Rishon Rishon

Rather "was reborn"?

(One would hope that reports of N.A.'s death have been greaty exaggerated.)

I thought that having “describes” in present tense would be enough for people to understand that he’s still alive.

David.
There were certain so to say objective circumstances that helped me in the process of changing my worldview. One of them is that I had already passed through an earlier historical event that forced me to reconsider many things.
My father, who is alive, aged 81, was diagnosed in 1988 with colon cancer. I had never visited the old land, that is, Hungary with him. I didn’t know then that, after surgery, he would eventually overcome the illness. So I decided to make a longer visit to Hungary with him in 89. Also, in 87, one of the best Yugoslav poets, Vasko Popa, had visited my country, and I interviewed him for my paper. During the next year, a friend of mine, born in the Yugoslav Vojvodina, a region that had belonged to Hungary until the end of WW1 and where almost everyone spoke both Serbian and Hungarian, worked on his translation of an anthology of Popa’s poetry. Though I know no Serbo-Croatian, I helped him with some stylistic decisions and translated for the volume a poem the Mexican poet Octavio Paz had written on Popa. By mid-89, the anthology was published, and, as Belgrade is not so far from Budapest, I also decided to take it personally to Popa there. While dad and I were in Eastern Europe, during the summer of that year, things none of us had ever thought possible began to happen and I stayed in Europe till November, writing about the end of communism for my paper. My stay in Yugoslavia allowed me to get a glimpse of the deep enmity between Serbs and Croats and to have some idea of future problems in the Balkans. People I talked to in both countries also assured me that the deposition of Romania’s Ceausescu would be a bloody affair. The whole thing, though not the first, was doubtlessly the most important occasion I had up to then to see the Western left amazed and in denial.

But there are other, more personal things that made my change of mind easier after 911.
São Paulo’s cultural environment is rather small and everyone knows and is more or less in touch with everyone else. Being someone who writes poetry, I was badly in need to remain for some time far from the older local poets in order to try and overcome their influence on my work. As Greta Garbo, I also wanted to be alone for some time in order to read more and develop my own more or less independent ideas on some subjects. When 911 happened, the fact that I was far from my own cultural milieu was, in its own way, quite helpful. Had I been in Brazil, I would have doubtlessly been influenced by the people I used to be in touch with and whose opinions were quite unanimously anti-American. Neither would I have felt so free to write what I thought because of subtle social pressures. Writing what I wanted to write, I would have felt rather ill at ease with people who not only disagreed with me but also disapproved of my positions and with whom I would have dinner two or three times in the same week. I went to Paris in May 2001 and didn’t even revisit Brazil before this year’s January. By then, I had had time to solidify my opinions and to read publications, books and authors I wouldn’t probably have read otherwise.

Even so, when I wrote my obituary of Edward Said last year, some two hundred Brazilian intellectuals, some of the most famous and influential among them, for instance, Brazil’s most important literary critics, many poets, writers, novelists, pop musicians, painters, theatre and TV people, ex-government ministers, several famous journalists (a couple of which wrote for or worked in the paper I work for), personal friends and even my own publisher, signed a violent letter condemning me, stating that I had written a cowardly article that didn’t deserve to be answered but only repudiated etc. The letter in short asked for my head (TS Eliot: “I saw my head upon a platter and, in short, I was afraid”) and not a few of its signers put pressure privately on my paper to fire me. I have to say that my paper stood by me in the most dignified way and I’m deeply grateful for that (my paper is the main liberal one here, Brazil’s NYT). Nevertheless, the letter was the most important joint manifestation of Brazilian intellectual in the last half century or so and it was extensively covered by other publications as well. Had I been in Brazil, I would have felt isolated and crushed by it. Being far away helped me to survive psychologically the first and worst weeks of the affair.

Finally, though I wasn’t expecting something like 911, the Durban hate-fest which had taken place only a little earlier left me deeply disturbed and depressed. Besides, as I had neither space nor real conditions to test and discuss my ideas daily in the newspaper, blogging helped me a lot. It has been rather like going to a shrink and the fact of trying to express myself in a language other than my own was also helpful in some ways I don’t know exactly how to explain. Perhaps writing for a public about which I know much less than about the Brazilian one gave me a kind of liberty even to commit mistakes that I wouldn’t have felt I had were I writing in Portuguese. Then, two and a half years between 911 and my return to my homeland were more or less enough for many people here to forget what was exactly they had been scandalized about. Memories are short in Brazil.

The internet gave me access to a variety of sources I could only dream about as recently as in the 90s, and being in the heartland of western anti-Americanism, in France, reading daily its lying newspapers, watching daily its official manipulative media were helpful too. There’s also a huge difference between spending some weeks in Paris and actually living there for some years. Tourists tend to see only the nice sights and, from a Brazilian’s perspective, that is, from the perspective of someone who lives in a poor, corrupt third world country, European social democracy looked like paradise. My stay in Europe allowed me to see its deep structural problems or, to put it in Maggie Thatcher’s words, I could see with me own eyes why “Labour doesn’t work”. Going to French doctors I saw the failure of the local health system. Visiting French friends and acquaintances I saw that, according even to the standards of my third world country, their professional middle-class is relatively poor, powerless and resentful. Seeing people drinking, chatting and dancing every spring and summer night on the riverside seemed, at first, quite romantic. Then I understood that, if they prefer that place to restaurants, coffee-shops or night-clubs, that’s because they simply lack the money to go frequently to such places. That’s also why one sees so many middle-class people lunching in the parks: they cannot afford going every day to a bistrot or brasserie. The variety of food there is much smaller than in São Paulo. They work less than the Americans, but stand in lines longer and much more often because they have to buy food daily since in their ridiculously small apartments there’s no place for big freezers and refrigerators. And whenever one talks about such issues with them they become savagely defensive and aggressive, telling you that you are a France hater and that things are much worse in the US. There are a million such small details that one only gets after having spent a considerable time in Europe. For God’s sake, in almost three years in France I have not one been able to eat a single decent pizza.

My father was a teenager in the 30s in Hungary and he told me a lot about that time and how it wasn’t so impossible to realize or to smell the catastrophe that would happen soon. George Orwell, the first author I read extensively in English in 73/74 (not 1984 or Animal Farm, but the four Penguin volumes of his collected essays, letters and journalism) confirmed each and every point of what my father said as did the Hungarian-turned-British Arthur Koestler. Then, after WW2, my father was a middle-ranking party functionary in communist Hungary. By the way, he had been a teacher of Marxism-Leninism in those days and gave me and insider’s view of the workings of that regime. And thanks to my militancy in the left from the late 70s to the early 80s I could see by myself how the leftist mind worked. That was the time o the Iranian revolution and my comrades were enthusiastic about it, saying that Iran was the capitalist world order’s “weak link”. I was enthusiastic too, but they continued to be so for much longer than I did.

A large part of my change of mind was due to being in the right place at the right time or, at least, to not being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Luck doubtlessly accounts for much in one’s life.

Nelson,

Do you have the Said obituary piece posted somewhere in English [or perhaps French]?

He was a proffesor of mine in college and a number of us [students] took him up on some of his unfounded contentions about historical method and assesments from a cultural perspective, that is, it's, minimally, a two way street. This man was one of the least objective scholars I've had the displeasure of hearing- his methodology was wholly borrowed from Continental Literary criticism and philosophy w/o any of the universal concerns. His legacy is nearly cannonized now: he was a strident Arab Nationalist, posing as a dapper Liberal (you should have seen his collection of silk scarves/ties). He did not like, but still aided the Islamic revolution in the ME.

Siccari.
I've translated it into English and posted it at Europundits on September 28, 2003. Here's the link to it: http://www.europundits.blogspot.com/2003_09_01_europundits_archive.html#106478059002565171

Not terribly respectful an epitaph. All very accurate, however (though I suspect that his reputation and his legacy will live on for some time to come, so firmly entrenched are his pustulations in the minds of the ideologically deluded---willingly or otherwise---in academe). No wonder his acolytes were a bit dismayed.

Nelson, you are a dangerous man....

Thanks Nelson.