How did the idea for the Literary Festival in Paraíba come about?
It appeared last year, in April, when I met the governor of Paraíba, who was introduced to me by senator Daniella Ribeiro, from Paraíba, who had been at the inauguration of the Casa da Cidadania da Língua, in Coimbra. And she liked the project because there is no literary festival in Paraíba, there are many events but there was no literary festival. So, I arranged a meeting and said what I always insist on. That I live in Finisterre and you live in Inícios Terra. Ponta dos Seixas, in Paraíba, is the easternmost place in the Americas. And we thought about how to celebrate this and created the literary festival.
Did you already know Paraíba?
I had never been to Paraíba in my entire life. It was the first time. I was there at the Zé Lins do Rego Auditorium, I got to know a little about that state, which is very interesting. Even the names of things, right? It’s a very literary state, the land has changed its name. The flag of Paraíba itself has the word Nego written on it, because they refused to participate in the idea of Brazil.
The festival is going into its second edition. What marks this fair?
Our purpose is to be an international festival with the ambition of bringing together as many speakers of the language as possible. It was like this last year, when we had participation from Angola, Mozambique, Portugal and Brazil, of course. This year we will have Guinea, Cape Verde, Portugal and Brazil. It’s all very bureaucratic, we haven’t managed to include the festival in incentive laws this year, but next year I plan to present the festival to the State, already with incentive laws. This second edition will be a little different, based on what we learned last year.
Learning is part of it.
Yes, the first one was difficult, with difficulties in understanding, timingbut it ended well, everyone was happy. So we started this year a little early, because last year we put together the festival in two and a half months. This year we had a little more time, even a little more time to call people. So here’s the second edition. The edition that ends the festival year, which is another interesting thing. And I thought about making Fliparaíba the closest festival to Europe, to Africa, to the Atlantic side, at the same time as being able to end the season of literary festivals, but well, now I don’t know how it’s going to be, because this has become a swarm of literary festivals from all over, they’ve discovered that authors are cheaper than other artists. But that’s good, because writers are guardians of democracy and thought. There may even be right-wing musicians, but we still haven’t invented country music in literature, fortunately.
What differentiates the Fliparaíba from other festivals?
There is this proposal, which is a festival at the beginning of the earth and at the end of the earth, a festival of contact with the ocean. Unlike Paraty, which is also a riverside festival, but it is a festival of the route, an ancient festival. The festival I want is the one of the future. Today, the agenda of the Environmental Social Governance agenda originates from the Global South, all of them from problems that come from the South. This is something that the North itself does not accept, does not see. So there is this difference. The festival, as I said, that connects the old acquaintance, the old knowledge, Europe to this new place, which is the new world, which is the south, which represents new knowledge, a new way of seeing the world.
Do you think that these festivals make the global North have these different perspectives?
I think the north is already seeing it differently. I was in Belém, in the Amazon recently, I attended a wonderful concert, with Chris Martin from Coldplay, who decided to be Seu Jorge’s percussionist and sing along with Anitta, Gilberto Gil, Ed Sheeran. And all of them defending agendas from places that are not theirs. Today, the North sees what it did in the South. There is a huge debt and in paying this debt lies the salvation of the planet and humanity. Elon Musk will go to Mars alone, and no one will want to go with him.
How do you feel about playing this role as a European making these provocations about Europe?
There’s a European poet, Miguel Torga, who, by the way, with whom I did the last interview of his life, he says that whoever does what he can, does what he should. And this discovery that I have made for Brazil, for the Global South, for the world and for my career, which is in journalism, in business, in the chamber, in whatever, I feel in this place of being able to help insignificantly, like all the individual help from someone who is not the leader of a large country. It is for me to be able to help give voice to this need that citizens of the North need to have that it is very necessary to bring more justice to the world and repair what was committed in the last 500 years, which is not all bad, not all horrible, but, in fact, there is a debt of the North to the South, there is a debt of the world that industrialized to the world that came after. When you ask how I, as a European, see myself, like Miguel Torgas, doing what I think I should do, and I think I found it here, in culture, in literature, which have always been things in my life, along with the slightly dispassionate and less artistic way of looking at life, it has to do with business, finding, in what I’m doing here, helping Brazilians understand the bias of Europeans. Things cannot be done in conflict, the same thing I help the Portuguese and Europeans to look at a problem that they often don’t understand exists. This leaves me in the position of taking stone from Europeans and taking stone from Brazilians [risos].
Do you encounter resistance in this position?
Of course yes, there are people who call me European and send me to Europe, and when I arrive in Europe, they call me Brazilian and send me to Brazil. Albert Einstein said that if relativity, if the theory of relativity proves right, the Swiss will call me Swiss, the French will call me French and the Germans will call me German. If she is proven wrong, the Swiss will call me French, the French will call me German and the Germans will call me Jew. So, that between world wars was a powerful statement. Not taking things so much importance, there are people who like to stay in a place of comfort. I don’t feel comfortable in a place of comfort. So I do what I have to do. Sometimes well, sometimes badly, sometimes more successfully, sometimes less. This is normal. And I think that literature and thought today is an important place. That’s why we said it’s becoming pop. It’s a place where facilitism, fake news, and hate find it more difficult to enter. That’s why it’s a denser, more thought-out place. So, this helps to protect humanity. As has always happened throughout history, with less visibility, because the story was told more slowly. Today it’s faster. Today everyone has access to more information.
Click here and follow the DN Brasil channel on WhatsApp!
Do you see writers and literary festivals as guardians of what is still good in the world?
Of course. Today, a writer is a kind of flask of democracy. It is a jar where the defense of democracy, the defense of values, is kept. Writers today are strongholds of civilization, as they say here in Brazil, strongholds of civilization. We are keeping them and they represent the best that civilization has to offer and we see what it is losing. Today populism is exceeding on the left. We didn’t fight the populist right and we are fighting it with the populist left. This doesn’t bring anything new, it doesn’t bring anything good. But now, I don’t know if there’s another better solution, I don’t think anyone knows. I think we’re all testing what the solution is. Sometimes I think that the Chinese, who are a wise and ancient people, have already discovered this before.
And what is the guiding thread in the curation of this edition?
We have three levels of curation. One is not to forget where the festival is, it’s in Paraíba, it’s in João Pessoa. And Paraíba has Campina Grande, which is another big city. We have to have a festival where the old unknown meets new knowledge. So half of the writers are from Paraíba. The second axis of the curation is representation of the Portuguese language and to welcome the investment that Paraíba has made, because Paraíba is far away. It’s far from São Paulo, it’s far from Lisbon, from Angola. And this contradiction, as I was talking about contradictions in that land a little while ago, this is one of them. It is the closest land and the furthest at the same time. So, there is this, which is for a festival to have this second level of curation, for a festival to have representation of the language. The third level is being aligned with the issues of the future, being aligned with the discussions that the world needs to have. We chose the theme of the tables, which was the journey that these ten tables trace around Our land, our people, ancestry, identity and the future of democracy. That’s it, our festival in Paraíba is land, it’s people, it’s the future of democracy.
In the last edition, a manifesto against colonization was created, will there be something similar in this edition?
Precisely, it is from this manifesto that we start towards a decolonized future, the second festival goes there. In the three layers of the narrative map, language as symbolic territory, language as a political field and language as a poetic gesture. Then it’s the route we take through each of the ten tables. The first is directly connected with last year, language and what is always language as a territory of citizenship. This title exists in practically every festival I do. At this table we will have a very promising woman from Paraíba, Aline Cardoso, the inaugural Silviano Santiago, who won the Camões award, who is 91 years old. An interesting thing is that we have two Camões awards at the festival. This is very relevant.
And why choose ancestry as another theme of the festival?
Today we discuss the future of democracy, which is not something ancestral, democracy was not invented by indigenous peoples, nor by the black population who were later enslaved, taken to Brazil and then thrown at random. This democracy was a construction of the North, but today the whole world thinks it is the best solution. So, let’s listen to what ancestry has to say about this and let’s think about how this knowledge of ancestry comes about. These different concepts he has of priority in time, priority in space, of the value of lives that we do not give, of the harmony of voices that are not just human, not just animal, are vegetable, are even mineral. All of this forces us to think in a different way. And today humanity needs to think in a different way. And then there is this challenge or this provocation of asking what ancestry has to do with democracy? And that’s what it has to do with democracy. This is the link I make and I think it is a challenge, but it is also perhaps the festival of my maturity as a curator too.
And as a writer?
I just released A Poetic Geographywhich was published first in Brazil, then in Portugal. The book is an invented curation. I wanted to do a table with Fernando Pessoa and Camões. It’s just inventing, but inventing by knowing. It’s a fiction book around curation. The next one, called Festa da thirst, is a parable of the backlands that takes place in Paraíba. And, for May next year, there is another one that comes from the walks I took with Germano Almeida in Coimbra last year.
amanda.lima@dn.pt