Sustaining Activism: A Brazilian Women's Movement and a Father-Daughter Collaboration

6. Holding Paradox, Emma

∏ holding paradox Emma Mônica Marchesini makes everything her family eats except sugar, salt, and coffee. The farm where she lives with her husband, Joacir Marchesini, and their four children is five kilometers from the center of Ibiraiaras, and they don’t own a car. Mônica relies on erratic buses and rides from neighbors to get into town, where she buys the three items she doesn’t produce, attends church, and, when Joacir lets her, goes to women’s movement meetings. Mônica’s house is blue, wooden, and weathered. Nestled against her family ’s fields, the house is framed on either side by the milking shed and improvised plastic greenhouse where Mônica starts and ends her days. She milks the cows and looks after the garden each morning and evening; in between, she prepares meals and cleans the kitchen, makes cheese and bread to sell, and does the laundry. Mônica is the kind of person for whom Gessi, Ivone, Vania, and Vera started the women’s movement. Leaders of the movement have, at times, made activism their lives, but Mônica, a movement participant, combines activism with daily life on the farm. The outline of Mônica’s life, the farmwork and cooking and cleaning, resembles the life her mother lived. Mônica doesn’t want to let that life go. She wants to let go of something more subtle: the belief that women do the housework because that’s what women are meant to do. I saw a photograph of Mônica before I met her. In 2002, the year my family lived in Brazil, Dad drove to Ibiraiaras for a short visit. Ivone accompanied him to Mônica’s house to help him find his way on the unmarked rural roads. They spent an afternoon in Mônica’s kitchen. It was cold, and Dad left his coat on, but Mônica and Ivone wore flip-flops. Dad took a picture of Mônica holding her daughter, Milena, in her arms. When he showed me the photograph, I thought back to the women I had met a few months earlier, when he took me to women’s movement meetings in Ibiraiaras and Sananduva. Mônica didn’t look like them. Shadows touched the bridge of her nose and filled the hollows above her cheekbones .Shelookedlikeshewascarefullyconsideringsomethingfaraway,andthe mix of warmth and concern in her gaze was directed somewhere I couldn’t see. Milenalookedstraightatthecamera.Maybescared,maybejustyoung.Laundry hung above her head, wool sweaters and jeans turned inside out to dry. 60 chapter six Mônica Marchesini and her daughter, Milena. Photograph by Jeffrey W. Rubin. Dad told me the story behind the photograph. When Dad met Mônica, she was forty and had been married for eighteen years. Joacir had been an alcoholic for longer than that. When he came home drunk, Mônica told Dad, Joacir said, ‘‘I’m the one who speaks, and everyone must obey me. I’m the one who has a voice.’’ Even struggling on a small farm, they had enough to live what Mônica called ‘‘a dignified life,’’ but alcoholism took that possibility away. Joacir tried to stop drinking several times, then started again right away. Mônica said that living with Joacir’s alcoholism was like living with ‘‘a war in the family.’’ That’s the image I had in mind when Dad and I visited Mônica’s house in 2004. The woman I met surprised me. Mônica was warm and talkative. She brought us into the kitchen and filled our hands with oranges and tangerines. The day was warm for winter, so Dad and I wore fleeces instead of coats, and Mônica wore a women’s movement T-shirt and black athletic pants. This time, the shirt hugged her body instead of hanging at her sides. Her hands, worn from farmwork and housework, took over the space in front of her broad holding paradox 61 shoulders and moved with her words. Milena followed as Mônica led Dad and me through her morning routine, first to the milk shed, then the fish pond, the vegetable garden, and back inside the kitchen. Milena’s bright-pink shirt stood out against the wooden house and deep greens and browns of the fields, though she would have been hard to miss even if her clothes had blended in. The six-year-old barely stopped...