06/16/2024 – 15:15
The book will be launched next week, in Brasília and Rio de Janeiro. 1964 – I Was a Child and I Lived, from Caravana Grupo Editorial. The publication brings unprecedented points of view on the civil and military dictatorship (1964-1985), through reports from people who were children and teenagers at the time of the dictatorship. deposition of the constitutional government of João Goulart.
The 19 testimonies gathered in the book show how the coup acts were perceived and the immediate and subsequent consequences for the families of those aged between 6 and 14 years old. There are common stories from the domestic environment, such as those about mothers who stocked up on food and fathers who ordered that the lights in the house be left completely turned off.
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There are picturesque episodes like the one remembered in the book by Luiz Philippe Torelly, now an architect, whose father entered a barbershop in Brasília with a start to take him away, despite not having finished the cut yet. “The military coup of 1964 had begun. Next to our block, on 408 [Sul], there was a DTUI Telephone Exchange – Department of Urban and Interurban Telephones. The center was soon occupied by armored vehicles and machine gun nests, due to its strategic nature”, recalls Torelly in the book to explain his father’s tension.
“The book also contains accounts of people who suffered the horrors of the dictatorship, or who had family members who were very affected and who went through a lot of suffering”, highlights Rita Nardelli, one of the organizers of the publication.
The publication features a testimony from journalist Mônica Maria Rebelo Velloso, about a cousin persecuted by repression and deeply traumatized. “She was arrested, lost the child she was expecting and her partner was killed. She managed to go into exile, first in Chile and then in Sweden. She came back with the amnesty and completely unbalanced. After a few attempts, she managed to take her own life in one of her crises.”
Bonfire and book rescue
More than one of the published statements talks about the fate of books that could be considered “subversive”. There are stories of those who burned their own books to avoid being labeled communists, in the event of a home search by the police or the Army, and of those who outmaneuvered the military to save their works.
“I don’t remember exactly what day, shortly after the dismissals, we learned that Army soldiers were starting to burn the books of teachers and the UnB Library. [Universidade de Brasíla]. Our mother, Othília, a disciplined and exemplary public servant, always courageous and disguised in adverse situations, took her four children and some sheets and we headed to the university by car”, recalls in the book Sônia Pompeu, daughter of journalist Pompeu de Sousa, creator of the journalism course at the University of Brasília. According to Sônia, Mrs. Othilia “managed to deceive the soldiers who surrounded UnB, claiming that she needed to get some of her family’s clothes from the laundry that provided services to the teachers.”
For architect Márcio Vianna, the other organizer of 1964 – I Was a Child and I Lived, the first years of the dictatorship ended up politicizing those who were still in childhood or early adolescence and teaching them about persecution and deception. According to what Vianna read and heard in the statements collected, people began “to feel leftist even as children, because of the things they saw, what they witnessed in their families and because of what they knew about the country’s problems.”
The architect’s political memory also extends to his Portuguese classes. “Metaphor… is when we want to say something and we can’t, like now in these times, and we have to say the same thing, but in another way, a poetic way, and only those who like poetry understand it, and… and those who don’t can know what the poet is saying, after all, he doesn’t even understand, because poetry is a kind of code that only understands those who have poetry within themselves”, he quotes in the book, remembering the teacher, who was a Dominican nun and “gave examples, generally using the lyrics of songs he said were protest songs.”
Service
Book 1964 – I Was a Child and I Lived (Caravana Grupo Editorial), with testimonies collected and organized by Márcio Vianna and Rita Nardelli.
Launch in Brasília: Tuesday (18), at Livraria Sebinho (CLN 406), from 5pm to 9pm.
Launch in Rio: Thursday (20), from 5pm to 9pm, at the Brazilian Press Association (ABI), city center.
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