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The Brazilian Exile Experience : Remaking Identities

Denise Rollemberg Latin American Perspectives 2007 34: 81 DOI: 10.1177/0094582X07302948 The online version of this article can be found at: http://lap.sagepub.com/content/34/4/81
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The Brazilian Exile Experience Remaking Identities

by Denise Rollemberg Translated by Timothy Thompson
The story of the Brazilian exile experience (19641979) from the perspective of the exiles themselves highlights the loss of roots and references and the discovery of new possibilities. The quotidian side of exile involved doubt, certainty, distress, emptiness, fear, insanity, death, difficulty with documents, work, study, reconstruction of pathwaysin short, a redefinition of identity imposed by day-to-day life. At the same time that the exile experience meant the removal and elimination of the generations of 1964 and 1968, it also meant their survival: it was the locus of free thought, critical inquiry, learning, and enrichment, the locus of resistance and transformation, the negation of negation. Keywords: Political exile, Brazil, Civil-military dictatorship, Brazilian leftist movements
The exile Maria Augusta Carneiro Ribeiros1 description of her experience with Muslim women in Algeria (interview, Rio de Janeiro, April 4, 1996) seems like a scene from a surrealist film:
The bathhouse was enormous. The women were naked, around them in the corners were the tiled shelves where hot and cold water came out. The steam. The water comes up from the floor. You sit on the floor to bathe yourself. You scrub and use a gourd to rinse off. Its a collective bath, all the women together, the water runs along the tiled floor. Its a terrifying sight. The women are green, tattooed. They tattoo themselves according to their status: mothers, grandmothers . . . they keep tattooing their bodies, telling a story. A few old women were tattooed all over their backs and arms. The tattoos dont show because the women are always covered. Its horrible . . . since they dont get any sun, they look ugly and pallid. . . . I just kept taking it all in. . . . Some women go around with pumice stones for scrubbing. . . . They scrub your body with the stone. With only one bath per week, your body gets very oily, so they scrub hard to get rid of all the oil. That whole scene just kept churning, churning, churning. . . . Once I fell down and passed out.
Culture shock was inevitable for this young middle-class woman, who belonged to a generation that defied order and convention and valorized the ability of men and women to change the world through their own intervention. After the glory of being exchanged for the U.S. ambassador through a
Denise Rollemberg is a professor of contemporary history at Fluminense Federal University and a member of its Nucleus of Contemporary Studies. Her research focuses on Brazils civilmilitary dictatorship and leftist movements. Timothy Thompson is a doctoral candidate in English at Boston College and a freelance translator. This article is adapted from a chapter of the authors Exlio: Entre razes e radares (Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1999).
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 155, Vol. 34 No. 4, July 2007 81-105 DOI: 10.1177/0094582X07302948 2007 Latin American Perspectives
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revolutionary action, followed by guerrilla training in Cuba in preparation for a return to Brazil to rejoin the armed struggle, Maria Augusta found herself in a strange situation. She was in Algeria waiting for her organization to authorize her return, but their authorization never arrived, nor would it. The guerrilla struggle had been undermined, repressive forces had scored a series of victories, and her organization had vanished.2 Many years would pass before her desire to return to Brazil could be fulfilled. In the meantime, the experience of exile would have to be lived out day to day in the face of both objective and subjective issues. After feeling that they had been at the center of things in a conjuncture of intense political turmoil, the generations of 1964 and 1968 experienced their exile as a break with reality, the uprooting of the universe of references that had given meaning to their armed struggle (on the concept of generations as used here, see Sirinelli, 1987; 1989). The defeat of a personal and political project, uneasiness vis--vis other countries and cultures, difficulty in adapting to new societies that often infantilized them, lack of recognition in the new roles available to themall of this subverted the image that the exiles had had of themselves and triggered a crisis of identity. The results of this crisis could be seen in a range of everyday situations: struggling for documents or refusing to obtain them, working and studying, remaining politically engaged or abandoning militancy, contributing to art and culture, and negotiating emotional and family life. The story of day-to-day life in exile is therefore a story of constantly renewed culture shock, of discomfort with the other and especially with oneself because of the conflict between what one used to beor had wanted to beand what one had actually become. It is a story of disorientation, of a crisis of values that meant the end of a journey for some and the discovery of new possibilities for others. It is a story of inglorious and futile effort to maintain an identity. And it is a story of redefinition and reconstruction of identity that extended throughout the phases of exile and for many continued even after returning to Brazil. Several factors played into the experience of daily life in exile, beginning with the character traits and personalities of each individual. Social status proved equally important: whereas some exiles were recognized as professionals or public personalities and never lacked institutional invitations to proceed with interrupted projects, others needed to impose their presence and fight for visibility and material survival, often undertaking activities that had nothing to do with their expectations and for which they were overqualified. Personal resources made a difference: some could count on reserves of money and family help, while others could not. Age, too, interfered: in general, the younger exiles, who had accumulated and solidified less baggage, were more flexible in the face of adversity, but those exiles who could claim some measure of notoriety were also the older ones. Knowledge of the language and the degree of difficulty in learning it also made a difference. The company of family members, meanwhile, could represent an element of security and support or an overload of responsibility. The phases of exile were also decisive: the reference points of each period could open horizons or eliminate hopes, facilitating or not ones confrontation with concrete realities.3 Finally, belonging to a party or organization or embracing a definite political stanceor being able to redirect ones militancy toward a professional projectin general helped give meaning to life in exile.
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In sum, an exiles crisis of identity might involve a network of complex questions, including psychological ones, questions that affected each individual in a particular way. There are wry accounts such as Darcy Ribeiros: To suffer banishment one needs a great deal of character, something I dont have. I suffered in my own way, without exaggeration (1977: 13). But for others daily life was an unbearable drama that led, in the extreme, to insanity or even suicide. Between these two extremes there were innumerable individual experiences. One recurring issue raised by the majority of my sources, whether to assert or to question its relevance, was the psychological aspect of exile. It is necessary, therefore, to reflect on how the crisis of identity influenced these two generationsto consider the way in which the disorientation provoked by exile contributed to the redefinition of a prior political project, beginning with the reconstruction of the exiles own sense of identity. In a letter dated November 16, 1976, Csar Benjamin, in Sweden, calls attention to the question in all its contradictions and ambiguity:
Paris is a party, but for many its also a party thats over. Theres a drama in the air, a drama of which weve been the protagonists for several years, but in a different way now. Our luck, good or bad, I dont know, but our strength, certainly (though it becomes the weakness of many), comes from being collective, which is to say historical. Here, however, the end of a cycle is clearly visible: the same drama whose foundations were laid when we broke away, with vigor but little vision, from our class in 1969, going full speed ahead without it, arrives today at its final act, which for some might last a whole lifetime of profound identity crisis that, needless to say, opens the (difficult) possibility of reconstruction. The sad thing is watching this current drama: if its foundations were laid and developed in Brazil, it became mixed up there with the heroic and utopian (in the sense of the antithesis of pettiness) and tended toward the epic, which sustained us and gave a sense of beauty; but here, for many, all thats left of the drama is tragedy, or even farce. The crisis of identity seen in the faces of people without homeland or class, without a link between past and present to be projected forward, living in a static eternity devoid of meaning (its appropriate that Im reading The Magic Mountain right now4), the crisis of identity, I repeat, if strong and severe, opens up at the same time the possibility of regaining identity on another, broader level, deeper and more human because chosen. Theres a challenge involved in it. I believe that many wont overcome it, but those who do survive will have something to say.
THE LOSS OF THE SPEAKING SOUL In East Germany, the gray country, the architecture and the color of the buildings, the difficulty with the language, the schedule, the discipline, the rigid control, the totalitarian system, the weather, the habits, the customsall so different from Contendas do Sencor in the interior of Bahia, where he was borncontributed to the daily life of Delce Faanha (interview, Niteri, August 24, 1995) from 1974 to 1983. The hope that urban and rural guerrilla warfare would change the course of history and prevent so many other Northeasterners from going down a path like hisa path marked by poverty and needwould disappear in the face of his strict routine as an unskilled foreign worker in the German chemical industry. Under the attentive, omnipresent, and controlling watch of the German Democratic Republic, he had only the worst tasks assigned him.
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The removal of ones universe of references makes exile seem like emptiness, absence, interval. Notions of space and time lose their clarity; past blends with present, superimposing the country of origin on the country of destination in an effort to maintain what no longer exists. In the impossibility of maintaining it, many were left with the agonizing sensation of lost time: More than time are the lost sensations, the sensibility, the way of facing life I miss it all. Lost time because of being here and not there, as Csar Benjamin describes it (letter, September 23, 1977). Being out of place coalesced with being out of time. Miguel Arraes (1979) speaks of the search for lost place as a struggle for life, as resistance against death:
Being in exile is like seeing time pass outside you. Things happen without your participating in them, without your being inside them. So you have to make a tremendous effort to keep yourself on a par with reality through conversation, visiting, reading the newspaper, listening to the radio, et cetera. You need to make an effort to live because, on the contrary, when youre outside of time you dont live.
In the midst of the difficulty of redefining a political and life project, the past for Vera Slvia Magalhes (interview, Rio de Janeiro, January 25 and March 14, 1999) meant her search for herself, and it imposed itself as essential to her very survival:
I went to training in Cuba propelled along by my own story. I wasnt in control, because I left with the group [of 40 political prisoners exchanged for the German ambassador], with all of my friends. I didnt know exactly if the revolution would be possible in Brazil again or not, or at which point in history. I was riddled with doubt. But when you arrive at a certain point, especially at that age . . . I had reached my limit. I thought that I had given all I could to building a revolutionary project, but then what? How do you build another project? Youre already tangled up in it to such an extent. . . . Many people gave up, its true, didnt even go to training in Cuba, but in my case it was like this: I have to survive this sadness, this pessimism. How? By reclaiming the most vital thing in me, which was my revolutionary project. So I had to go on.
Recalling his memories of armed struggle and exile, Reinaldo Guarany describes the disorientation he experienced while living in Chile. Because he felt alienated from the political process then unfolding, he reverted to his past as a guerrilla, rejecting his new identity as a refugee (1984: 112):
I clung to the past, to the glories I had lived through, practically demanding reverent respect for the hero I must have been. Refusing to accept the mediocrity of the present, I re-created a reality known only to myself and my ghosts, a reality that we alone relived through the delusions I was dragged back to each night. There, on a bench in the city square, in the still of the night, I began to recover my identity. I stopped being just some dupe [cabide de roupas] who had to put up with the vulgar language of the thieves [cogoteiros] and hookers of the Mapocho.
Exile is frequently associated with uprooting, destabilization, solitude: I would wake up suffocated, telephone everyone, write like a madman, look people up. It gave me great pleasure to know the details of lives told in letters, says Juarez Ferraz de Maia (interview, Paris, November 27, 1995). The solitude
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of exile triggered in him the memory of the solitude he had experienced in prisonthe weeks passed in solitary confinement. For Maria Valderez Coelho da Paz, exile produced a fear of solitude (pnico da solido) (Costa et al., 1980: 348):
Foreign countries and exile are an exercise in solitude. They were for me. When I lived with Brazilian friends it was great at first. . . . But later the house began to be overrun by people who were trying to find each other, compulsively, obsessively. They tried to find each other but said nothing, and if they said anything I have the impression it was only rarely. . . . It was the fear of solitude, a solitude that manifests itself more clearly when ones points of reference are far removed. . . . After a while I began to refuse the imposition. And furthermore I wanted to be alone, to be able to be by myself. If you cant find peace and quiet, you fall into that crazy rhythm, or you go crazy yourself.
But solitude is hardly a problem that affects only exiles. In the opinion of Emlia Viotti da Costa, U.S. society in general, in which she spent her exile, is a society of solitary individuals. Ignorant of social codes, the exile feels particularly marginalized in this universe and consequently extremely solitary (Costa et al., 1980: 397). The emotionally destructuring effect of exile is blamed for the end of many marriages. Amidst the loss of reference points and the difficulties of personal reconstruction, attrition proves inevitable. At the same time, we also hear of relationships maintained precisely because of the exile experiencebecause of the need to preserve something stable against the instability, to cling to someone familiar against the unknown. The way in which the French infantilized the exile community makes Nan Verri Whitaker (interview, Paris, November 30, 1995) remember the terrible moments of despair when faced with arrogance and pretended superiority: The reputation of France as a land of asylum is just a veneer. Even individuals on the left who had offered to help them make the transition assumed an air of superiority: Its as if they had said, Were doing you a favor. We can help you. It was never a relation of equals. There was also the double face of refugee aid institutions: on the one hand solidarity, housing, food, work, clothes, and documents and on the other hand the infantilization inherent to the welfare dynamic. Between necessity and humiliation, exiles were rebaptized as refugees without ever being able to recognize themselves in the new role assigned to them. It is not for nothing that we hear of the disagreeable sensation of going to receive a handout. The words of Sebastio Hoyos (interview, Geneva, January 10, 1996), for example, reveal the depth of resentment toward the Swiss system of asylum: There is assistance in Switzerland for refugees, but you have to beg for it. The regulations for obtaining assistance are designed to humiliate people. I refused to accept it. Im proud to say that I never benefited from assistance. I have always worked here. The process of infantilization was especially painful for those forced into unskilled labor, and finding a way out, whether through political means, work, or study, proved difficult. In this way, exile seemed reduced to mere subsistence, especially when compared with the expectations that prior militancy had created (Costa et al., 1980: 331):
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The experience of prison was much more enriching than that of exile. What Im about to say might seem absurd, but I felt much more alive there than I feel here. Because in prison, for better or worse, I felt that I was acting. In exile, most of the time I feel as if Im just surviving, and thats all. . . . Exile is very, very belittling. Everything is reduced to survival! In exile you have very little choice in anything!
The account of Nanci Marietto (interview, Rocca Priora, Italy, January 20, 1996) is also striking in this sense. According to her, the problem was not simply that she was an exile or refugee but that she was a foreigner: The Italians think that if youre a foreigner they can do whatever they want. We were mistreated, I was cheated in every way, something that happens frequently with foreigners. The way people were treated was terrible. Her story is one of scams, thefts, insults, harassment, and humiliation in Rome.5 The loss of ones native language means the loss of self-expression, the loss of emotion, as Luiz Alberto Sanz (interview, Rio de Janeiro, September 14, 1995) describes it: Speaking a language that isnt mine and that I havent mastered, I ended up saying things with much less emotion than I could in Portuguese. The feeling he experienced in Chile was reinforced in Sweden:
I was able to say the most offensive things to people without getting very involved in what I was saying. It seemed it was a different person talking. . . . When I began to master the language, I was able to put emotion into what I said, and thats when things got really bad. Offensive language with emotion behind it is much more shocking than when it lacks emotion. Youre much more objective when you havent mastered the language.
Herbert Daniel also registers how significant the absence of ones native language becomes: The greatest problem of exile is the loss of language. Losing your language means losing your soul (Carvalho, 1981: 23). Language is a basic reference point of social identity; the lack of language redefines identity and triggers metamorphosis. The capacity for expression and comprehension dwindled or suddenly disappeared, especially for those living in countries such as Sweden, Denmark, and Germany, where language learning took time and aggravated the exiles isolation vis--vis others and the world.
MYTHS OF ORIGIN AND DESTINATION

THE MYTH OF THE HOMELAND
During exile there emerged what Daniel Aaro Reis Filho refers to as the myth of the homeland, the assumption among militants that those living abroad were out of practice and therefore should not offer opinions, much less make decisions about the course of the armed struggle. On the contrary, they were to wait for instructions from the homeland. This was particularly the case during the first phase, when exiles were still polarized around vanguard organizations and exile itself had been devalued as a time and place of resistance:
For those particular leftists, anyone arrested or exiled was out of practice according to their definition of the word. This meant a loss of status and a loss of the right to intervene and express an opinion, the idea being that only those
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engaged in revolutionary practice could speak out. There was a tremendous disregard for theory, discussion, debate, and anyone who tried to influence the organization from abroad.
In the specific case of the organization to which Daniel belonged, the Movimento Revolucionrio 8 de Outubro (Revolutionary Movement of October 8MR-8), which included some of the last militants to leave Brazil, there arose, at a time when the grip of repression had grown tighter, a new appreciation for exile as a space for rejoining the fight. Members reading of Lenins exile writings, through which he had sought to influence the struggle from abroad, redefined the exile experience for them. According to Daniel, an emblematic figure emerged out of the myth created around the word homelanda word that, more than simply referring to Brazil itself, signified the armed struggle and the revolution they would return to. This figure, constantly present in other exile experiences, was that of the high-ranking militant come to deliver orders to those in exile. Deriving authority from his connection to the homeland, this individual had no qualms, even if simply for the sake of maintaining his own power, about belittling those already in exile, taking advantage of their isolation and filtering, censoring, and manipulating the flow of information.
THE MYTH OF THE SOCIALIST COUNTRY
Exile presented the possibility of life in a socialist country, a possibility that forced militants to reconsider their own points of reference. The experience proved decisive in confirming, annulling, or redefining their socialist projects. Maurcio Dias David (interview, Paris, March 9 and 15, 1995), seduced by the utopia of the socialist system, had gone to study economics in East Germany, where he had received a doctoral fellowship, but managed to remain in Berlin a mere six months: Thats when I broke with communism. I said, Ive been fighting my whole life against what I see here, against this society as I see it organized. I made a dramatic break and came to embrace an anticommunist position much closer to Swedish social democracy. The asphyxia of the country, the controlled, dictatorial systemthese had come as a shock. Prior to this experience, Maurcio had spent two months in Sweden, and after comparing the two countries and their systems he opted for the social democracy. Disappointment also marked Delce Faanhas time in Cuba between December 1973 and March 1974 while he waited to go on to East Germany. According to him (interview, Niteri, August 24, 1995), the group of nearly 200 people that he had accompanied from the Venezuelan embassy in Chile was not permitted to move freely in the country, though the government did promise food, lodging, and health care. Denied contact with the population at large, the group was stationed at a hotel nearly 100 kilometers from Havana and kept under constant surveillance: I was very disappointed. Of the minimal contact that we had with people, I saw that they were only interested in turning a profit, a common tendency in supposedly socialist countries. A month after her arrival in Algeria in June 1970, Vera Slvia Magalhes (interview, Rio de Janeiro, January 25 and March 14, 1994) left for Cuba. But what she saw there did little to inspire her. She came in contact for the most
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part only with bureaucracy, with privileged and authoritarian individuals who gave access only to those approved by the party. The experience left her disenchanted. If day-to-day experience in socialist countries could place in check ones points of reference, it could also reaffirm them, as the enthusiasm of Mrcio Moreira Alves demonstrates. He was drawn to the same Cuba that to others seemed so restrictive (Ucha Cavalcanti and Ramos, 1978: 233):
In Cuba I experienced firsthand and saw with my own eyes what socialism is about and what its possible to achieve in a socialist country. Cuba is Pernambuco with scruples. Thats what it is: Pernambuco with a sense of decency, a proper government, and a population that isnt exploited. And the potential of this transformation is so evident that it can really transform a person. Everything you could imagine having read about is there being put into practice, and this makes for a much more viable option. As I see it, Ive had two points in life when I really learned something. First, I began to learn after the military coup in 1964. I began to learn what my country really was, the real face of Brazil. A face that was hard, violent, and bloody. Later on, I began to learn in Cuba, to learn the possibilities of a life lived in harmony, not deprived of basic needs such as food, health care, and education. I began to see that an underdeveloped people could create such a life.
In the same way, the testimony of Roberto Morena, a former militant unionist of the Partido Comunista Brasileiro (Brazilian Communist partyPCB) exiled in Czechoslovakia, is very revealing. After years living in a country harshly repressed under Soviet-style socialism, he embraced an uncritical view of the system, one that confirmed his own ideal vision (Ucha Cavalcanti and Ramos, 1978: 325):
Living in socialist countries gave us a clear vision of the reality and viability of the revolutionary ideals that we had embraced since youth, even in school, and that had been strengthened in factories, unions, and the Communist party. A wonderful fulfillment of what we had imagined, proposed, and proclaimed: a society without factory owners, a society in which men feel secure in the present and the future, in which social inequalities disappear, in which the possibility of knowledge and culture is both open to and within the reach of the collective masses and is steadily advancing toward the complete construction of socialism.
THE MYTH OF THE COUNTRY OF ASYLUM
The term country of asylum is widely employed by institutions and publications concerned with refugees to designate the countries in which they come to reside. Meanwhile, if the word asylum brings to mind the solidarity frequently expressed through the initial process of reception and social adaptation, it also conceals or diminishes a reality that is much more complex. Indeed, as we have seen, even solidarity involved contradictions and ambiguities. If some segments of society mobilized to receive political exiles, others identified them as terrorists whose stay should be interdicted. According to Herbert de Souza (1979), in some countries exiles were in fact treated as terrorists; he cites the case of Theotnio dos Santos, who upon arrival in the United States was denied entrance and accused of terrorism on the basis
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of information exchanged among police agencies in several countries. In the same way, Reinaldo Guarany (1980; 1984) witnessed a campaign by the German right against receiving Chilean exiles, whom right-wing newspapers referred to as terrorists. Police forces in the very countries that had granted UN refugee status in fulfillment of the Geneva Convention remained in contact with the Brazilian police, the institution whose tacticsbased on the torture, imprisonment, and assassination of those who opposed the systemhad caused such outrage throughout Brazilian society. A French professor active in the Comit France-Brsil, which had denounced the dictatorship, still has a form written in German and Portuguese about the political activities of Brazilian exiles, a document proving that German and Brazilian police had collaborated. Ricardo Vilas (interview, Paris, November 30, 1995), even though he had received a visa to enter England, was arrested upon arrival in the country with his wife and eight-month-old daughter. They were all detained and made to spend the night at the airport. Accused of being a terrorist, he was forced by the police to sign a document in which he requested permission to leave the country. Interviews with several militants exiled in democratic countries, such as West Germany and France, leave no doubt that the police forces of these countries received information from the Brazilian police and used it to pressure, intimidate, and humiliate those in exile (Daniel Aaro Reis Filho, interview, Rio de Janeiro, 1996). When Reinaldo Guarany was summoned by the East German police, he discovered that they had been keeping a folder with information about him in Portuguese and German. The pettiness of the police and the humiliation they inflicted were part of day-to-day life in West Germany. During the 1974 World Cup, for example, some exiles were forced to appear at the police station three times a day during the games for fear that they might attempt to assassinate members of the Brazilian team. Prosecuted for forgery of documents, illegal entry into the country, and even bigamy, Reinaldo Barcellos and his wife, Dora, were never granted asylum. When Dora committed suicide, the government finally granted asylum to Reinaldo along with others in the same situation. Instead, Reinaldo chose to leave the country (see Guarany, 1984: 132133). Miguel Arraes (1979: 6), constantly identified with the government of Algeria, where he remained throughout his time in exile, remembers the restrictions imposed by democratic countries: For years I was prevented from traveling, since the governments of France and England refused to let me enter, for reasons they never explained. When my own children traveled to these countries to study, they were pulled out of airport lines and subjected to special inspection. After being exiled in June 1970, Apolonio de Carvalho, who had fought with the French Resistance, waited two years for a French visa, which during the Georges Pompidou government had also been denied to four other political exiles belonging to his group (interview, Rio de Janeiro, SeptemberOctober, 1986). Authorization was given only after leftist groups and the Socialist party took action. In the same year, the Swiss government invited Apolonio and another exile, Ladislas Dowbor, to leave the country. According to Erasmo Saenz-Carrete, in 1975, after the attack perpetrated by the Venezuelan Carlos the Jackal, in which French police officers had been
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killed, the French secret police, the Direction de Surveillance de Territoire, subjected political refugees to interrogation, going so far as to forcibly enter the homes of Brazilian refugees. The following year, Poniatowski, the interior minister, threatened to expel any political refugee who created problems for public order. Georges Casalis, a French citizen active in institutions defending human rights, testified to the Bertrand Russell Tribunal II that because of this episode very harsh measures of control and intimidation were taken against Brazilian refugees, who, notwithstanding, were the beneficiaries of official UN statute (Saenz-Carrete, 1983: 214, 217).6 The story of the so-called aviators also contributes to a consideration of the meaning of country of asylum, an unstable term even with regard to the socialist countries that militants had idealized. Three young sympathizers of the armed struggle, in order to demonstrate their commitment to Latin American revolution, hijacked an airplane in Brazil and headed for Cuba, the symbol of their ideals. Once there, they suffered the same fate any hijacker would who lacked either backing from an organization acknowledged by the Cuban authorities or prior authorization from the Cuban government: they were detained. Not understanding the kind of situation they had gotten themselves into, they offered to work, their goal being to serve the socialist cause. Cuban officials, accordingly, took them to a quarry, where they did their best at the arduous task, all for the glory of the revolution. Meanwhile, they began to find it strange that the other laborers expressed frequent and serious criticisms of the system until finally, to their surprise, they discovered that they were all prisoners. When they proposed the idea of building a stone statue in homage to Comrade Trotsky, they fell completely out of favor and were left without documents, plane tickets, or authorization to leave the country. They managed to leave Cuba months later through the intervention of militants who had arrived for guerrilla training and guaranteed that they were neither spies nor anything close to it. For the aviators, the nickname they received from these militants, the dream of a country of asylum for Latin American revolutionaries had turned into a nightmare (Gabeira, 1980).
DISORIENTATION, EMPTINESS, FEAR, INSANITY Fear loomed large during exile, arising at different moments and to varying degrees: from the militia created during the first nights in Ben Aknoum by members of the group of 40 prisoners exchanged for the German ambassador (because they refused to rule out the possibility of further repression from Brazilian forces) to the presumed presence in Santiago of police chief Srgio Fleury, symbol of terror during the dictatorship, which led militants of the Ao Libertadora Nacional (National Liberation ActionALN) and the Vanguarda Popular Revolucionria (Popular Revolutionary VanguardVPR) to plan his murder (Guarany, 1984: 104).7 The ghost of Fleury, in fact, would appear and reappear at different times and in different places, frightening and threatening. Over time, this paranoia, half true, half delusional, the idea that the secret police were watching us and plotting against us, would show itself in other forms (Daniel Aaro Reis Filho, interview, Rio de Janeiro, 1996). There are countless stories about exiles who suffered psychiatric problems or came to
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associate exile with insanity, lost identityor if not insanity then drama, anomaly, and sickness (Poerner, 1980: 13) or, in the account of Padre Lage (1979: 26), the struggle to recognize oneself:
Man is degraded by exile. My experience involves a permanent struggle to be myself and nothing else, a struggle against the degradation of being forced into exile. I dont know if its because the individual in exile has been removed by force at the acutest point of his capacity to serve the peopleuprooted at the point of deepest rootedness. But this displacement lasts. This contradiction lasts. I feel even more Brazilian than I used to, without wanting to associate myself with anything in particular. I feel very Brazilian. I dont know how. And consequently unable to enrich myself with the tremendous culture that a country like this [Mexico] has to offer. I think that exile drives you crazy. Who knows, am I crazy already? . . . Maybe thats what insanity is: when he thinks hes not himself anymore. I ask myself: Am I really who I am? I asked myself that question just this morning.
In 1976, Vera Slvia Magalhes (interview, Rio de Janeiro, January 25 and March 14, 1994) suffered her first psychotic attack during a banal moment of her exile in Paris when she believed someone to be an agent of repression: It was like an explosion around the void inside me. The loss of her revolutionary project and the impossibility of redefining it led to disorientation:
I dont know what my real role in this story is anymore. . . . Ive lost a part of myself. My life now feels truly emptied of the things I used to believe in. I dont believe anymore. Theres no use pretending. Im sure I pay some price for my lack of faith, and I do mean in the religious sense. I dont have any faith. So Ive ended up kind of lost. Ive accumulated so much inside my own head, experiences that I dont know where to put. I havent dedicated myself to anything in particular since then, other than my son.
Fear of repression together with a sense of longing for home unleashed extremely severe outbreaks of insanity in Vilma, exactly when exile pointed to financial security and stability. The sicker she became, the more homesick and nostalgic for her childhood she felt. She wasnt able to withstand the shock, and she gave in. Some people go through this and hang on to their sanity, but others just arent able to, says her ex-husband.8 Free from the financial problems that afflicted other exiles, successful and well adapted in each country that he lived in, he suffered his greatest hardship in the form of his wifes illness, from which she never recovered. In the midst of a lack of prospects, the redefinition of identity was often a slow and painful process. Some were unable to overcome the crisis. Frei Tito de Alencar and Maria Auxiliador Lara Barcellos, or Dora, chose death as the way to put an end to fear, emptiness, and insanity. At 31 years old, Tito, who had been banished in 1971, hanged himself in a convent near Lyon in 1974. During his three years in exile he had never recovered from the trauma of torture and prison. Convinced as he was that Fleury was pursuing him in France, he found his life a living hell. Rebuilding proved impossible for him, as another Dominican, Magno Jos Vilela, reports (Ucha Cavalcanti and Ramos, 1978: 215): In France, he tried to continue his studies but wasnt able to. He was in an extremely delicate state psychologically, lacking courage, energy, in short, a way to survive. He lived in sadness until the day he chose to end it
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all. Dora, freed along with Frei Tito, threw herself in front of a subway train in Berlin in 1976. She was also 31 years old. Not long before her death, she had undergone psychiatric treatment. In Belgium, Juarez Ferraz de Maia received letters that were sad, unhinged, and very painful in which she spoke of solitude, anguish, and failure and displayed her lack of faith in men, women, and the possibility of change (interview, Paris, November 27, 1995). Luiz Alberto Sanz, exiled in Sweden and a member of the group of prisoners that had been exchanged for the Swiss ambassador, made a film with Lars Safstrom about Doras death titled Quando chegar o momento (When the Moment Comes). The film uses the interview she had given with four other exiles for a documentary filmed in Chile, No hora de chorar (Its Not Time to Cry), which was about the suicide of Dora ver Guarany (Guarany, 1980; 1984). The trajectory of Sebastio Rios also symbolizes the drama of disorientation during exile. A former professor at the University of Braslia, Rios participated directly in kidnapping the U.S. ambassador and managed to leave the country without being arrested. Once established in Argentina he worked to support the organization, preparing documents for clandestine militants in exile. Later, transformed into a clochard (homeless person), Rios could be found on the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris. Even if these are extreme experiences in which the redefinition or reconstruction of identity proved impossible, the analogy drawn by Toms Tarqnio (interview, Paris, January 17 and February 26, 1995) comparing exile to a stoneshattered mirror yielding a barely recognizable reflection still synthesizes the substance of many accounts. Togetherness among Brazilians was one way to alleviate suffering. In dayto-day life, at parties, in political activity, exile colonies tried to reproduce a Brazilian environment, sometimes stereotypically through traditional food and music. Many recall never having eaten so much feijoada as they did in exile, feijoada not being something that Brazilians, especially members of the middle class, tend to eat every day.9 In general, those who had best adapted to society repudiated life in the colony and criticizedor even disdained those who relied on it intensely, accusing them of being introverted, incapable of opening up to the opportunities around them, and ignorant of the country in which they were living. Those in the colony resented this autonomous adaptation, considered it a form of selling out, and identified it with those aspects of the country of exile that were the object of their ridicule. Mrcio Moreira Alves (Ucha Cavalcanti and Ramos, 1978: 230231) refers to insular exiles as tribes of cannibals living
in a small group of Brazilians who only think about Brazil, who only read about Brazil, who only relate to their surroundings in a parasitical way in order to take things, find things, resources for this or that . . . in short, who mooch off of the society in which their companheiros are working and fixate on Brazil in a vacuum at the same time that they affirm themselves by lashing out and attacking other groups of Brazilians who do exactly the same thing.
Life in the ghetto (as the exiles called it), however, did play an important role. The ghetto was an attempt to alleviate the insecurities of exile, to find protection from prejudice, to avoid social alienation, and, for many, to survive. Turning to those who shared their story, they sought to recover the past that
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had given life meaning, finding self-affirmation in a common culture that went far beyond traditional food and, in short, helped preserve identity itself. Throughout history, life in ghettos has been a strategy that groups have seized upon on seeing their identity threatened or called into question. The ghetto therefore functions as a form of resistance, a negation of negation, a struggle against fragmentation: The way we survived in exile was by sticking together, as Vera Slvia Magalhes (interview, Rio de Janeiro, January 25 and March 14, 1994) puts it. Despite the ghettos neurotic environment, according to Juarez Ferraz de Maia (interview, Paris, November 27, 1995), if it hadnt been for the colony of Brazilians in Belgium, we wouldve lost it. At the same time, it is true that the ghetto represented a circumscribed universe in which there was no shortage of conflict and contradiction. In the view of Csar Benjamin (letter, December 30, 1977), there were two faces to life in the colony, dissatisfaction with the limits it imposed and difficulty in moving beyond it: At this point exile seems like prison: our little group has been predetermined for us. . . . Outside the group, the rest is blond-haired and speaks some weird language. The ghetto can also be a way of reorganizing people and reformulating a failed political project. Out of this experience came committees denouncing the dictatorship and calling for amnesty, as well as publications, demonstrations, and cultural and political groups and activities. Magno Jos Vilela speaks of the recovery and intensification of contact with the Brazilian community in Paris not only as a psychological necessity but above all as a political act. To get together to chat, listen to music, all of that, but also to continue the political fight (Ucha Cavalcanti and Ramos, 1978: 211). Throughout the 1970s the parties thrown by the colony in Paris became famous for ending up as orgies. Lus Eduardo Prado de Oliveira (interview, Paris, October 27 and November 3, 1995) comments on the situation as both a psychoanalyst and an exile: Orgies played an integrating role. They were a way for people to unite before dividing once again. But this left me with an impression of insanity. The Brazilian colony was really insane. Once again we see exile, now specifically in the form of the ghetto, associated with psychopathy. And the boundaries are indeed tenuous. The projects of vanguardist militants, above all during the first phase of exile, seemed delusional even at the time to those who had pledged to revive the armed struggle in Brazil. The following episode, which took place in Cuba, is quite apposite. A former director of a vanguardist organization had developed a plan to return to the country and was assisted by a former leader of the Northeastern peasant leagues known as Z. Even before 1964 Z had been brutally beaten in Brazil, and he had been sent to Cuba for treatment. He had remained in Cuba because of the civil-military coup, and years later when militants began arriving from Brazil for guerrilla training he got to know them and befriended several. It was in this way that the former director and the former peasant leader met. With the goal of returning to Brazil, they devised a plan to build a boat with a false bottom. Stowed away, the guerrillas would enter the country via the Amazon rather than via Uruguay and Argentina, whose borders were better known to repressive forces. The organization dedicated itself to the plan and even allocated considerable resources to building the boat (Daniel Aaro Reis Filho, interview, Rio de Janeiro, 1996):
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This project reveals something of the megalomania, the delusions of grandeur. As things unfolded, Z, who was involved with this ex-director of the organization in the project, completely lost it. This story didnt come to me secondhand, I lived it. One day I remember running into [Z] in Chile. He was very troubled and had a long story to tell backed up by notes that he showed me. The story was complicated, and supposedly he had discovered, invented, and designed a special weapon that could be of great use to the militant left in Brazil. The weapon was a self-propelled rocket. He even protested bitterly that the Cubans had stolen his original blueprints but that he had managed, with a great deal of effort, to reconstruct them. I mean, these self-propelled rockets were meant to cause mass destruction in our fight in the cities and in urban guerrilla warfare. At this point I really came to believe that Z had crossed the line, gone over the edge. Afterward I found out, in fact, that this had really been his fate. . . . I dont tell this story to belittle anyone, only to point out one expression of the delusion and deviation that militants and leftist organizations had begun to suffer from.
The crisis of identity and values of the left in exile can also be seen in the armed actions lacking any political outcome that were undertaken in Chile, which revealed a deviation from the ideals and principles of the vanguard. Reinaldo Guarany (interview, Rio de Janeiro, August 31, 1995) states that the ALN, the organization to which he belonged, had instructed its militants, who had disembarked in January 1971, that they were neither to accept work nor become socially integrated but were to await further instructions. At a certain point, however, the host government stopped supporting them, and the ALN had no resources to maintain them. The solution was to undertake actions of expropriation, as they were called at the time, and divide the money among the participants. At first they targeted doleiros (currency dealers who exchange U.S. dollars on the black market), who were engaged in illegal activity and could not complain to the police:
Many Brazilians engaged in a series of actions in Chileindividuals from the VPR, the ALN, and people who set up parallel groups, with or without a political objective, with people who had decided to get involved just to make a profit. I knew one guy personally who got rich, because after a while he lost interest in waging armed resistance to obtain money for Brazil. It became a personal objective. He got so rich that he bought a factory and became a businessman.
In fact, however, only a minority of Brazilians exiled in Chile behaved as if the tactics usedand learnedin Brazil to obtain resources for guerrilla warfare could be unmoored from principles and political objectives. Actions driven by political objectives were also undertaken, as Guarany explains. Brazilian exiles connected to a left-leaning sector of the Chilean Partido Socialista joined together to obtain and send weapons to Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. When they were found out, ngelo Pezzuti, who had been banished with the group of 40, and others involved were arrested. Once again he was tortured, this time by representatives of the socialist Unidad Popular government:
ngelo Pezzuti was severely tortured, literally broken. The other prisoners as well. He told me that the difference between what he suffered in Brazil and what he suffered in Chile was that the policeman, Victor Toro, a member of the PC [Partido Comunista], insisted on torturing him without a mask on. At this point,
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groups of Brazilian exiles who were engaged in their own separate actions split up and left for Europe.
Armed actions undertaken for personal profit demonstrate that a crisis of values was already present during the first phase of exile. Reframed in a different context, these actions led to an extreme version of what to a certain extent had already occurred in Brazil when armed groups had to commit robbery simply to support themselves. But in Chile the cycle of survival became distorted, and armed actions came across as caricatures of what they had been before. Even when political objectives were involved, they were but desperate attempts to prolong the past and carry it into the present, to superimpose the identity of guerrilla on that of refugee. The aspect of the exile experience involving self-interested actions is a sensitive issue because, even though it is no secret, there remains a certain embarrassment in owning up to it and making it explicit. Even those who never participated prefer to avoid the subject, opting for more elevated topics. And, as is to be expected, those who were involved in such activities rarely care to bring them up. The schemes were diverse, multiplying over the years, and they, too, were tied to the crisis of values and identity. Some schemers used travelers checks, declaring the checks lost and spending them simultaneously. Others, when amnesty was declared, invented stories about stolen documents, money, or goods in order to receive indemnity or insurance money. Even exiles in Africa, committed to building socialism in abject countries that had been exploited by colonizers for centuries, had no qualms about doing business with sectors rather less identified with socialist principles, making money on the sending of dollars abroad and thus undermining the interests of the governments that had received them. Many stories surrounded the case of the slush fund (caixinha) in Chile, an institution created by Brazilians to assist those arriving from Brazil. The fund included a program of scholarships provided by an outside institution to encourage higher education in the exile community. The Brazilians themselves, however, alleged that the scholarships were being used to support militants of particular organizations with no other criteria dictating their disbursement. Informal from the beginning and possessed of few resources, the fund was soon completely transformed by a significant donation from the World Council of Churches in support of the exile community (Amnesty International, 1974: 23). The council of Brazilian exiles decided to use it to open a large restaurant that would also serve as a function hall and commercial food factory. The idea was to aid the exile community by augmenting its resources through economic activity. Because the slush fund existed off the books, 12 legal residents of Chile offered to accept the money in their names. A movie theater in Providencia, an upscale neighborhood of Santiago, was eventually purchased as the site of the restaurant. When the coup dtat occurred in 1973, the meal-preparation section was in operation and was placed under UN protection. The two principal managers of the fund were never arrestedon the contrary, they continued to work providing food to refugees in the embassies and to prisoners in the National Stadium. It is difficult to discern exactly what happened, but the managers were accused of embezzlement and of working for the information services of the Brazilian government and the Chilean junta.
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DOCUMENTS: MAKING IDENTITY CONCRETE In exile, identity documents assumed particular importance both for residence and for travel. Exiles frequently attempted to obtain and maintain them, whether false or authentic. Each document issued was a motive for great rejoicing and celebration. Those who lacked legal status depended on them to move about and interact. Whether an exile had become legalized or was trying to do so, documents defined essential facets of daily life, beginning with the basic permission to establish oneself, work, and have the right to health care, housing, food, and so on. Because of this, it was an issue that mobilized people. By refusing or disdaining authentic documents (something that happened often in the first phase), exiles stressed their connection to the revolutionary project whose defeat eventually became evident. Resistance to letting go of forged documents arose from an effort to preserve the past and a prior sense of identity. Legalization implied a redefinition of identity, which occurred especially in the second phase of exile. It is symptomatic that Daniel Aaro Reis Filho (interview, Rio de Janeiro, 1996)who had lived in Chile for two years with documents acquired at a party in Parisafter 30 days in the Panamanian embassy in Santiago awaiting safe-conduct out of the country remembered to destroy his documents only after he had left for the airport, thereby running the risk of not being able to embark:
In the morning, the buses pulled up to the embassy. They loaded us into the buses and, escorted by Chilean military police and members of the army, we went to the airport. It was one oclock in the morning. They insisted that these buses not travel through the city by day. Then something incredible happened: I was already in the bus when I realized that I still had my special set of documents: my passport and seven other documents. Now, on the list going to Panama I was called Daniel, but in my documents I went by another name, so if I was caught with all of those documents the officials would be able to say, Well, youre not going to embark because youre not Daniel, youre so-and-so. So I had to tear up all the documents and throw them out the window, slowly, because each bus had a paco, a military policeman. I had to keep throwing them slowly out the window because there were several buses, and I was afraid that if I threw everything out at once this would draw attention from those coming behind us.
Under his own name he was leaving behind not only Chile but the project of returning to Brazil, the project of guerrilla warfare. He attempted to enroll in a university course in Panama but succeeded only in France, where he obtained refugee status: this change represented the redefinition of an entire life project. Until the coup in Chile the organizations maintained sympathizers abroad, in general ex-militants who acted by acquiring documents, normally among Brazilian tourists, and preparing them to be used by exiles who lacked legal status. They were also responsible for obtaining support and money via contacts with governments, organizations, and political parties (Daniel Aaro Reis Filho, interview, Rio de Janeiro, 1996; Lus Eduardo Prado de Oliveira, interview, Paris, October 27 and November 3, 1995). During the second phase of exile, the lack of documents or the precariousness of papers issued by Latin American governments led many diplomatic
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services to deny visa requests. Humiliating peregrinations in pursuit of a country to receive them, together with the negligence with which they were treated, contrasted with the self-image they had created for themselves as revolutionaries. Daniel Aaro Reis Filho (interview, Rio de Janeiro, 1996) speaks to the absurdity of the situation:
We were stuck in Panama, which wouldnt give round-trip tickets, only one-way, and many of us, the majority, didnt have travel papers. It was then that Panama issued us a travel document, but it was a piece of toilet paper, as we called it, just a piece of paper, not even a decent booklet with a sturdy cover, nothing. It was a piece of paper folded in four with a 3-by-4 photograph, your name, your fathers and mothers name, your country of origin. So one of us found a market where booklet covers with the Panamanian seal were sold. To give a more decent look to that piece of toilet paper, everyone went and bought a cover and stapled the paper to it. It was just for show [para ingls ver] because any customs official who opened it would see that it was just a piece of paper stapled to a cover bought at a market. It was ridiculous, but at any rate it kept up appearances.
The distress caused by the lack of documents resulted from the military governments determination to deny passports to exiles, a decision peculiar to the Brazilian dictatorship among authoritarian governments of the period (Souza, 1979). Although there was no list of individuals stripped of nationality, as occurred for example in Nazi Germany, the simple refusal to issue passports left exiles without identification. Even during the coup in Chile, when foreigners lives were at risk, the Brazilian embassy refused to issue passports: It was the only country to do so. Other countries such as Bolivia showed concern for their nationals in Chile and issued passports so they could leave for another country. But not Itamaraty, recalls Maurcio Dias David (interview, Paris, March 9 and 15, 1995).10 The Paraguayan embassy, in the middle of the dictatorship of General Stroessner, took in its exiled nationals, explaining that they were doing so to save their lives but that they should move on to another country (Reinaldo Guarany, interview, Rio de Janeiro, August 31, 1995). The accounts of various prisoners detained in the Chilean National Stadium attest to the presence of Brazilian secret police interrogating Brazilian prisoners and teaching torture tactics to the Chilean police (Toms Togni Tarqnio, interview, Paris, January 17 and February 26, 1995; Pedro Vianna, interview, Paris and Crteil, March 22 and 25, 1995; see Rablo, 1978). Antnio Cmara Canto, the Brazilian ambassador who supported the coup, also presided over the commission of inquiry responsible for the political purge of Itamaraty, which eliminated diplomats considered leftists. Didi Rablo (1978) and her husband took refuge in the Panamanian embassy; their oldest son, meanwhile, had been detained at the National Stadium. She tells of the Brazilian embassys conduct in refusing to authorize the departure of their other children for Brazil:
I spent hours and hours at the embassy because the situation was so difficult and look at what bastards they wereit was the only place where I could find a little peace and safety, and I thought that they were going to help me because we were Brazilians and the children had nothing to do with all of this. I bought some sandwiches, kept the children close by, and sat there and kept asking, trying to convince them. . . . How the children suffered . . . the ambassador should have
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gathered together all the children and taken them to his house. I resisted as much as I possibly could until, lacking any other option and feeling threatened, I entered a United Nations refuge with all of them.
Brazilian embassies not only in Chile but in every country occupied by exiles refused to register the exiles foreign-born children. In Chile the Unidad Popular government recognized them as Chileans, but the military junta that assumed power after the coup annulled all of these records. Few ambassadors confronted the military government and took the initiative to recognize the right of children to nationality as did talo Zappa, ambassador to Mozambique. In many cases Brazilian embassies would not renew the passports of those who had left the country. Luiz Hildebrando Pereira da Silva left with his passport in 1969 and managed to renew it in London in 1973 through a PCB sympathizer at the consulate. But in 1976 his passport expired, and this created obstacles to travel and participation in international conferences in his role as a scientist at the Pasteur Institute. Under the premise that it would limit his freedom of expression, he never solicited refugee status (Hildebrando, 1990). In France, Lus Eduardo Prado de Oliveira also suffered at the hands of the Brazilian diplomatic service (interview, Paris, October 27 and November 3, 1995). In 1972 he declared the loss of his passport, which he had left the country with in 1969, and easily obtained a new one valid for four years. In 1974 he was summoned by the consulate, and the consul demanded that he return his passport, alleging that he was wanted by the Brazilian police. Although the passport expired in 1976, he was able to obtain another only after amnesty was declared. Since France had renewed his residency visa, he went six years without leaving French territory. The role of the Brazilian diplomatic service in relation to exiles during the dictatorship remains a research topic to be further investigated. WORK Professional activity was an important factor in the exile experience; social integration and adaptation were directly tied to the type of work one performed. For many exiles, especially for professionals with degrees and experience, Latin American countries offered the possibility of specialized work in research institutions and universities. Through special projects, the United Nations also employed these professionals. In Chile the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, also tied to the UN, received many intellectuals. Even students who had left Brazil before receiving their undergraduate degrees found work in their areas of study, particularly in administrative positions in the Unidad Popular government. In Chile, in fact, exiles from throughout Latin America were employed by specialized agencies of the state. The less educated do not seem to have had great difficulty in finding blue-collar work, and the Allende government had even created a financing network for those interested in opening small businesses, including foreign political refugees. Meanwhile, during the first phase of exile, concern with employment was not even on the table for those still committed to the idea of return. Many became involved in learning a trade that would facilitate their reintegration
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among the poor in Brazil in order to foster a mass movement (trabalho de massas). To this end, Heliana Bibas and Carlos Henrique Vianna established themselves in Maipul, a city near Santiago where there was a metalworking center. While there they took courses in machining and lathe operation. The austere life of a factory worker, waking up early and working eight hours a day, did not dismay these two middle-class young people fresh from the high-school student movement. Contempt for petty-bourgeois values and idealization of the working class were the sentiments that prevailed. Daniel Aaro Reis Filho also spent part of his time in Chile in a carpenters workshop trying to familiarize himself with the profession. All told, this mind-set speaks to the effort to preserve the revolutionary project. In Europe, however, the outlook proved radically different. Only a minority managed to find employment equal to their level of skills. The most common experience was of occupational demotion; educated individuals had to accept positions scorned by Europeans, reinventing themselves as housekeepers, babysitters, janitors, hotel doormen, civil construction workers, and so on. As exiles and refugees blended in with economic migrants, the urban middle class that made up the majority of the exile population came in contact with a very different reality. The meaning of this experience comes through in the account of Csar Benjamin (letter, May 31, 1977):
Until last week I was working in a school and kindergarten as a janitor, earning for a total of eight hours work but doing the job in fivethat is, from 3 till 8. After repeating the same manual labor every day in a school, an environment that I know well as a student and from my daydreams, since childhood, of being a teacher, I remembered Sinclairs musings at the beginning of Demian when he is surprised by the discovery of another world that isnt his world, an obscure world (sic) that began in his own home (the maids room, the workers entrance, wage labor, alienation, etc.), which he had lived with without seeing and which he depended on, without realizing it, for the smooth functioning of his luminous bourgeois world.11 And I couldnt help seeing myself in those who, like me when I was a student, had certainly never stopped to think about why they always found their classrooms neat and cleanthat there was a person behind it. The gesture of one teacher struck me as very simpaticoshe always had her class of forty put their chairs on top of their desks to leave the room ready for cleaning. And I would always clean her classroom with special care, although I was never able to identify her among the schools teachers.
The challenge of political defeat on the one hand and material survival on the other forced exiles into work that not only ran completely counter to their expectations but threw them into a profoundly disorienting role reversal. Csar Benjamin, again, conveys the disconnect between what they had hoped for and what had actually happened (letter, September 23, 1977):
Swedish society wants me to be an efficient vaktmastare [janitor], and thats it. Bluftahkapumbt. And in return I have my needs met. As the sportscaster says, Close call, Deni! [que perigo, Deni!] Yep, no matter how hard the goalie tries, there will always be balls he cant stop. In fact, just being a goalie is a bust from the startthe point man [ponta-de-lana] is what Id like to be, bedeviling my opponents penalty area [zona do agrio]. And the penalty area of this game is called Brazil, where the language I speak is spoken.
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And further (letter, December 30, 1977):

Our place in society has nothing to do with what we think our identity is or with what should proceed from it. But you go on living. Survival isnt a problem around here: theres even central heating. But to make sense of things without sacrificing either honesty or intelligence . . . without playing the bureaucratic game . . . without losing your own sense of who you are . . . without losing your points of reference.
Although cultural differences seem to have afflicted exiles from poorer backgrounds in particular, the basic goods and services furnished to refugees in both capitalist and socialist countries carried inestimable worth for those who had previously lived without these rights. For them, exile often meant an improved standard of living; returning to Brazil, by contrast, would mean a step backward. Even so, the desire to return remained. Damaris de Oliveira Lucena, exchanged for the Japanese consul kidnapped in 1970, relates her enthusiasm for the access to health care, education, food, and housing provided by the Cuban government (Costa et al., 1980: 235):
The change was drastic, since for starters I was only semiliterate. I come from a poor family in the North and was a textile worker for several years, as well as a housekeeper and an agricultural worker. I wasnt even able to finish grade school and so hadnt mastered my own language. As a poor woman Id never had access to education. I came to Cuba sick, traumatized by the brutal assassination of my husband and the torture that Id suffered, bringing my three children with me, one three years old and the other two nine years old. I was admitted to the hospital and received all the necessary treatment along with my children. I began to learn my own language and Spanish as well. A world of knowledge opened up to me. And at forty-three I finished both grade school and high school and then went on to enroll in a pre-university course. . . . My children, too, received all that a mother could wish for her children: the best schools, books, toys, health care when theyre sickeverything that a normal child needs in order to develop.
For middle-class exiles, the exact opposite occurred in most casesin Europe their standard of living declined. It is true that this situation was already familiar to militants in the armed struggle, during which they experienced reduced standards of living in hideouts (aparelhos) or in the countryside. But that experience, notwithstanding, involved a very specific context within what was supposed to be the decisive confrontation of the revolution. In European exile few managed to maintain a standard of living corresponding to what they had had in Brazil. Anina de Carvalho, a lawyer, recalls the initial conditions of exile (Costa et al., 1980: 64):
At first I lived like everyone else, in the maids room. The first two where I lived didnt even have hot water, or a toilet, or a bathroom. There was a little coldwater sink in the room, but there was no central heatingnot to mention the seven stories you had to scale by foot. It was a struggle to get hold of a meal ticket for the university restaurantI was really broke.
Her first work experience, as a fashion-show assistant, was dramatic:

My job was to help the models put on their belts, suspenders, and pants. In the psychological condition of someone who had just been exiled, who had lost
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everything that was important, you were really in the gutter in every sense, going through financial problems, often without money for food. You felt really demoralized having to take a job helping models put their pants on.
Another case involves an exiled woman in Paris who ate meat used as dog food and, just after the declaration of amnesty, died of stomach cancer. According to Nanci Marietto (interview, Rocca Priora, Italy, January 20, 1996), Italians saw refugees as manual labor for domestic work. She calls attention to the inequalities among exiles, which corresponded to a stratified set of opportunities: political figures of a certain stature found a great deal of support in organizations created on the occasion of the 1973 Chilean coup dtat and in leftist parties like the PC and PS. The rest had to manage as best they could. Faced with limited offers of employment in Italy, Nanci, a nursing student, worked as a housekeeper during much of her time in exile. At the same time, however, Europe presented the possibility of scholarshipfunded study. Many exiles completed undergraduate programs and went on to graduate work. Experienced professionals took advantage of the opportunity and obtained their doctorates, making use of European universities and libraries. In Sweden the state gave student loans to those in university courses on the condition of repayment after graduation (as political refugees, exiles were able to claim this right). In other countries such as West Germany, France, and Switzerland, civic institutions, generally tied to churches, granted scholarships to refugees. At times, however, scholarships were used merely as a means of immediate survival without further application. And the choice to study often did not exclude the possibility of unskilled labor, since scholarships did not always provide for every material necessity. Academic degrees gave exiles the qualifications to perform skilled work in Africa or, later on, in Brazil and pointed to the redefinition of a life project. The forms of work-related assistance varied. Beyond scholarships, the Comit Inter-Mouvements Auprs des vacus paid for technical or professional courses and later helped refugees find work. The UN, through its High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), granted loans to exiles who wished to start some type of business. It was in this way that Enoir de Oliveira Luz, known as Juca, a unionist from Rio Grande do Sul and member of the PCB, opened a Brazilian restaurant, Brasuca, in 1978 in Lisbon (still in operation to this day). At the same time, however, it seems that Brazilian exiles did not often resort to the UNHCR for support, perhaps because it represented a redefinition of identity on a different level from what they had experienced so far. With this initiative the UNHCR blurred the line between refugee and economic migrant and, in the case of Brazilian exiles, deprived them of the political characteristics that had determined their identity. Jucas transformation into a businessman did in fact radically redefine his sense of identity. He himself acknowledges (interview, Lisbon, January 27, 1996) that he never felt the desire to get involved in politics while in Portugal and even opposed the creation in Lisbon of a pro-amnesty committee: Ive never been openly active in Portugal, politically. I dont want trouble with the Portuguese government. Ive kept to myself. Instances of Brazilian exiles managing to become integrated in Europe as skilled professionals are few and far between and include only individuals with
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the highest scientific and academic credentials. Some of the better-known cases include Luiz Hildebrando Pereira da Silva, Paulo Freire, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Pereira da Silva, an internationally renowned researcher who was fired by the University of So Paulo after the First Institutional Act in 1964 and by the University of Ribeiro Preto after the Fifth Institutional Act, continued his career at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Freire, invited to work in various countries, established himself at the World Council of Churches in Geneva, where he remained for many years. The then-sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso served as a professor at the University of Paris X between 1967 and 1968. But even Mrio Pedrosaa historic figure of the left and respected art critic to whom Chile had opened its doors, inviting him to teach at the Institute of South American Art two days after he arrived and then to curate the Museum of Modern Art (soon rechristened the Museum of Solidarity) encountered difficulties supporting himself in France (Pedrosa, 1978). The decolonization of Portuguese colonies in Africa and the process of rebuilding them, which began in the middle of the 1970s, created a broad labor market because of the lack of qualified personnel. Many exiles who had graduated from European universities migrated to Africa in a move that characterized a third phase of the Brazilian exile experience. The presence of UN programs in Africa also encouraged Brazilians to relocate to various countries and contribute to projects in education, communication, and so on. This provided a way out for exiles who had been underutilized in Europe; in Africa, where their contribution was finally valued, they were able to put their skills to use, learning, improving themselves professionally, and gaining further experience. By choosing to migrate they confirmed the reconstruction of their life projects. Africa was a labor market not only for members of the middle class who had earned a degree but for those who had gained professional experience in Europe. Jos Barbosa Monteiro, black, the son of illiterate peasants, had completed only three months of grade school prior to working for a foundation that assisted marginalized youths in Geneva, the majority of whom were children of economic migrants. After a long exile in Switzerland, he went to GuineaBissau to work as an educator (Ucha Cavalcanti and Ramos, 1978: 113143). In sum, the circumstances of exile imposed the redefinition and reconstruction of identities. Even though ties with the former project might be more or less maintained, a revision of values proved inevitable as part of a process that decisively reoriented the course of the Brazilian left. Until the Chilean coup of 1973 a Latin American revolution was considered possible, and the possibility was fundamental in defining the identity of those in exile. In the meantime, even during the first phase of exile there were signs of unfolding transformations. Many sought out other paths. Some failed to find an alternative. The third phase was marked by even greater distance from the former project and a more serious involvement with life in the country of residence. As in Ovids Metamorphoses, exiles underwent essential transformations, though they always maintained the primordial mark of exile, which stuck to us like our own skin (Daniel Aaro Reis Filho, interview, Rio de Janeiro, 1996). Still, although wrapped up in circumstances of time and place, of destiny in Ovidian terms, there remained, in the meantime and at all times, space for the free will or initiative of human beings (Velho, 1994: 8).
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NOTES
1. Names mentioned or quoted without further bibliographic information refer to interviews conducted by the author in the 1990s, the details of which appear in parenthetical citations. Tape recordings of the interviews (with a total of 37 interviewees), excluding those recorded with Flvia Castro, were donated to the Laboratrio de Histria Oral e Imagem (Laboratory of Oral and Visual HistoryLABHOI) of Fluminense Federal University and the Arquivo Edgard Leueroth (Edgard Leueroth ArchiveAEL) of the University of Campinas. Only the interviews with Daniel Aaro Reis Filho and Toms Tarqnio have been transcribed, and the transcriptions, likewise, have been donated to the LABHOI and the AEL. 2. In total, organizations of armed resistance carried out four kidnappings of foreign diplomats. Their demand in each case was the release of political prisoners. The first kidnapping occurred on September 4, 1969, when the Dissidncia Estudantil da Guanabara (Student Dissident Movement of GuanabaraDI-GB) and the Ao Libertadora Nacional (National Liberation ActionALN) captured U.S. ambassador Charles Burke Elbrick in Rio de Janeiro. In exchange for his freedom, 15 political prisoners were released, and a guerrilla manifesto denouncing torture and political imprisonment was distributed by the Brazilian news media. This action, of great impact both in Brazil and abroad, was the high-water mark of the armed struggle. Although the organizations considered it a great success, it provoked an intensification of government repression for which the revolutionaries proved unprepared. At the beginning of November, in the midst of a series of arrests and assassinations, Carlos Marighella, head of the ALN and the principal leader of the urban guerrilla resistance, was killed. On March 11, 1970, the Vanguarda Popular Revolucionria (Popular Revolutionary VanguardVPR) kidnapped the Japanese consul Nobuo Okushi in So Paulo. Five guerrillas were then released. The third action, on June 11, 1970, involved the capture of West German ambassador Ehrenfried von Holleben in Rio de Janeiro. Here the VPR and ALN obtained the release of 40 prisoners. In the final action, carried out on December 7, 1970, Swiss ambassador Giovanni Enrico Bucher was captured by the VPR and the Movimento Revolucionrio 8 de Outubro (Revolutionary Movement of October 8 MR-8, the name that the DI-GB had assumed during the first kidnapping). This action involved 40 days of very tense negotiations, since the government had rejected certain names on the list delivered by the guerrillas. In the end, 70 prisoners were freed. At this point, it became clear to the organizations that this had been their last diplomatic kidnapping. Daniel Aaro Reis Filho, historian, ex-militant, and author of several books and articles on the armed struggle, argues that a better word to describe this type of action would be capture and not kidnapping, since the latter, as defined by the dictatorial regime, carries a criminal connotation. 3. I divide the Brazilian exile experience into three phases. The first phase is bracketed by the Brazilian civil-military coup of 1964 and the Chilean coup of September 11, 1973, which overthrew the government of Salvador Allende. During this phase, leftist militants viewed their exile as provisional and believed that they would soon return to Brazil. For the most part, they remained in Latin America, first in Montevideo and then in Santiago, which became the capital of the first phase. The second phase was one of diaspora. After a series of coups and dictatorial takeovers throughout Latin America, remaining on the continent became difficult, and the idea of a speedy return disappeared from the horizon. This was a period marked by the need to adapt to the realities of new countries of exile, learn other languages (not simply Spanish), join the labor force, and cope with the loss of a personal and political project. The majority of exiles either abandoned political activism or were forced to redefine it significantly, experiencing a kind of internal exile within their external one. They also began to embrace positions that had hitherto been ignored or treated as secondary by Brazilian leftist movements, including positions associated with democracy. During this phase, Paris became the new Brazilian exile capital. The third phase, contemporaneous with the second, is one of migration in exile. With the independence of former Portuguese colonies in Africa, many exiles left Europe to promote socialism in these countries. During the second phase, many had studied in and obtained degrees from European universities. Unsatisfied in jobs as hotel doorpersons, janitors, and so on, they saw opportunities for skilled labor and political activism in the construction of socialism in Africa. Redefined, revolution once again became the order of the day during the third phase. 4. Published in 1924 by German writer Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain is set in a luxuryclass sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. The protagonist, who has come to visit his ailing cousin,
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remains there for seven years in a state of enchantment until the outbreak of World War I. Translators note. 5. We find Nanci in a small city set in a rocky hill near Rome living with her Italian husband and three adolescent children adopted as infants in Brazil. 6. See also Casalis (1976). In his testimony Casalis mentions additional attacks on Latin American refugees in Paris. On the Russell Tribunal see Rollemberg (1999: Chap. 8). 7. Information about Fleurys presence in Chile had been given to the ALN and VPR by the Chilean PS, but the reports were never confirmed. 8. The interviewee requested that I not reveal the name of the person in question: Vilma is a pseudonym. 9. Feijoada is a rich stew of black beans seasoned with salted pork (traditionally trimmings such as ears and trotters), dried beef, and sausage. Originally an improvisation by African slaves, it has become Brazils national dish.Translators note. 10. The Palace of Itamaraty is the seat of Brazils Ministry of Foreign Relations.Translators note. 11. Published in 1919 by German-Swiss writer Hermann Hesse, Demian portrays the psychosocial awakening of its protagonist, Emil Sinclair, who begins to question conventional pieties after his encounter with fellow student Max Demian.Translators note.
REFERENCES
Amnesty International 1974 Chili. Bruxelles. Arraes, Miguel 1979 Entrevista. Pasquim 9 (535): 46. Carvalho, Herbert de and Herbert Daniel 1981 Entrevista. Pasquim 13 (643): 2223. Casalis, Georges 1976 Dclaration de Georges Casalis, le 13/01/1976, la suite de lintervention de la dlgation argentine devant le Tribunal Russell II (3me session) sur Le rfugis politiques (TBR. II. R. Cart. I). Costa, Albertina de Oliveira, Maria Teresa Porcincula de Moraes, Norma Marzola, and Valentina da Rocha Lima (eds.) 1980 Memrias das mulheres do exlio. Vol. 2. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra. Gabeira, Fernando 1980 O crepsculo do macho. 13th edition. Rio de Janeiro: Codecri. Guarany, Reinaldo 1980 Os fornos quentes. So Paulo: Alfa-mega. 1984 A fuga. So Paulo: Brasiliense. Hildebrando, Luiz 1990 O fio da meada. So Paulo: Brasiliense. Lage, Padre 1979 Entrevista. Pasquim 11 (533): 2426. Pedrosa, Mrio 1978 Entrevista. Pasquim 9 (469): 48. Poerner, Arthur Jos 1980 Entrevista. Pasquim 11 (571): 1315. Rablo, Didi 1978 Entrevista com a famlia Rablo. Pasquim 10 (473): 1215. Ribeiro, Darcy 1977 Entrevista. Pasquim 9 (426): 815. Rollemberg, Denise 1999 Exlio: Entre razes e radares. Rio de Janeiro: Record. Saenz-Carrete, Erasmo 1983 Les cadres socio-politiques de ladaptation des rfugis latino-amricains en France, 1964 to 1979. Ph.D. diss., Universit de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III.
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Sirinelli, Jean-Franois 1987 Effets dge et phnomnes de gnration dans le milieu intellectuel franais and Les Khagneux et normaliens des annes 1920: un rameau de la gnration de 1905? in Generations intellectuelles. Les Cahiers de lInstitut dHistoire du Temps Present, no. 6. 1989 Gnration et histoire politique. Vingtime Sicle: Revue dHistoire, no. 22. Souza, Herbert de 1979 Entrevista. Pasquim 10 (519): 10-12. Ucha Cavalcanti, Pedro Celso and Jovelino Ramos (eds.) 1978 Memrias do exlio, 1964 / 19??: De muitos caminhos. Vol. 1. So Paulo: Livramento. Velho, Gilberto 1994 Projeto e metamorfose. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar.

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The Brazilian Exile Experience : Remaking Identities

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The Brazilian Exile Experience Remaking Identities

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Rollemberg / BRAZILIAN EXILE

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Rollemberg / BRAZILIAN EXILE

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

MYTHS OF ORIGIN AND DESTINATION

Rollemberg / BRAZILIAN EXILE

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Rollemberg / BRAZILIAN EXILE

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Rollemberg / BRAZILIAN EXILE

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Rollemberg / BRAZILIAN EXILE

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Rollemberg / BRAZILIAN EXILE

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Rollemberg / BRAZILIAN EXILE

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Rollemberg / BRAZILIAN EXILE

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

And further (letter, December 30, 1977):

Her first work experience, as a fashion-show assistant, was dramatic:

Rollemberg / BRAZILIAN EXILE

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Rollemberg / BRAZILIAN EXILE

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Rollemberg / BRAZILIAN EXILE

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