Anthropologist and Senator Darcy Ribeiro died on February 17. He was
considered by most an accomplished educator, novelist, anthropologist,
and politician. President Fernando Henrique Cardoso went to his funeral
and even declared a national three-day mourning period in the days following
his death. Was he only a façade? Was Ribeiro the shrewdest cheater
Brazil has ever seen? That’s what this article wants to prove.
By
Janer Cristaldo
Inhabitants of the year of the Lord 1997, we have witnessed
in Brazil the crumbling of one of the most fragile myths created by the
Brazilian intelligentsia. Or maybe we should call it stupiditsia.
The myth in question is the monoglot senator Darcy Ribeiro, who built
his entire life and career on lies. He died last February and left a posthumous
piece of trash, Mestiço é que é bom (Mixed
Breed is Best) (Editora Revan Publishers, Rio, 1997).
Before we get into the senator’s swindling, let’s read some of his pearls
of wisdom. In this book, Darcy is interviewed by some of the most illustrious
Tupiniquim (1) “communossaurs”, like Antônio Callado, Antônio
Houaiss, Eric Nepomuceno, Ferreira Gullar, Oscar Niemeyer, Zelito Viana
and Zuenir Ventura. It’s important to list these names. If it were not
for the testimony of these friends of his, one would have trouble believing
the following paragraphs.
One of the most surprising revelations of this posthumous work by the
illustrious humanist from Minas Gerais is the pleasure he derived from
beating women. Oscar Niemeyer, one of the most solid bastions of Stalinism
in Brazil, kicks the ball and Darcy scores the goal:
OSCAR NIEMEYER—There was a story you told me once which was more
complicated, that somebody threw you on the railroad tracks.
DARCY— It was in Paris, the first time I went to Paris, in 1954.
There I found an incredible thing, a girl, of Turkish-Lebanese origin,
from Rio Claro, in São Paulo. At 18 she had won the French language
prize, she was a student. I arrived from Switzerland, I had spent a month
in Switzerland, working. When I arrived in Paris I met the girl by chance,
I liked her company and started hanging out with her.
She was terribly embarrassed of her virginity—French women are much
more concerned with their virginity than Brazilian women, a French girl
from a bourgeois family, that is— but as she was living on the Rive Gauche,
she was embarrassed of being a virgin there, because the boys fooled around
and they wanted to fuck. I wanted to fuck, too, but she refused to fuck.
I was already bored with her and she kept coming after me like a tick,
holding on to me, but wouldn’t fuck with me. She came to see me in my room
at the boarding house but wouldn’t fuck. A room at a boarding house, in
those days, in Paris! This girl was very much ashamed of being a virgin,
but very scared.
So, I kept going out with her, sightseeing in Paris. On a certain
day, we went to catch the last subway, we had to catch it or we would have
to walk several blocks. We went to the subway, we were at the edge of the
subway, waiting, and she knew that when we arrived she was going to be
fucked, otherwise I would bust her head. Soon I would be leaving, so this
was the day for her to be fucked, she was very nervous. Then the bitch
suddenly threw me down the subway tracks, way down. That stuff is electrified,
I could have died! I kept trying to get up, hanging by my hand at the edge
of the platform, and she stepped on my hand. I was furious and I
beat her up.
HOUAISS—You managed to climb up and get out of there?
DARCY—I managed to climb up— today I wouldn’t be able to— with her
stepping on my hand. I really beat her up, man! She was real quiet, cried
a lot and then she agreed and I fucked her.
That’s why I was just now, recently, walking with my chief of staff,
who is a very good-looking woman, and her husband, in the market of Montes
Claros and I went and said to one of those women vendors—many of them know
me:
—How are you?
She asked:
—Who is this, your wife?
—No; she works with me but doesn’t want to fuck.
—Beat her up and she will.
Not satisfied with proclaiming his qualities as an emeritus brutalizer
of women, the senator proceeds to brag about his sexual adventures as an
ethnologist, when he scored some “decadent Indians”. This time the one
kicking the ball is the also deceased Antônio Callado:
CALLADO—Darcy, the first time I went to see the Indians, in 1950
or ’51, it had been long established that you don’t fuck Indian girls so
as not to mess things up too much, it was more or less traditional, so
that they wouldn’t start fucking all the Indian girls. So much so that
when I was there, Leonardo Villas-Boas was already at Fundação
Brasil Central (Central Brazil Foundation) and he was being forced to leave
the Indian Protection Service because he had fucked an Indian girl, whom
he married. When did you arrive there for the first time? Was this law
already in effect?
DARCY—It’s true. I started with the Indians in 1946. This law exists
to this day, because of Rondon and classical Anthropology. I was educated
not to have sex with the female Indians because, for the anthropologist,
in my case specifically, long research work was difficult. Nowadays the
women are already doing it with the Indians, the women anthropologists
like to have sex with them, to create intimacy. They are really doing it,
with them too. Poor guys, the Indians are human too. So they do it. And
since they do it with the men, the men also started to fuck with the Indian
girls, first-generation anthropologists. (…) I spent many months with
the Indians and I always managed to have one. For instance, I never fucked
the Urubus-Kaapor girls because I was doing work with the Kaapors, but
I used to fuck the Tembés, who were some decadent Indian women found
up there.
Let’s see this brilliant interpretation of Genesis proposed by the senator:
DARCY—By the way, I need to tell you about a very interesting thing
that I have developed recently, kind of literary but very nice. It’s a
story about Eve, I’ve been meditating about Eve and discovered that Eve
is a Trotskyist. She is the first revolutionary in history. We owe fundamental
things to Eve.
First, Eve created the fuck. Adam was a perfect jackass, standing
there, with that dangling apparatus of his and didn’t know what to do.
Eve said:
—Come here, Adam dear.
He put it inside her and it was such a good come, he had the orgasm,
and when he came, the big angel descended and said:
—God doesn’t like it, God is pissed off at you. Out!
And he ran them out of Paradise. Paradise was shit, it was not plastic
because there was no plastic yet, it was made of papier mâché.
Because the flower is the plant’s genital organ, it fucks, there could
be no flowers fucking in paradise. It was papier mâché. When
the big angel ran them out of there, he ordered:
—Let’s make communism, let’s build Paradise out there.
Eve also left to make communism.
And since we are talking biblical themes, it’s worth having a look at
the concept Darcy Ribeiro has of Jews:
DARCY—The Jews are such sons-of-bitches that from time to time they
name the baby girl Lilith. Lilith is the sinful Eve, the one that offers
the wandering, fiery little pussy.
Let’s admit that these confessions were the result of a lot of alcohol
in the brain. Which by the way renders them more serious: in vino, veritas.
However, we must suppose that the monoglot senator was not drunk when he
wrote in Folha de São Paulo: “The expansion of the white
man was the worst catastrophe in human history”.
If this statement had been made by some illiterate individual with no
better concept of History or Geography, the phrase would simply be another
piece of nonsense like so many others reproduced daily by the media. But
it so happens that it was uttered by a Senator of the Republic, whose ideas,
profession, life and career—in spite of his monoglotism and lack of academic
education—were fed by Europe. Considering the source, such nonsense deserves
some consideration.
That White Europeans killed, both in their continent and in the continents
they conquered, no one in their sound mind can deny. But killers were also
the Chinese, the Mongols, the Turkish, the Arabs, the Japanese. Blacks
and Indians also killed and still do. As for as human beings are concerned,
the only broad statement we can make without incurring in any fallacy is
that the Green people, as well as the Blue people, have never killed their
fellow creatures. Due to the simple fact that there are no green people
or blue people.
The first man to create embryos of universities all over the world—and
this happened 300 years before Christ—set out killing and conquering peoples,
trampling them from Macedonia to Asia. Were it not for Alexander, the dialogue
between East and West would have been delayed by centuries. There were
times when cultures spread by the sword and those times are not very distant
from our times. So the European conqueror stifled the Neolithic from Pindorama
(2)? Good! If it were not for that, Darcy Ribeiro would not have had access
to the cobalt bomb which in the ’70s helped extend his life considerably.
The European white man killed and destroyed, as all men kill and destroy,
except Green and Blue men. But he also discovered penicillin and nuclear
fission, went to the moon, is already contemplating Mars and its electronic
eyes are now approaching Pluto. He gave us Mozart and Vivaldi, opera and
cinema, communications and the computer. Even Christianity, in spite of
its medieval murdering fury, has bequeathed us an aesthetics which cannot
be thrown in the famous trash dumpster of history. There are no terms of
comparison between the Notre Dame and a umbanda (3) yard. No one
can confuse a native’s hut with the Eiffel tower. Even less the Paiakan
Caiapó (4) chief with Casanova.
To dismiss the expansion of the white man, that is, of European culture,
is to deny Socrates and Plato, Cervantes and Shakespeare, Dante and da
Vinci, Schliemann and Champollion, Fernão de Magalhães and
Armstrong, Pasteur and Einstein. Not to mention Hegel and Marx, who are,
ultimately, the foundation for Darcy Ribeiro’s Weltanschauung. If
we accept his fundamentalist view, then Van Gogh’s and Bosch’s canvases
better be left to those who collect paper for industrial recycling. May
the great museum collections be used to build dams in Holland, the Louvre
and the Hermitage be closed, libraries, publication collections and film
collections burned and all computers and parabolic dishes forbidden, as
it is already happening, by the way, in the Islamic world. The first measure
of the Taliban fanatics, when they first entered Kabul, in Afghanistan,
was to destroy all television sets.
White technology transported Darcy Ribeiro in its jets to the countries
where he tasted “the bitter caviar of exile”. When he had to choose a refuge,
he favored countries of White culture, the same culture which expansion,
according to his accusation, resulted in the worst catastrophe in history.
When death approached, Darcy chose to bite the hand that fed him.
Hieratic, enjoying the absolution that death confers, he died in an
aura of sanctity. But that is not a reason to forgive the infamies which
he uttered posthumously, thanks to the editorial effort of his “compagnons
de route” (journey companions). There is an explanation for this amount
of nonsense delivered by an intellectual of international fame: throughout
his life, Darcy was a fraud.
Besides bragging that he was a monoglot, he boasted as his university
degree a diploma from the School of Sociology and Politics in São
Paulo, a course which was never recognized by the Ministry of Education
and Culture. In the résumé he sent to the Senate, he smartly
entitled himself an ethnologist, an occupation which, like those of anthropologist,
prostitute or psychoanalyst, is still not regulated in Brazil. He was awarded
three federal retirement benefit packages, one of those by the University
of Brasília, where he never had one single student and where he
was never employed.
As if this were not enough, he used to say that he founded the University
of Brasília. He did not. Nor did he ever teach there, although he
retired from it. He also said he founded the National University of Costa
Rica. He didn’t do that either. By the way, there is no such university.
He bragged to have been awarded a Honoris Causa diploma from the Sorbonne.
Pure intellectual fraud. Darcy received the Honoris Causa, in 1978, when
the Sorbonne no longer existed. The diploma was conferred by the University
of Paris VII and delivered in a room in the building of the former Sorbonne,
which is quite different. Not to mention that the Honoris Causa diploma
serves only to embellish business cards and doesn’t grant any academic
qualification to its carrier.
Darcy knew very well that in this country where there are no better
criteria for evaluating intelligence, cheating is the easiest resource
for the uneducated man to prosper in life. Lying all the way, he was hoisted
to a government ministry and to the Senate. Once in office, from the heights
of his high school degree, the monoglot senator condemned in a single phrase
the culture in whose bosom he was born and fed.
In trying to escape his spiritual death, Ribeiro did not choose the
tantã (5) or the oral account under the shade of a baobab, but
instead he chose modern printing houses assembled by the white man he so
abominated. In his effort to escape physical death, which is an instinctive
reaction of every human being, the anthropologist did not resort to witch
doctors but to first rate hospitals. When Jesus called, he didn’t seek
salvation through shamans. Instead, defeated, he begged the representatives
of that same culture which produced him and which he, the turncoat, later
decided to abominate.
The worst catastrophe in human history—”the expansion of the White man”—produced
this country which in turn produced Darcy Ribeiro, and seasoned this cultural
pot in which the senator, with his Mineiro (6) cleverness, built
his career and prestige. Before his death, he organized a foundation to
ensure that his “thoughts” would not die. Obstinate graphomaniac, he left
an amount of work so voluminous that he doesn’t know any more how many
books he wrote nor in how many languages he has been translated. Thanks
to whom? To a European called Gutenberg.
It is fashionable among anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists
and other ologists to systematically deny the cultural values of the West,
that is, of white culture, whose bases are in Greece and in Rome, to favor
primitive cultures which oftentimes never went as far as an alphabet and,
even in those places where they did, their lives today are soaked in the
blood of tribal wars. More than fashionable, this tendency is a true conspiracy
from all the defeated in History who aim their deaf resentment against
the best that humanity has produced.
In life, senator Darcy Ribeiro joined this immense group of sores.
Dead, he became an icon. When the Tupiniquim stupiditsia hear
the news that the Berlin Wall has been taken down, Darcy will take his
deserved place, which is in the famous garbage dumpster of history.
(1) Tupiniquim is from the Tupi (indigenous) language; it is
used to mean “Brazilian” in an affectionate and sometimes pejorative manner.
(2) Pindorama = Indian name for Brazil
(3) umbanda = religious cult that combines Afro-Brazilian rituals
with Brazilian Spiritualism
(4) Caiapó = Brazilian Indian tribe
(5) tantã = type of drum played by the Indians
(6) Mineiro = from the state of Minas Gerais. In the original,
the expression is “manha de Mineiro”.
Janer Cristaldo is a writer, translator and
journalist. He got a Ph.D. in French and Compared Literature from Université
de la Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III) with the thesis La Révolte
Chez Albert Camus et Ernesto Sábato (The Revolt in Albert Camus
and Ernesto Sábato). He published among other books: O Paraíso
Sexual Democrata (The Democrat Sex Paradise) (essay) , Assim Escrevem
os Gaúchos (Thus Write the Gauchos) (anthology), A Força
dos Mitos (The Power of Myths) (crônicas), Ponche Verde (Green
Poncho) (novel), Mensageiros das Fúrias (Messengers of the Furies)
(essay). You can get in touch with him via his E-mail: cristal@ibm.net
Translated from the Portuguese by T. Braga. Grateful
to C. Edinger for proofing.