Bolsonaro's silence on artists' deaths reflects disdain for Brazilian culture
Deceased Brazilian cultural luminaries (clockwise from top left) Rubem Fonseca, Aldir Blanc, Moraes Moreira, Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza, Dona Neném and Flávio Migliaccio. Composite: Alamy/EPA/Getty images/Youtube
The president loathes the arts, according to critics: asked about his favourite writers he cited a dictatorship-era torturer
Brazilian culture has suffered an unusually devastating year, robbed of some of its leading lights in just a few painful weeks.
The deceased, some of whom fell victim to the coronavirus pandemic, include the musical giants Aldir Blanc and Moraes Moreira; the carnival legend Dona Neném; the actor Flávio Migliaccio; and a trio of top writers – Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza, Sérgio Sant’Anna and Rubem Fonseca.
In most countries, such passings would be marked with official mourning or words of tribute and regret.
But while there has been public remembrance, Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has responded with silence – a reflection, critics say, of his loathing of the arts and academia.
“Bolsonaro has no idea what Brazilian culture is,” said Chico Buarque, a musician and author widely considered Brazil’s greatest living composer.
Rubem Fonseca’s daughter, the writer Bia Corrêa do Lago, said such disregard was to be expected from an administration whose leader cited the dictatorship-era torturer, Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, as one of his favourite authors.
“It’s a government whose idols are torturers,” she said. “So there’s no reason to be surprised, or saddened. Thank God these people don’t even utter my father’s name. The further away my family and I can be from these people who are in power, the better.
“Authors represent freedom while torturers represent everything we most abhor: cruelty, dictatorship, cowardice, a dread of diversity and difference,” Lago added.
“To be frank, it would bother me if any member of this government did decide to talk about my father … These people are hideous.”
Bolsonaro’s disdain for artists is longstanding.
He was elected preaching culture wars and bashing what he painted as Brazil’s decadent, leftist artistic elite. Since taking power in January 2019 he has enraged musicians and film-makers by slashing public funding for their work.
When Buarque won the Prêmio Camões – the Portuguese-language answer to the Booker prize – last year, Bolsonaro refused to sign off on the €100,000 ($108,000) award, which is co-sponsored by the governments of Portugal and Brazil.
When João Gilberto, the father of bossa nova, died last July Bolsonaro sparked outrage with his tepid eulogy: “A well-known person. Our condolences to the family, all right?”
But the president’s indifference has become particularly grating in recent weeks, with the deaths of a succession of cultural colossuses going unremarked.
When Aldir Blanc, one of Brazil’s greatest lyricists and composers, died from Covid-19, two former presidents paid tribute, but Bolsonaro said nothing.
“The only artist Jair Bolsonaro admires is Jair Bolsonaro,” complained Luis Fernando Verissimo, a celebrated writer and friend of Blanc and Fonseca.
Bolsonaro’s culture secretary – a soap actor whose predecessor had to resign after mimicking the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels – has become a lightning rod for criticism.
Challenged over her silence during a bizarre television interview last week, Regina Duarte claimed she had sent private messages of condolence to the artists’ families but was not obliged to become a walking “obituary”.
“You’re digging up the dead. You’re carrying a cemetery on your shoulders … Lighten up,” Duarte snapped at her interviewers, dismissing critics as a “shouty minority”.
More than 500 artists, including rappers, comedians and composers, subsequently signed a manifesto condemning Bolsonaro’s culture chief and the government’s “repeated attacks on the arts, science and the press”.
A spokesperson for the culture secretariat said messages expressing “regret and solidarity” had been sent to the grieving families – but did not explain why no public tributes were paid.
Many observers see Bolsonaro’s silence as a deliberate slight towards artists who Bolsonarian ideologues consider part of a decades-old Marxist plot to control the production of ideas.
“[For Bolsonaro] there is nothing to celebrate about these people’s lives,” said the writer Pedro Doria, who likened Bolsonaro’s behaviour to a British prime minister ignoring the deaths of national treasures like David Bowie or Elton John. “They’re not artists – they are the enemy.”
Lago, whose father died of a heart attack age 94, said Bolsonaro’s cold-shoulder reflected the “crass ignorance” of a man utterly uninterested in literature.
“He feels so threatened. His ignorance is staggering. He’s never read a book in his life. He’s never heard of these people who died,” she said. “So you can imagine why it’s better for him to ignore them. Because it’s like something from another world – as though it’s all written in Greek and he can’t understand any of it.”
Lago recalled telling her father, shortly before his death, that a Bolsonarian governor in the Amazon had tried to ban nearly 20 of his books from schools. “What’s the surprise, with this government?” replied Fonseca, whose work was remembered in a New York Times obituary.
Buarque, the composer, said being blanked was a distinction: “Praise from Bolsonaro would make any decent person ashamed.”
Bolsonaro’s silence contrasts with the eloquent tributes artists have been paying their friends despite being housebound because of the coronavirus.
The most potent homage came from Lima Duarte, a 90-year-old star of stage and screen. In an impassioned monologue the actor said he understood why he believed his friend, Flávio Migliaccio, might have taken his own life at a time when the “putrid breath” of dictatorship could once again be felt in Brazil. Duarte concluded quoting a play by the German writer Bertolt Brecht. “Those who wash their hands,” he declared, “do so in a basin of blood.”
The historian Célio Turino has been organizing online “incantation ceremonies” to remember the departed on Zoom.
“These people we are losing, they matter. They are people who must be honoured – because they are impregnated in our souls,” said Turino, a former culture secretary. “It’s resistance through love.”
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