my remorse,
my remorse for all of us…
Alexandre O’Neill
Clara Pinto Correia’s talent was not just the will-o’-the-wisp of an ebullient personality, it was a multiple splendor that filled all her works and creations with joy. Biology and the History of Sciences had a serious and recognized contribution, just as journalism and literature benefited from persistent and tireless work, which gave us works that were, in their time, rightly welcomed and received.
Do we deserve a fire as bright as this woman’s, with the strength of her joy and the shadow of her heartbreak?
The Portuguese literary and journalistic circles decided to cancel it, as they say today, they spread a cloak of silence and omission around it that hid it from us. Yes, copying a few paragraphs from the New Yorker in a chronicle of Visionbut what is this venial sin in the face of a work like yours? However, it served to obliterate her from our small public space nor the important scientific work that, after that, she carried out in the United States, (collected in the book Fear, Wonder and Science in the New Age of Reproductive BiotechnologyColmbia University Press, 2017) had no echo or repercussions here. As Clara Pinto Correia said, “in Portugal it was swept under the carpet, not a word was heard about the book”.
Between scientific works and literary works, his legacy is impressive, in terms of number and quality. Here is someone who did not waste the multiple talents with which she was gifted, but carried them out in tireless work filled with intense joy, which hid her pain from us.
Goodbye, princess, how easy it is to say. We let you go because we didn’t know how to welcome you. Having talents in different areas is not well accepted among us. Its multiplication is not seen as generosity and fruitful work, but only as dispersion and frivolity. And if the public image is bright, the mechanisms of envy work to stifle it.
Our generation is beginning to disappear from public space and many from life itself. The melancholy of losses adds to the remorse we feel for those we left behind. I was friends with Clara until the end, even though I didn’t meet her very often, as I lived outside of Portugal. I tried to break the publishers’ negative barrier to his latest novel Antareswithout success. Fortunately, a publisher appeared, Nuno Gomes, who is a biologist and admirer of Clara, and he published that novel (publisher Exclamação) and will soon publish his book on the history of the science of female infertility, Tabu.
Carmen Garcia, a columnist for Public which I always read, tells the truth: it is difficult not to be angry with the generation that lived through Clara’s golden age, that allowed her to fall into oblivion and that is now writing beautiful farewell texts.
But isn’t this generation that the columnist rightly censors also disappearing, in death or in oblivion?
What did we do? Revolution and Democracy, it’s easy to answer. We changed the country in a way that only we, the oldest, can feel. But we are no longer in the swing of the times. We fight so that the fundamental values of social solidarity, multicultural coexistence and freedom of cultural expression are not erased by the resurgence of the ghosts of the past, which easily deceive those who did not experience them. But we have to put aside the status that they want to stick to us as has been and not be afraid to be who we are and to raise our voice in the public square.
Diplomat and writer