-
1. Testimonies and the Amnesty Law
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
28 1 Tes ti mo nies and the Am nesty Law Brazil’s first cycle of cul tural mem ory took place in con- junc tion with the 1979 Am nesty Law. At the time, for mer guer ril las began pub lish ing their tes ti mo nies in the form of books, some of which be came best sell ers and won pre stig ious prizes. Be cause many au thors were ben e fi ci ar ies of the law who pub lished their ac counts after re turn ing from exile or being re leased from prison, their works came to be seen as the “cul tural fruit of the 1979 am nesty,” as one ob server has put it, or as hav ing “emerged under the sign of the am nesty,” in the words of an other.1 Thus the two phe nom ena, one in sti tu tional and the other cul tural, be came in ex tri cably linked in the pop u lar imag i na tion. No sin gle work is more closely iden tified with the am nesty than Fer nando Gabeira’s me moir, O que é isso, com pan heiro? (What’s Going On Here, Com rade?, here after also re ferred to as Com pan heiro), pub lished a few weeks after the piece of leg is la tion went into ef fect.2 His to rians, so ci ol o gists, and lit er ary schol ars have stud ied it more ex haus tively than any other tes ti mo nial work from the pe riod, tak ing a va riety of ap proaches. Among the most val u able for the study of mem ory pol i tics are those that use Gabeira’s book as a ba rom e ter of the po lit i cal and cul tural cli mate dur ing the pe riod of po lit i cal open ing, or aber tura, of the early 1980s or that con sider its place within a wider body of tes ti mo nial works, in clud ing those by re gime in sid ers.3 Yet no study that I am aware of pro poses to an a lyze the re cip ro cal inter plays between guer rilla tes ti mo ni als and the Am nesty Law in a system atic way. Such an anal y sis is the ob jec tive of this chap ter. The first guer rilla ac count to be pub lished after the law was en acted, O que é isso, com pan heiro? rep re sents one survivor’s mem ory of the armed strug gle Te s t i m o n i e s a n d t h e A m n e s t y L a w 29 and as such defies the mil i tary regime’s at tempt to im pose a kind of in sti tu tion al ized for get ting by grant ing am nesty to state se cur ity agents. Yet Ga beira re counts his ex pe ri ences, in clud ing tor ture, with out ever ques tion ing the im pu nity granted to those who tor mented him and his com rades. He there fore mod els what I have called rec on cil i a tion by mem ory. Com pan heiro be came an in stant hit and helped turn its au thor into the “super star of the am nesty.”4 Book and am nesty be came linked. Var i ous in di vid u als and groups, in clud ing Ga beira him self, lev er aged the con nec tion ac cord ing to their var i ous agen das and through their ef forts helped pro mote book and au thor, help ing con sol i date the mean ing of the am nesty as rec on cil i a tion and a vic tory for so ci ety rather than as im pu nity and par tial de feat. Two other books pub lished around the same time by sur vi vors of the armed strug gle fur ther il lus trate the re la tion ship between guer rilla tes ti mo nies and the Am nesty Law. Al fredo Sirkis’s Os carbonários (The Car bo nari), which also evokes the mem ory of the armed strug gle with out...