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

9. Demanding Speech and Enduring Silence, Emma

Ω demanding speech and enduring silence Emma Ivone and Vania met leading women’s movement protests, taking over government buildings to secure legal rights and insisting on women’s autonomy on public streets and in private homes. In 1994 they moved in together, making an alternative vision a reality in their own lives. Seven years later, they moved to a red-and-white house in Ibiraiaras, and Gessi and Didi built their own house in Ivone and Vania’s front yard. Gessi and Didi’s daughter, Natália, who was three when I first met her and thirteen when I last visited, runs back and forth between the two houses to collect ingredients for shared meals, and her brother, Davi, is as comfortable in his aunts’ house as in his own. This alternative household arrangement— more typical of Northampton, Massachusetts, where I grew up, than a Catholic town in Southern Brazil—is built on two decades of courage and audacity. It comes out of a generation of young female leaders who refused to settle for limited lives and instead started a women’s movement, showing the world and showing themselves the possibility of new possibilities. And it rests on two lesbian women who have learned to trade the right to speak about themselves for the right to live as they choose. Ivone, Vania, and other movement leaders insisted that to engage rural women in a project to change the world, each woman needed to see herself as a citizen with rights, and she needed a place to speak about herself. They worked to facilitate open conversations in rural homes and at movement meetings. The first time I saw Vania, she was standing in a church basement in jeans and a women’s movement T-shirt, surrounded by a circle of women and leading everyone in song. When she paused, her face took shape around her wide smile, short-cropped brown hair jutting out across her forehead. I was twelve years old, visiting a women’s movement gathering with my family, and it was clear right away that I had stumbled into a place from which real change was being made. As night fell and the flow of trucks on the dirt road outside the church in Santa Lucia slowed, I watched the women prepare a communal meal and then throw squares of paper inscribed with hopes for their families into a bowl of fire. 114 chapter nine Vania Zamboni and Ivone Bonês. Photograph by Jeffrey W. Rubin. The stories I heard when Dad and I returned to Ibiraiaras three years later got beyond what the movement achieved and showed me what it took to get there, painting a picture not only of what the movement is now, but also of what it might have become. Over the years, I came to know a quieter but equally dedicated side of Ivone and Vania, a side their neighbors in Ibiraiaras and their comrades in the movement refused to take on. I asked Ivone and Vania if they would talk to me about their relationship not knowing how they would respond. Though Porto Alegre has one of the most active gay rights movements in the world, the urban movement has yet to extend to rural areas. To the contrary, Catholic influence in rural areas like Ibiraiaras is such that when the women’s movement began discussing sex and birth control in the early 1990s, the Church, which was instrumental in encouraging young activists to form an autonomous women’s movement in the 1980s, temporarily stopped letting the women’s movement use church spaces for meetings. Ivone’s and Vania’s names were almost always mentioned in the same sentence—‘‘Ivone and Vania will be here soon,’’ or, to Gessi’s children, ‘‘go ask your aunts if you can stay at their house tonight’’—but I would never have known they were partners, and not sisters or friends, if my family hadn’t demanding speech and enduring silence 115 stayed in their house on my first trip to Ibiraiaras in 2002. They were never physically affectionate in public, and in the months I have spent at women’s movement meetings, community barbecues, and Gessi’s kitchen table with the two families, I have never heard Ivone and Vania’s relationship mentioned in any explicit way. There is one story—a success story—I could have told without ever talking to Ivone...