WLT interview with Moacyr Scliar

World Literature Today, May-June, 2006 by Luciana Camargo Namorato

Born in 1937, MOACYR SCLIAR is the son of immigrants from Bessarabia, who arrived in Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul (the southernmost Brazilian state) in 1919. One of the most distinguished Brazilian writers in the Jewish tradition (together with Clarice Lispector, who did not openly thematize her Jewish heritage in her works, however), Scliar grew up in a Jewish neighborhood and belonged to various youth organizations that oriented him toward Zionism. He has published more than seventy books, including novels, collections of short stories, essays, and children's and young-adult literature, which have been translated into ten languages. Scliar believes that his career as a physician, from which he retired in 1987, has offered him intimate insights into the human condition and social realities. Inspired by allegorical fiction and magical realism, Scliar combines fantasy with investigations of social and political oppression as well as explorations of the peculiarities of the immigrant experience. In his first fictional work, the collection of allegorical short stories O carnaval dos animals (1968; Eng. The Carnival of the Animals, 1985), Scliar makes use of fables in order to cope with the censorship imposed by the Brazilian military dictatorship. O centauro no jardim (1980; Eng. The Centaur in the Garden, 1984), his most celebrated novel, became a classic of Brazilian literature and introduced the nation to the dilemmas faced by Jews in Brazil and to the vulnerabilities of minorities in a broader sense. His short-story collection A orelha de Van Gogh (1989; Van Gogh's ear) received the Casa de las Americas award in 1989. Elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 2003, Moacyr Scliar is one of the most compelling contemporary voices of the Jewish diaspora in Latin America. For a volume translated into English, The Collected Stories of Moacyr Scliar (1999), he received the National Jewish Book Award. Scliar also served on the jury of the 2002 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, nominating Luis Fernando Verissimo for the award. The following interview is the translated version of two conversations with the author during his visit to Middlebury College in the summer of 2005, where he was writer-in-residence at the Portuguese Language School.

Luciana Namorato In your books, the experience of immigration plays a major role. What are the most vital aspects of the diaspora for your work?

Moacyr Scliar The immigrant is always a person who somehow does not completely fit into his new country. He sees reality with different eyes, the eyes of someone who has experienced another reality. The immigrant perceives everything anew. His expectations and critical abilities have not already been blunted by habit. He is able to notice in his new land things that those who were born there would never notice. His eyes are wide open for business opportunities, for example. He wants to survive, and, for this reason, he must compromise sometimes. But he is also very aware and extremely critical of social injustices. But the immigrant usually lacks a native command of the new language, and this deficiency limits his interventions in society. His experience with literature is often reduced to texts written in his native language, and he usually does not have spare time to invest in literary creation. He is too busy trying to survive.

LN And is that when the sons and daughters of immigrants come into play?

MS Exactly. The children of immigrants go through an identity crisis that can be extremely painful but also very productive if a creative mind is willing to transform this experience into literature. This explains why, in countries like Brazil, Argentina, the United States, Chile, and England, most of the writers who are responsible for reshaping their country's literary traditions are the daughters and sons of immigrants.

LN In your opinion, how can immigrants' experience in their former land contribute to the political, economic, and social development of their new nation?

MS Immigrants are always questioning themselves about their past and future, about their connections with other people and groups. They do not know exactly who they are. It does not mean, however, that they are constantly desperate or in anguish. On the contrary, they bring hope for a better future. They have a firm belief in the positive changes that the future will bring in their new land, since they have made a decision to abandon everything they once knew and trusted in exchange for an opportunity to begin anew. In Brazil, in particular, this attitude is extremely significant, since this is not the attitude of most of the people who are born in Brazil and who are so disappointed by corruption and poverty that they suspect that things will never change. There is a widespread mistrust in the country, but this hopelessness was not shared by the immigrants. This trust in the country's future, I believe, is more valuable than any physical work performed by those who emigrated to Brazil. The colonization of our country by the Portuguese was sometimes marked by destructive acts of exploitation, by injustices and violence. This explains the Brazilian citizens' complete lack of trust in their country's future. Different from the first Portuguese explorers, the Russians, Germans, Italians, Japanese, and other later immigrants instead dreamed of building a life for themselves and their descendants. They did not want to remove the riches from Brazil but, rather, to increase them and keep them here for their descendants. I believe this is the first step toward change. When you worry about future generations, you begin to work toward a more equal and fair nation.