I stand in my basement facing stacks of cardboard boxes, the remnants of my last cross-country move out to Boulder, CO. If you were to take a cross-section of each box, you would see the sediments of everyday objects: a top layer of clothes; the occasional sweater enveloping a ceramic mug; a layer of miscellaneous household necessities (clothes hangers, desk supplies, etc.); and finally, a thick deposit of books.
At the bottom of one of these boxes I found a thin book, barely visible between the thick spines of a heavily annotated copy of Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and a fat collection of Pushkin short stories. I pulled out the paperback, which turned out to be a Brazilian novel, The Brothers, written by Milton Hatoum and translated into English by John Gledson. I couldn’t be sure if I had actually read the book before rediscovering it in the crevice of a cardboard box.
I flipped to the copyright information. The original was published in 2000, with the English translation released two years later. Milton Hatoum is a Brazilian author of Lebanese descent, born in 1952 in Manaus, a city in the Amazon. I flipped to the blurb, which promised the story of a Lebanese immigrant family, focusing on the rivalry between two twins, Yaqub and Omar, who live in Manaus in the latter half of the 20th century.
It’s an intriguing premise, one that draws on the age-old trope of brotherly rivalry, harkening back to Cain and Abel, to The Brothers Karamazov, and to Machado de Assis’s Esaú e Jacó. The novel promised to capture the author’s own experience as a man of Middle Eastern descent from a peripheral region of Brazil. I couldn’t remember how it went from my bookshelf to being snugly packed, which made me curious to investigate further. I left my final box unopened, sat down on the pillows and blankets I had piled on the floor, and began reading. The novel opens with an epigraph, a quote from a Carlos Drummond de Andrade poem:
“The house was sold with all its memories
all its furniture all its nightmares
all the sins committed, or just about to be;
the house was sold with the sound of its doors banging
with its windy corridors its view of the world
its imponderables.”
The narrative then begins with Yaqub’s homecoming to Manaus from Lebanon, where he had spent some years of his youth, and the reuniting of the two twins under a single roof. Hatoum unveils ever-mounting tensions amongst members of the family through their domestic alliances and conflicts, and the touching and torrid backstories that define those relationships; rich descriptions of setting provide a fascinating portrait of Manaus, albeit one that is devoid of exoticization; and the complex exploration of character in simple, quotidian situations calls upon the wide-ranging tradition of the family saga in literature.
As I entered this domestic setting, something bothered me. I flipped back to the epigraph. A dark presence hangs around the edges of Hatoum’s prose like the nightmares in Drummond de Andrade’s poem—like a suppressed memory. My own memory: an increasingly intense feeling of déjà vu, the conviction that I had read the same first chapters of this book before but cannot place when or why I put it down. The presence of fictional memory, too, from the family in the novel—subtle indications of something dark and unspoken underlying the family’s history, underlying Manaus and Brazil as a whole.
Hatoum’s talent lies in his ability to create this feeling of the unarticulated. It took me a few dozen pages to see that one ghost haunting this text is the unnamed narrator, a figure who knows the intimate secrets of the family, and yet is not a member of it—someone who exists both inside and outside the text, and whose literal existence remains invisible. With increasing frequency, issues of race, gender, and class manifest themselves in the slave-like treatment of the family’s live-in servant, Domingas; how the male characters treat women as property; and how the female characters repress their sexuality, and in the extreme inequality present in descriptions of Manaus. Hatoum makes these aspects of the text build in their intensity and presence in the text, unrecognized by any of the characters. While the plot follows the saga of Yaqub and Omar’s sibling rivalry, the social backdrop of the novel builds tension.
The time period of the plot sees Yaqub first return home in 1945, but the novel then rapidly races through time, careening towards Brazil’s military dictatorship that began in 1964 and the context of political oppression that accompanied it. In the moment when I noticed where the book was heading in time, I recalled why I had the book and when I had last read it.
I wrote my senior thesis in college on detective fiction written after the last Argentine and Brazilian military dictatorships. At the beginning of the project, I sought out novels in which the detective investigates state oppression and, in so doing, becomes witness to memories of violence that nations would prefer to forget. A friend had given me this copy of The Brothers, explaining that it takes place under the dictatorship. After skimming the first twenty pages, seeing nothing about dictatorship or detectives, I decided it did not “fit” my project. I abandoned it to my bookshelf, where it quickly disappeared between classic titles and newer releases.
In my first reading of the book, I missed something that became increasingly apparent in my spontaneous re-reading. The reader is in fact the detective that I had searched for in the book over a year before, one who investigates “all the sins committed, or just about to be.”
The layers of unspoken violence began to peel back a quarter of the way through the book. Hatoum reveals that Domingas, an orphan of indigenous descent, had been forced by her orphanage to live with and serve the family when she was still a child. This instance of post-abolition slavery isn’t the only moment of revelation: from Hatoum’s clues, the reader-detective realizes that the narrator is actually Domginas’s son, and that the narrator’s father is either Yaqub or Omar. The Brothers is not a simple story of sibling rivalry, but rather the narrator’s attempt to identify both his father and the culprit of his mother’s rape. It is the narrator’s search for his story – for history – of silenced trauma and slavery:
“I knew nothing about myself, how I came into the world, or where I had come from: my origin, or origins.”
The dictatorship appears in the final quarter of the book, parachuting into the story with full force and little warning. The politics behind the coup itself are never visible. Instead, one single instance of terror, of state oppression, affects every character, ripping apart the already frayed domestic ties in the Manaus household. The extrajudicial kidnapping of a beloved leftist professor, Laval, wreaks total havoc and inspires the most striking, terrifying descriptions in the text:
“The ground seemed to shake more and more, and now it was sirens and howls that buzzed around my head, and bayonets pointing at the church door, where my fellow students from the lyceum were raising their arms, throwing themselves on the ground and falling, and then pointing at Laval, writhing in the aviary full of dead birds, his right hand holding his battered briefcase, his left trying to catch the sheets of paper burning in the air. I tried to go into the aviary, but it was locked, and I could still see Laval right close to me, his face ripped apart with pain, his collar covered in blood, a sad look in his eye and his mouth open, incapable of uttering a world.”
Laval’s last moment is one of silence. This unspeakable violence then remains, quietly haunting the characters as the novel continues. By barely discussing the dictatorship, limiting its presence to one central event in the last fifty pages of his book, and then suppressing the memory of that event, Hatoum captures one aspect of political violence. Oppression builds insidiously, explodes in all its terror, and then slips quietly back under the surface, remaining an unarticulated nightmare from the past.
The book I skimmed and returned to my shelf a year ago is not exactly about memory; I was right about that when I set it aside. Instead, The Brothers captures the experience of forgetting. In Hatoum’s use of silence, the novel both describes and simulates the systematic forgetting imposed by the oppressive structures of deeply entrenched racism and a once-authoritarian state. Hatoum calls on us to search through our seemingly innocent homes for the collective nightmares that haunt us.
The Brothers is not the newest or most widely known book on my shelves, but there is a need for the public to return to this novel, even as it passed us by over the years. Brazilian President Michel Temer’s questionable rise to power, and the major policy shifts his administration continues to enact without public mandate, make it all the more important to recognize that Brazil has neglected to confront its authoritarian past. After a smooth transition from dictatorship to democracy in 1985, not a single member from the military regime has faced trial for human rights violations and, though former clandestine detention and torture centers dot the country, few are officially identified as locations of dictatorial violence. With such little collective memory, history threatens to repeat itself.
Brazil is certainly not alone in its need to deal with its history of slavery and state violence. Gledson’s English translation of The Brothers presents global readers with a unique opportunity to erode the nation-state borders that circumscribe our memories. As old ghosts haunt us, we can revisit this book, take it out of its box or its bookshelf, and remember the ways we forget.
Lara Norgaard is a graduate of Princeton University in Comparative Literature with a focus on Latin America. She teaches English and researches public memory in Brazilian literature as a 2017-2018 Fulbright Scholar in Brazil.
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