The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation has a temporary exhibition called “Complexo Brasil”. In its catalogue, there is a text by award-winning journalist Eliane Brum with the title Letter of Unfoundation of Brazil — Addressed to the descendants of the subjects of King Dom Manuel I. With this title, you can already guess what’s out there. Exactly as the title indicates, according to this journalist, there is a weight of responsibility for all Portuguese descendants of the “subjects of D. Manuel I”. A collective, not individual, responsibility (that was also what was missing…). What was forgotten is that a large part of the descendants of these subjects, some millions, are in Brazil. But it places the weight of History solely on the shoulders of those in Portugal. However, when you ask for responsibility, which one? The responsibility was to hand over to them a country that is a continent, heterogeneous, multiracial, multicultural, giant in every way. Unfortunately, they didn’t know how to take care of him.
It distills a xenophobic hatred towards the Portuguese that is disconcerting. I don’t know if the journalist knows Aesop’s fable, or La Fontaine’s, but that’s what reminds her. When the lamb tells the wolf that he couldn’t have done a certain action because he hadn’t been born yet, the wolf says “if it wasn’t you, it was your father, or your grandfather!”, to justify the attack on the lamb. And this is what we see more and more. The justification for the incompetence of Brazilians who, in 203 years, were unable to transform that country into a power. Like the United States of America, whose declaration of Independence came just 46 years before Brazil’s. What do you want the Portuguese to do about the past between the 16th century and the beginning of the 19th century? Denigrating History in an angry text, full of bile, will not heal the wounds of the past. On the contrary, it will encourage, increase and destroy any understanding that the two peoples had been building. For those who consider Portugal to be one of their main emigration destinations, Brazil is not very intelligent in building cultural divides, with requests for historical responsibility. Yes, that is hate speech. And I am surprised that the Gulbenkian, that extraordinary institution that has always been an island of oxygen for artists and researchers, allows, in an exhibition catalogue, which was intended to promote the connection between two countries that claim to be brothers, to develop speeches of hate, revisionism, anachronism and food to increase the gap of resentment that can be seen growing in society.
I still remember a time when the Portuguese were very happy to welcome Brazilians. They called us (I’m also Brazilian, because I was born there) brothers. With affection, admiration, kindness and happiness.
With this type of attitude and the damage that part of the Brazilian emigration has done to Portugal, this feeling no longer exists.
Stirring up tempers will not improve what is currently going on in Portuguese society.
And the fault is no longer with slavery: it is really with the slavery of thought about Portugal.
And it won’t go well.
Assistant professor at the Autonomous University of Lisbon and researcher (at CIDEHUS).
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