Letters from Joel Rufino to his son

Some teachers teach us more than what the school curriculum dictates. Joel Rufino dos Santos must have been one of those teachers, someone capable of transforming the present’s understanding and generating new desires for the future when talking about past events and ideas. In the early 1960s, Rufino dos Santos was part of a team, led by Nelson Werneck Sodré, responsible for writing the História Nova do Brasil [New History of Brazil] series, a set of textbooks the authors defined as the “Structural Reform in History Teaching.” Rewriting and retelling the country’s history was part of a nation-building project aimed to eradicate illiteracy with the Paulo Freire method as well as implement structural reforms, which included land democratization, fiscal justice, and the right to housing. It was during these years that Thiago de Mello wrote the poem “Madrugada camponesa” [The Peasant Dawn]: “The land is still dark (it’s clearer now) / Working is worthwhile. / Though it’s dark, still I sing / for morning is coming soon. / Though it’s dark, still I sing.”

It is difficult not to ponder about the kind of country we would be living in today if João Goulart had not been deposed. But our history is a different one. And the 1964 civic-military coup interrupted the political project geared towards a more egalitarian Brazil, beginning more than twenty years in which the State arrested, tortured, and executed men and women who fought for this ideal.

Thiago de Mello was no exception. Nor was Joel Rufino dos Santos, arrested in 1972, when his son, named Nelson after Werneck Sodré, was eight years old. During the two incarceration years due to no other charge than the content of his writings, Joel sent his son the letters gathered here. Written in prison, reviewed by censors, stamped, mailed, held in Nelson’s hands, silently read, read aloud by Teresa Garbayo dos Santos, kept safe for years, reread, and finally, these letters are made public. Letters that speak of love, nostalgia, daily life in prison; letters that talk about the history of this country, which help to understand the present and forge desires for the future. Like the works around them, these letters point to the cracks that allow us to evade censorship and escape imprisonment, either physically or imaginatively and creatively. They are worth reading. Because they can, as Thiago de Mello writes in the introduction of the book that brings these letters together, “cleanse the adhesions of deceptions that damage our lives, hurt our intelligence and stain the childhood that throbs in man’s chest.”