social order. Evidently, also not to forget evil, as this engenders new deeds, whose complexity recreates forgetfulness in the human heart and reason.
Marielle sleeps. We watch. Her death sends threads of energy into memory, despite the lingering waves of forgetfulness. Her death was as political as all the deaths ordered by the landowners were political and that destroyed people, families and communities in the Brazilian rural world. In the vast majority of cases, silence and oblivion, since the energy that still exists has limited sparks in the face of the mediocre country. It is the pain of the small family, which sometimes gives thanks to G‑d for life.
A few years after the death of Marielle and Anderson, it can be seen that the political virus that takes over the rooms, drawers, documents and police investigations of Rio de Janeiro has already infected the lungs of each investigator, has established a limit of action for one by one of the authorities, restrained gestures and cut off the speech of all those involved. Much worse still if there are bribes and other forms of corruption in the phenomenon, against which nothing exists or is known. The anything goes of evil in the rotten country ensues. All that was left was the suffering family and a still vigilant movement spread across the consciences of the immense territory, under continuous risks.
Certainly, no excuses are justified: perfect crime, occult forces, high powers. But the heinous process of forgetting is being created, the matrix of mortality in the Colony of sesmarias, in the Empire of the barony and in the Republic of the incompetent military. There would also be some excuse for the innumerable deaths – political, as they liquidate citizenship and the Constitution – of farm workers, whose greatest threatening gesture is the search for the right to work on land that is theirs.
Marielle-Anderson's death and her investigation signal the decrepitude of this social territory. There is no point in Minister Barroso coming to talk about solid institutions and, perhaps, convincing some, as that eastern saying suggests a reading of the totality of phenomena. Whoever is incapable of discovering a murderer (it matters little, in the face of death, whether he is the principal or the executor) who is among the people of the republic is, structurally, incapable of anything. The crime against the human, the crime against the worker cannot operate in arithmetic, but in the reason of the meanings and purposes of the structures made for the good of the totality. Why does CBN keep this “commercial” for democracy on the air? An ignominy.
Faced with the death of people and the end of his life in polisor in the eito and its concealment, little remains to be taken advantage of: great intentions, economic ciranda, deputies' benches, bureaucratic justice. In everything, as if due to a breakdown or structural corruption, there will be the mark of injustice, of the vilification of those crossed by bullets and knives, of a country that takes two steps forward and four steps back.
Everything is related to everything. It is not just a political prerogative, but a universal value, also physical, quite present in popular literature and generational memories. Denying the right to the truth even in death means the self-denial of society and culture. Can't go forward. In vain the circumstantial efforts. Only radicalism can provide answers. The moderation, the ways, the occasional solutions, the “let's see”, the Executive-Legislative-Judicial arrangements, etc., all this is dying, as it suffers the self-asphyxiation of an unfair country.
*Luiz Roberto Alves is a senior professor at the School of Communications and Arts at USP.
