2023-12-03 17:17:33
Literature action scenes from world literature
When Clarice Lispector took to the streets against the military dictator
As of: 4:17 p.m. | Reading time: 3 minutes
Clarice Lispector (1920 to 1977)
Quelle: Courtesy of Paulo Gurgel Valente/Family History Photo Archive/dpa/picture alliance
The Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector was an elegant presence. Once, in 1968, she also got involved politically. At the “March of a Hundred Thousand” she protested in the front row.
The students who organized a protest in Rio de Janeiro in March 1968 primarily wanted to complain about the bad food in the cafeteria. But the administration called the police, the situation escalated and a seventeen-year-old was shot. The whole of Rio went into uproar over this brutal action, and a “March of a Hundred Thousand” was formed, the most important demonstration in Brazilian history. Intellectuals and artists led the procession, in the front row a slim lady in an elegant dresshigh heels and sunglasses: Clarice Lispector, the most famous writer in the country, 48 years old and very beautiful.
Lispector (1920–1977) was not a political activist. But she found the young people’s demands justified and took their side in her column: “I declare my body and soul solidarity with the tragedy of the Brazilian students.” Her articles demonstrated a motherly empathy, she demanded humanity for everyone in one language understandable to everyone (which was not that of her books).
She may have only been dimly aware of the danger she was putting herself in (many demonstrators were later arrested or went into exile). The brutality of the police made her more afraid for the future of her two sons than for herself. Brazil was not a democracy; the dictatorial power of President Artur da Costa e Silva was based on the military. Even before the demonstration, Lispector described how the social climate was changing. “A whole new form of ‘loneliness of those who don’t belong’” has come over them “like ivy overgrowing a wall.”
Born in Ukraine
She had always been lonely, although blessed with friends. Anyone who met her was enchanted by her enigmatic look, her full lips and her light hair. She hardly gave any interviews and lived in seclusion. She felt that the older she was, the more she was perceived as a strange, even stressful person, without changing. Her books, and the way she wrote and spoke, contained a moment of strangeness that disturbed many readers.
Although she considered herself Brazilian and was very homesick while traveling around Europe and the United States with her diplomat husband, she came from an unknown faraway place called Ukraine. Her parents fled from there with their three daughters in 1922 to escape the never-ending pogroms. She was the youngest, only two years old. Her first name was Chaja, the Hebrew word for ‘life’, and the family language was Yiddish. But even her earliest memories didn’t go back that far; she was the first in the family to learn Brazilian Portuguese and loved it as her mother tongue.
Statue of Clarice Lispector in Strand in Rio de Janeiro
Quelle: Luiz Souza/NurPhoto/picture alliance
She completed her school and law studies brilliantly, and when she was 23 her first novel was published, titled with a Joyce quote: “Near the Wild Heart”. A book without precedent, a sensational success. Clarice Lispector wrote incessantly, stories, sketches, columns, novels. She delivered the newspapers on time and the stories were scattered around the living room. They contain unforgettable sentences: “The brown eyes were…so independent, as if they had been planted in the flesh of an arm and were looking at us from there – open, moist.”
Next door in Argentina, Jorge Luis Borges, the scholar, read through the world’s books. Clarice Lispector in Brazil read herself.
It is said that all writers’ lives are paper. In this series we provide evidence to the contrary.
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Action scenes from world literature
also read
Action scenes from world literature
also read
Action scenes from world literature
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