Translated from Portuguese by Jamie Lee Andreson
I was born in 1979. It had been fifteen years since Brazil established the military dictatorship with significant popular support. It was not possible to choose our rulers through democratic processes like general elections. Representatives for the municipal, state, and federal congresses, governors and the president of the Republic were nominated by “bionic” mandates, without passing through universal suffrage. During my childhood I didn’t know exactly what the vote was, or that we could choose our own representatives. When the military coup of 1964 happened, my father was six years old and my mother was three and a half. They also grew up without knowing what the vote was. My maternal grandparents were born during the Estado Novo (New State) dictatorship, which prevailed in Brazil between 1937 and 1945. They could vote in the general elections of 1960—when Jânio Quadros was elected the president of the republic. A year later he resigned and the vice-president João Goulart took over, ousted by the military in 1964.
Just like my parents, my grandparents could only vote twenty-nine years later, during the elections of 1989. I was ten years old and I remember how that moment was celebrated vivaciously from house to house, in the streets, in the months that preceded the plea. An election that was only possible thanks to the end of the military regime and the wide mobilization for the direct vote for president in 1984. A significant portion of the population organized through social movements, unions, or even spontaneously went to the streets to demand democracy. In that moment, we were defeated by the regime, which instituted a transitional government elected indirectly. But the ratified Constitution of 1988 fortified the democratic pillars and a year later eligible citizens went to the polls to make their right to vote count.
My family had divided preferences during those elections. But it was a democratic disagreement, where one listened to what the other had to say, and the divergence in rationale and ideas were externalized without fear that they could generate deep fissures in our family ties. My father, who had timidly participated in union movements, made his choice, as did my mother. I remember replicating their arguments about workers’ rights, the inequalities to be combated, etc. The unionist and constituent deputy Luís Inácio Lula da Silva was one of the twenty-two candidates, and in the months before the election, there was widespread political engagement in his presidential campaign.
By contrast, my maternal grandparents, despite having humble origins amidst the working class, voted for the winning candidate Fernando Collor de Mello. They were convinced by the campaign, which presented him as a hunter of privileges in the fight against corruption. I remember his victory as if it were today. I was on vacation at my grandparents’ house and upset that my parents’ candidate had been defeated. I wished death on the elected president. My grandmother very lovingly explained that I should never wish death on anybody for disagreeing with their ideas. And I held onto this warning as a principle to follow. A little more than two years later, the elected president was removed from his position on complaints of corruption, coming to an end by resigning his presidency in 1992.
From then on, each election was celebrated as the most important moment of civic life in a democratic country. Brazil, like many countries in Latin America, experienced years of threats of civil-military dictatorships. The 1989 election was the marker of a new era in the construction of a new country: the right to self-defense, freedom of expression, and the end of state terrorism.
And with the passing of thirty years from the first free elections of my life, the first of my parents, and the second in the life of my grandparents, we are now at the crossroads that have tested the limits of our democracy like never before. In recent years, a shift in direction towards populism has introduced a proto-fascist agenda in many countries throughout the world. It has also brought an alert to the fraying of the democratic fabric, something that we judged as being consolidated in many Western countries.
As always, literature makes us reflect on the errors that have brought us here. Milan Kundera wrote in the essay “The Curtain” that autonomous art possesses genesis, history, and its own morals; it transcends borders and time. He was ahead of his time to propose a subjective and deep analysis of the human experience. Narrative fiction is capable of giving us an X-ray of society in order to project situations of poised between what humanity has gone through and goes through in different times and places.
It’s not an accident that The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and 1984 by George Orwell, among other books, have returned to the Best Sellers list in many countries, especially in the United States and Brazil. The totalitarian regimes that we knew throughout the twentieth century and that inspired the writing of these works, seemed to have departed from the speculative and returned to haunt the democracies of our time. When asked about the source of inspiration for her dystopian novel, Atwood said many times that the atrocities recounted in her narrative are not intrinsic to Gilead’s Republic, but they come from the real experiences of being a woman in so many countries. Just like how the socialist experiences from Eastern European totalitarian regimes from the last century served as the basis for what Orwell wrote in his allegory 1984. There are still works like K – Relato de uma busca by the Brazilian Bernardo Kucinski, and The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez that deal with the ulcers of the neoliberal Latin-American dictatorships, which were supported by the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Literature, as an artistic expression, is capable of allowing readers to share the human experience. Stories can transport us to places and lives different from our own, in distinct times, all the while transmitting ideas, feelings, and sensations, the same way that they can transmit ideals of freedom and social justice.
These are the ideas that at times appear in my readings and that take me to the geopolitical influences, which are quite distinct from one another: from the long-term democratic experience of the United States and European countries to the experiences of authoritarian governance of Latin America and Africa. I try to accumulate knowledge and accounts from all of them because I do not believe there is just one form of democracy. The construction of democracy passes through histories, pieces of knowledge, and cosmologies from the most distinct societies.
I still believe that this is the most memorable cycle in the recent history of humanity. Even with the blow to the democratic principles, which we had judged as being consolidated, in no other time could we debate as freely as we can now and point out the contradictions of democracy, knowing that working on these contradictions is how we can improve democracy. In no other time were we able to elect Black and Indigenous people to participate in public life. It is still small in proportion to the representation of society, but we have advanced significantly in this way. In no other time have we seen so many women occupy leadership positions. There is still a long way to go so that this proportion reflects society, but we debate like never before the importance of amplifying these spaces.
By coincidence, as I finish writing this brief text, today is the election day for the municipal legislatures and executive branches in Brazil. All of this in the middle of a terrible pandemic and economic crisis that impacted the world in 2020. Even with all the restrictions against the circulation of people, many left the house to exercise their citizenship and vote, bringing with them the hope of better days. In conversations, on social media or at the voting polls, everybody seemed to be aware of the importance of this exercise to improve our lives in the cities, especially for topics dear to our collective life, differing by each place, but converging in a general way for mobility, education, health, environmental preservation, and public security. In this regard, I continue to be that ten-year-old boy who celebrated with his country the end of a dark period. It’s as if at each election the significance of what occurred after thirty barren years repeats itself to remind us that democracy constructs itself and perfects itself always. That it is not a given as an absolute value of our society, that there are contrarian opinions. And for those reasons, it is necessary to protect it always. And one of the instruments to do so, without a doubt, is the vote.