In his third book, , Jacob Blanc introduces readers to the life of Brazilian journalist and activist, AluĂzio Palmar. A survivor of torture as a political prisoner during Brazilâs military dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s, Palmar dedicated his life to investigating human rights abuses. After meeting Palmar during his fieldwork for his PhD dissertation in Brazil, Blanc kept in touch with the journalist and memory activist, and was alarmed when news broke in December 2019 that Palmar was being sued for libel by his former torturer.Ìę
Based on over 75 hours of interviews, Searching for Memory tells the story of state repression in Brazil, and its legacy in ongoing discussions of transitional justice in Brazil.Ìę
We spoke to Professor Blanc about the process of interviewing Palmar, his research on âmemory scriptâ and memory activists, and the impact of films, such as the 97th Academy Award winning Best International Feature filmÌęIâm Still Here,Ìęcan have on bringing the topic of transitional justice to the forefront of public consciousness.
Q: Who is AluĂzio Palmar, and how did you come to write his biography?
JB: AluĂzio Palmar is a former political prisoner and torture victim during Brazilâs dictatorship in the 1960s who eventually became a leading human rights activist. I first met AluĂzio in 2013, while doing fieldwork for my PhD dissertationâI was studying the history of rural movements on the Brazil-Paraguay border, and AluĂzio had been a journalist in the region at the time. He helped connect me to local archives and campaign leaders, and we stayed in touch over the years. Our collaboration got re-energized in December 2019, when I saw in the news on and Facebook that he was being sued by his former torturer for libel. That was a really shocking and scary lawsuit, a reflection of Brazilâs turn to authoritarian politics under the far-right presidency of Jair Bolsonaro. I wrote to AluĂzio asking for an interview, so that I could help publicize his case for an English-speaking audience. The resulting did a small part to help the lawsuit eventually get dismissed.
In the meantime, the whole world was rocked by the Covid-19 pandemic. AluĂzio was nearly 80 years old and diabetic, and I was worried that he might not make it. I asked if he was interested in doing a series of interviews for a biography about his life. He agreed, and we started recording weekly interviews. The project ended up growing and changing so much over the course of what became nearly five years of research and writing.
Q: Searching for Memory draws on years of interviews and conversations with Palmar; aside from these interviews, what type of research did you undertake to write Palmarâs biography? In creating this oral biography, what challenges did you encounter in recounting his story?
JB: I did 40 hours of interviews with AluĂzio and almost an equal number with other people from across his life: family members, friends, former militants, colleagues, and politicians. I also used extensive digitized archives from the period of Brazilâs military dictatorship. All the archival material that I collected, paired with all the interviews that I did with other people, helped give me a wide source base to contextualize, complement, and at times challenge the life history interviews that I was doing with AluĂzio. There were so many twists and turns. Doing in-depth oral history work with the subject of the biography meant that over the course of writing the book I actually had to develop a new type of conceptual and methodological framework to handle the diverse perspectives and layers of memory that were coming up. What are some of the challenges? Well, at times I would come across anecdotes or portions of his memories that did not align with other sources or even his own retailing of his life story elsewhere. And what do I do with those types of discordant memories? What are the ethical and political and narrative implications for me, as an author, to make a statement about whether or not certain anecdotes are âtrue.â What I ended up developing was a type of transparency with my reader, where I had to write myself into the narrative of the book in order to let the reader know when these moments of discordant memory emerged, how I dealt with them, how I discussed them with AluĂzio, and ultimately what I did or did not change in the final version of the book. It was a really surreal and at times awkward experience for me to write myself into the narrative. But it was a way that I felt could best allow me to handle the fact that I was actively collaborating with the subject of my biography, writing about somebody who is still alive, and who I invited into the editing process by sharing drafts of all my chapters with him so that he could give feedback. In the book I talk through the parameters of what Iâm calling a collaborative biography.
Q: In his , journalist Willem Marx says that your book puts forward the idea of a âmemory script.â What is a âmemory scriptâ, and how is Palmar a âmemory activistâ?
JB: I developed the idea of a memory script to offer a conceptual and methodological framework for doing collaborative oral history work. The idea of the memory script is that it helps us understand memory not just as a product but rather as a process of how individuals narrate their own life. A memory script shows us how people share their own memories in a way that is practiced, repetitive, and performative; by this I mean that they practice the activity of memory sharing, they repeat certain anecdotes and stories as a way to establish their life history as a public narrative, and it is performative because they are always aware of who their audience is and why they are motivated to share their life stories. For someone like AluĂzio, a memory script has multiple meanings. He is a committed political activist and human rights campaigner, and the sharing of his own memories is a way to bring attention to the violence of Brazilâs dictatorship and the ongoing legacies of that traumaâfor him personally and also for Brazilian society. And the idea of memory script also lets us understand how, for AluĂzio, sharing his life story is a way to elevate his own contributions into larger narratives. AluĂzio was never famous, even amongst human rights activists in Latin America, only a certain sector of the movement will know who he is. Yet his life overlapped with, and helped contribute, to some of the most pivotal moments in the last fifty years of Brazilian history. So narrativizing his life and stylizing his memories towards political goals also has the personal impact of moving his life history from a bit of a more peripheral position to a more central narrative in public understandings.
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Q: 2024 saw the release and positive critical reception of Walter Salleâs Iâm Still Here and FX Productionsâ Say Nothing, addressing the legacy of forced disappearances in Brazil and Northern Ireland, respectively. How do stories like the ones in Iâm Still Here and Searching for Memory approach the topic of transitional justice? What limitations and opportunities do societies face when engaging in transitional justice, and how do media representations of past human rights violations keep these past atrocities in the public consciousness?
JB: Iâm Still Here is such an important movie, as a reflection of the memory activism that people like AluĂzio and countless others have been doing in Brazil for decades. And itâs also a vital political and legal tool in the present day. In the aftermath of the filmâs release and its international acclaim, the Brazilian Supreme Court has shown a willingness to overturn the 1979 amnesty law that, for nearly half a century has shielded perpetrators of grave human rights abuses from being held accountable in Brazil. These are some of the difficult but important battles of transitional justice. How do societies grapple with a collective legacy of political violence and trauma? How can they strike a balance between allowing individuals to move on and forget the violent experiences in their own lives, while also needing to shine a spotlight on atrocities that were committed by their government? These are harrowing, personal, and difficult questions. The movie shows this clearly, and I hope that my book will also engage these paradoxes of memory in the aftermath of violence. A life history approach gives us a really interesting lens, I think, into the multitude of ways that memory shapes peoplesâ sense of self and their desire for political change in the present. By certain key measures, Brazil has been a slow adapter of transitional justice: it only recently had a truth commission, it has never had criminal trials, and the previous president, Jair Bolsonaro, rose to power in large part on a nostalgic and romanticized view of the military regime. In this context, it falls to activists, survivors, and allies, to keep pressuring governments and the international community to seek transitional justice. The life history of one such activist, who himself was a victim of Brazilâs dictatorship, gives us a lot to think through.
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Q: Your first book, Before the Flood: the Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil (Duke University Press, 2019) explores the rural experiences of dictatorship in Brazil and your second book, The Prestes Column (Duke University Press, 2024) presents an interior history of Brazil. How did the writing and research for your latest book further contextualize your understanding of the overlap of human rights and social movements in 20th century Brazil?
JB: This is my third book, and in a lot of ways it picks up where my first book had left off. Similar themes that I had developed about the legacies of dictatorship and the question of human rights from different perspectives, this is what really lies at the heart of my new book on AluĂzio. It forced me to contend with the complexities of memory and trauma at the scale of one individual. Whereas previously I had grappled with the histories of how marginalized groups in the countryside mobilized to defend their visions of democracy and human rights, I now traced those questions across the life course of one emblematic person. Social movements, for me, are such a fascinating topic of analysis because they force us as historians to think through how people articulate their frustrations and their hopes, and what tactics they pursue to try to fulfill them. Social movements fail far more often than they succeeded. So the lessons of why people keep fighting despite the difficult context of their life, shows us a little bit of insight into how popular struggle takes shape and why somebody like AluĂzio devotes their life to fighting for social justice. There are lots of contradictions and complications to be sure: AluĂzio is human, and has all of the faults and thorny characteristics as anybody might. And in the book, I explore some of those in so far as itâs useful for understanding his life trajectory and his impact on politics and his family. The struggle for human rights is comprised of people fighting for a better future, and seeing the struggles through the memories one individual helps us see a bit more of the human side of that history. A lot of that history is messy and troubling, and we canât hide those elements of the biography either.
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Q: In 2024, you received a SSHRC Insight Development Grant for your current project, âA Global History of Never Againâ, which will have you conducting research on mass atrocities across various regions outside of your geographical area of specialization of Latin America. How has this research experience developed so far?
JB: My project emerged from my training as a Latin Americanist: the phrase nunca mĂĄs (in Spanish) and nunca mais (in Portuguese) are central slogans across the regionâs history of human rights campaigns. I teach courses on violence and transitional justice in Latin America, and I had always wanted to expand my interests beyond the region to grapple with why this phrase resonates so strongly in so many different contexts. The paradox is that the phraseâs growing popularity has seemingly done nothing to stem the tide of violence across the worldâif never again keeps happening, why do people keep invoking the phrase?
This year Iâve worked with a team of undergrad and graduate research assistants to start compiling a database focusing on a dozen case studies, including Argentina, Bangladesh, Rwanda, Germany, Japan, Canada, Australia, the Middle East, and the United States. I plan to start conducting interviews next year to complement our archival data, with the goal of having each chapter as a sort of long-form journalism telling the story of activists, survivors, museum curators, international NGOs, government officials, and artists, all using the phrase as a way to call attention to a particular atrocity. Itâs really exciting, and also a bit terrifying, to start wading so deep into non-Latin American waters. At this stage in my career, I wanted to almost start from scratch and force myself to learn from scratch about new histories around the world. Thematically, it is very much in my area of expertise, but regionally itâs almost entirely new for me. That will be the fun part.