Abstract
Harmonia Lyra, an arts venue in Joinville, a city in southern Brazil known for music, theatre and ballet
Credit: Fundação Turistica de Joinville
Brazilian journalist
Such a response was not uncommon, Roldão discovered, as she set about investigating the period from 1964 to 1985, when secretive torture and murder were rife. As an avid theatregoer, Roldão decided to focus her research on the town’s arts scene and its censorship. The resulting book Acanhado, which translates as Sheepish, mixes reportage with interviews and extracts of previously unpublished plays.
In her lifetime, 24-year-old Roldão has seen Joinville, in the southern state of Santa Catarina, flourish to offer some of highest living standards in the country and an ever-growing arts scene, which includes one of the world’s largest annual dance festivals and the only branch of the Bolshoi Ballet Academy outside Russia.
Brazilian playwright Miraci Deretti
The industrial town was founded on immigration (predominantly German and Italian), and has a population known for being hard-working and reserved. This, said Roldão, meant that a lot of what was going on during the regime was never openly discussed and even less of what happened during the regime was documented.
“For a lot of people, nothing changed. They carried on with their routines, carried on working, studying, raising their kids,” she explained.
While researching the arts scene, she heard interviewees repeatedly mention Os Palhaços (The Clowns), a play written by Miraci Deretti in 1968, which was intended to run at a local social club but was never publicly performed. The play was a victim of unofficial censorship, which saw creative people and thinkers “advised” they were better off keeping ideas to themselves. As Roldão said, psychological pressure that was often more devastating to projects than any official letter from the authorities.
In the play, Deretti, who was a Catholic seminary dropout, used clowns as his primary characters. The piece is full of subtle jokes and acidic language, and demonstrates a deep resentment towards dominating institutions, including the church and the military government.
“According to him, we are all clowns for allowing this exploitation to happen,” Roldão said. “He also highlights the problems of hunger and extreme poverty, the relationship between employee and employer, the censorship of Protestants, and the individualism and egotism of human beings.”
The play – an extract of which has been translated into English below for the first time – was finally performed in Joinville in 2008. Deretti died in 2009. In 2012, the Brazilian government founded the Comissão da Verdade (Truth Commission) to shine a light on the era’s crimes. The board is currently investigating alleged murders from the period, but a military-era amnesty means there will be no trials.
by Miraci Deretti
Jeez, son! Don’t talk like that! God will punish you!
God … this ain’t got anything to do with God! This is all coming from those priests. God! God!
This is not God! This troublemaking God is an invention of those priests!
MEANWHILE, ON THE RADIO: Communism is creating more victims all the time! Communism is the root of all evils in the modern world! Communism, this perfidious and atheist doctrine, only Christ can defeat it!
Which Christ?! The one I know looks more like he’s with the communists than with you, sir!
---------------------
Brazil only creates and incubates clowns! Clowns proliferate in geometric progression! Brazil already had enough clowns to start exporting them
---------------------
I would actually just like to win a few million! The day I get 30 million … I … will get lots of blacks to move their arses! I’ve got the money! Arrest me! You see! Who wins the lottery? Only the rich! A rich man is skint … and what does he do? He goes to the bank: “Sir, fetch me five millions?!”
---------------------
Subversive! World-repairing lunatic! Propagandist! Are you going to quit this argument or not? Just so you know you’re starting to be annoying and you may end up getting yourself into trouble!
Go away, you professional ass-licker! Is this a democracy or a clownery?
It is a democracy with subtle dumb-ocratic tendencies!
---------------------
The same faces, the same banks, the same people going down the same way
Stop nagging, guys! Stop nagging me! You act as if you were born here! You can’t see anyone relaxed without sticking your nose in!
Hold on a minute, now you have offended me! I am from here and I do not accept you bad-mouthing my homeland!
Well, you are one of the bearable ones. If only this land had more people like you, it would be a paradise!
Do you know the land where one can’t be intelligent because the boss is dumb and he doesn’t want to be over-shadowed in the shadow … where a lad who owns a bar with three employees thinks he is the king of the world and has the right to control his employees’ private lives …
---------------------
For all of this I keep saying:
Where there’s a will, there’s a way, my Brazilian people,
We can fix anything up with jeitinho 1
No one will starve in Brazil,
Because there is always a farofa 2 with some fish!
If I’m living in a fixed-up shack,
Why do I need anything better if I am rarely going to sleep?
I have a serenade for my good friends
Life is good, I am better, I’m in Brazil!
All my offspring are going to be Brazilian
From a young age they will know how to live life…
Nobody works, because what do we get from it?
It’s better just to find a way to get going!”
---------------------
And the six-year-old little girl … I saw her turn her sad little face to her mother and say: “Mother! Today we have nothing, right? So I will go to sleep!” Today we have nothing … I thought it was the television! Or the radio. I thought it was a dessert. No! Today we have NOTHING …There is nothing … So I will go to sleep … And I also went to sleep … I forgot … And you will also go to sleep …
---------------------
And the clown found love!
He found out that those stories that say: ”And they lived happily ever after …”
Are only truthful when both people are …
Me and myself!
But he found that horrible!
It is repugnant.
A huge clownery!
But men say that’s what life is like! I only actually love …
Myself … And the clown thought that this way …
Life is a stupid deal
---------------------
I became a clown! I really enjoy theatre. I enjoy dramatic scenes! I enjoy appearing in front of the spectators with that heroic, indecipherable look of one who has felt emotions more tragic than the human mind could possibly imagine. I enjoy looking at the audience, with that fantastic expression, capable of moving a heart of stone. Because I am a clown.
© Miraci Deretti
Translation and introduction by Ana Minozzo