Frankfurt Book Fair 2013: Hello, Brazil!
Oct. 9th, 2013 07:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakFirst day of the Frankfurt Book Fair: over, and the succesfully passed. This years' guest of honour is Brazil, and at the opening ceremony last night, something happened which very rarely does. Actually two things. Usually, the speeches at the opening ceremonies are very sedate affairs, with the occasional exception, as in the year of China, when there had been some miserable bungling and spinelessness in advance but Angela Merkel found a good solution to the problem of having a dicatorial guest of honour (presented by the Chinese President) who had demanded censorship in advance. She talked rather pointedly about her childhood in the GDR and how authors had suffered by being repressed, censored, and what it had meant to read forbidden books. At no point did she make a comparison to China, but the point was clear nonetheless, and yet no one could have accused her of insulting the guests since she spoke about something that was in fact part of her personal biography.
The other non-sedate thing that occasionally happens is a gaffe, as when her secretary of state two years ago, when Iceland was the guest of honour, declared since he couldn't pronounce Icelandic names and thus wouldn't try. Since he's supposed to be our chief diplomat, there was a collective groan, so to speak. Anyway, this year, he did say every Brazilian name in his manuskript and promptly mispronounced a few, but other than that, his speech was one of the more relaxed ones, perhaps because, as he said, he was part of the outgoing government and won't be our secretary of state much longer. Consequently, he went a bit wild (for Guido Westerwelle) and declared that Germany supported Brazil in wanting a permanent seat at the UN Security Council, that it was outrageous the entirety of Latin American wasn't presented by a single country there, nor was the continent of Africa, and while he was talking about outrageous things, Germany fully supports the Brazilian President in her speech a few days ago at the UN about how just because you can spy on the rest of the world with technology and by virtue of being the biggest gorilla in the room doesn't mean you have the moral right to, so there. The rest of the German speakers were more concerned with the preservation of the Buchpreisbindung, which is more under threat than ever (and which is really what secures German authors their income, so yes, let's keep it, please), and bookstores hopefully making a comeback in the wake of Amazon image losing (wishful thinking, but I'd be all for it).
Anyway, what enlived the ceremony were the audience reactions to two of the Brazilian speakers. Of which there were three: author Luiz Ruffalo, the president of the Brazilian academy of Literature, and the Vice President of Brazil. The Brazilian delegation this year includes no fewer than 70 authors, which had been derided by the all time bestselling Brazilian author Paolo Coelho who declared he only knows 20 of them and the rest were probably only functionaries taken along as a government favouri, which was why he didn't show up. This made him look like a total diva, for two reasons: firstly because just because he doesn't know all 70 doesn't mean they're not authors or don't deserve to visit the Frankfurt Book Fair (how many authors of your own country could you name, btw?), and secondly because the Brazilian delegation last night proved that they were no government flunkies.
The first Brazilian speaker, Luiz Ruffalo, held a very passionate speech about the injustices of the present and past in Brazil. Some choice quotes: "We were born as a result of genocide. Of the four million Indians who lived in 1500, roughly 900.000 are left, and many of them live in miserable conditions at the side of the roads or in the Favelas of the big cities. Often people point as an example of Brazilian Tolerance to the so called "democracy of the races", the myth that there was no genocide of the native inhabitants of this country but assimilation. But this euphemism only serves to prettify an undeniable fact: if we're today a mixed race nation, this is the result of sex between European men and Indian and African women, to be precise: the assimalation happened via the continued rape of natives and Africans by white colonizers. (...) Even today, the majority of African Brazilians lives at the lower half of the pyramid of society. Very rarely you find them among the doctors, lawyers, engineers, c.e.o.s, journalists, artists, filmmakers and writers. They're invisible, badly paid, and robbed of the most basic rights as citizens - a place to live, mobility, vacations, education and health care - the majority of Brazilians is regarded as expendable as far as economy is concerned: 75% of the wealth of this country are in the hands of 10% of the white population, and only 46.000 people own half of the territory in our country."
"Intolerance thrives, carried along a terrible awareness of lack of punishment, because you only have to go to prison if you have no money to pay good lawyers."
"The rate of violent crimes in Brazil is at 20 murders per 100 people, 37.000 dead peopleper year, three times more than the world wide avarage. (...) As machos, we take the shaming seventh place among the countries with the highest rate of domestic violence, with 45.000 murdered women in the last ten years. In 2012 alone we had more than 120.000 reports of violent abuse of children and adolescents. And those are only the crimes that were reported; we know that the actual numbers are far, far higher."
This passionate J'Accuse was wildly applauded by the Brazilian audience, not just with cheers but stampedes and approving yells, as if Brazil had won the world cup. It was the total opposite of the speech the Vice President of Brazil, Michel Treme (if I recall correctly, haven't looked up the spelling yet), held, which not only declared how there were hardly any problems left but that he, too, is a writer, not just of books about constitutional rights but also of a volume of poetry about his childhood. At this, for the first time since I'm attending the opening ceremony of the Frankfurt Book Fair, a speaker was booed, as passionately as Ruffalo had been applauded, by the Brazilian delegation. The German audience sat there and visibly thought "um? how to respond to that one?"
By strolling through the Brazilian pavillon, as if it hadn't happened, was the obvious solution. As opposed to last year's New Zealand pavillion which offered some fantastic combinations of darkness, water and light, this year's guest of honour presentation was all in bright colours, one part with bicycles in front of tv screens (if you ride the bikes, you can see Brazilian history on the screen), and columms showing photos of writers which upon a closer look turned out to consist of paper which you can take; on the paper is the decription of a Brazilian classic novel, a different one for each writer. Very clever.
Today I mostly strolled around, caught up with various acquaintances and friends and browsed through books. Noted for later reading: "The Golem and the Djinn" by Helene Wecker. And then I heard some gossip about two authors with similar plots but will have to verify before reporting it.
The largest book fair of the world is still precisely that, though how much we're the ancien regime facing the ebook revolution and how much an amalgan of both remains to be seen. More in the days to come!
The other non-sedate thing that occasionally happens is a gaffe, as when her secretary of state two years ago, when Iceland was the guest of honour, declared since he couldn't pronounce Icelandic names and thus wouldn't try. Since he's supposed to be our chief diplomat, there was a collective groan, so to speak. Anyway, this year, he did say every Brazilian name in his manuskript and promptly mispronounced a few, but other than that, his speech was one of the more relaxed ones, perhaps because, as he said, he was part of the outgoing government and won't be our secretary of state much longer. Consequently, he went a bit wild (for Guido Westerwelle) and declared that Germany supported Brazil in wanting a permanent seat at the UN Security Council, that it was outrageous the entirety of Latin American wasn't presented by a single country there, nor was the continent of Africa, and while he was talking about outrageous things, Germany fully supports the Brazilian President in her speech a few days ago at the UN about how just because you can spy on the rest of the world with technology and by virtue of being the biggest gorilla in the room doesn't mean you have the moral right to, so there. The rest of the German speakers were more concerned with the preservation of the Buchpreisbindung, which is more under threat than ever (and which is really what secures German authors their income, so yes, let's keep it, please), and bookstores hopefully making a comeback in the wake of Amazon image losing (wishful thinking, but I'd be all for it).
Anyway, what enlived the ceremony were the audience reactions to two of the Brazilian speakers. Of which there were three: author Luiz Ruffalo, the president of the Brazilian academy of Literature, and the Vice President of Brazil. The Brazilian delegation this year includes no fewer than 70 authors, which had been derided by the all time bestselling Brazilian author Paolo Coelho who declared he only knows 20 of them and the rest were probably only functionaries taken along as a government favouri, which was why he didn't show up. This made him look like a total diva, for two reasons: firstly because just because he doesn't know all 70 doesn't mean they're not authors or don't deserve to visit the Frankfurt Book Fair (how many authors of your own country could you name, btw?), and secondly because the Brazilian delegation last night proved that they were no government flunkies.
The first Brazilian speaker, Luiz Ruffalo, held a very passionate speech about the injustices of the present and past in Brazil. Some choice quotes: "We were born as a result of genocide. Of the four million Indians who lived in 1500, roughly 900.000 are left, and many of them live in miserable conditions at the side of the roads or in the Favelas of the big cities. Often people point as an example of Brazilian Tolerance to the so called "democracy of the races", the myth that there was no genocide of the native inhabitants of this country but assimilation. But this euphemism only serves to prettify an undeniable fact: if we're today a mixed race nation, this is the result of sex between European men and Indian and African women, to be precise: the assimalation happened via the continued rape of natives and Africans by white colonizers. (...) Even today, the majority of African Brazilians lives at the lower half of the pyramid of society. Very rarely you find them among the doctors, lawyers, engineers, c.e.o.s, journalists, artists, filmmakers and writers. They're invisible, badly paid, and robbed of the most basic rights as citizens - a place to live, mobility, vacations, education and health care - the majority of Brazilians is regarded as expendable as far as economy is concerned: 75% of the wealth of this country are in the hands of 10% of the white population, and only 46.000 people own half of the territory in our country."
"Intolerance thrives, carried along a terrible awareness of lack of punishment, because you only have to go to prison if you have no money to pay good lawyers."
"The rate of violent crimes in Brazil is at 20 murders per 100 people, 37.000 dead peopleper year, three times more than the world wide avarage. (...) As machos, we take the shaming seventh place among the countries with the highest rate of domestic violence, with 45.000 murdered women in the last ten years. In 2012 alone we had more than 120.000 reports of violent abuse of children and adolescents. And those are only the crimes that were reported; we know that the actual numbers are far, far higher."
This passionate J'Accuse was wildly applauded by the Brazilian audience, not just with cheers but stampedes and approving yells, as if Brazil had won the world cup. It was the total opposite of the speech the Vice President of Brazil, Michel Treme (if I recall correctly, haven't looked up the spelling yet), held, which not only declared how there were hardly any problems left but that he, too, is a writer, not just of books about constitutional rights but also of a volume of poetry about his childhood. At this, for the first time since I'm attending the opening ceremony of the Frankfurt Book Fair, a speaker was booed, as passionately as Ruffalo had been applauded, by the Brazilian delegation. The German audience sat there and visibly thought "um? how to respond to that one?"
By strolling through the Brazilian pavillon, as if it hadn't happened, was the obvious solution. As opposed to last year's New Zealand pavillion which offered some fantastic combinations of darkness, water and light, this year's guest of honour presentation was all in bright colours, one part with bicycles in front of tv screens (if you ride the bikes, you can see Brazilian history on the screen), and columms showing photos of writers which upon a closer look turned out to consist of paper which you can take; on the paper is the decription of a Brazilian classic novel, a different one for each writer. Very clever.
Today I mostly strolled around, caught up with various acquaintances and friends and browsed through books. Noted for later reading: "The Golem and the Djinn" by Helene Wecker. And then I heard some gossip about two authors with similar plots but will have to verify before reporting it.
The largest book fair of the world is still precisely that, though how much we're the ancien regime facing the ebook revolution and how much an amalgan of both remains to be seen. More in the days to come!
