'Never-Ending Youth': Urariano Mota's Novel-Memoir of Resistance to Brazilian Fascism
JUNE 5, 2023
BY JOEL WENDLAND-LIU
The illusion of a constant present hides how most of our lives are experienced through memory. The physical imminence of the present—the sensation of concreteness, odors, sounds, vividness of sight, or tastes of the objectivity of the immediate now—continuously slips into memory. Still, memory may haunt the present, rendering it painful with an overwhelming sense of loss, despair of failure or falling short of goals, or perhaps with the emotions of nostalgia over missing loved ones, a favorite café, or homesickness for an old neighborhood that housed the milestones of youth. The struggle to withstand the perceived motion of time through the creation of a narrative that restores memories of human companions and yesterday’s vitality into the present is the subject of Urariano Mota’s semi-autobiographical novel, Never-Ending Youth.
Based on real people or composites of real people, Mota’s work offers snapshots of 1970s Brazil’s radical youth movement. It chronicles the students’ anti-fascist struggle in Recife, in the northeastern state of Pernambuco, during the dictatorship which, with U.S. backing, had overthrown the democratically elected government and came to be ruled by generals for two decades. As part of the story about these few years in the lives of a handful of young people, Mota’s novel also invokes a larger global context rooted in the European slave trade, colonialism, race and patriarchy. The book explores themes of male supremacy and racism and the significant changes in how people of the left understood these long enduring systems in their analysis of class struggle. Mota’s book restores the personalities, actions, and idiosyncrasies of the men and women who fought the repressive dictatorship.
They drew inspiration from ongoing anti-imperialist movements led by Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Zedong. The vibrant music, poetry, and fiction comprising Brazilian arts and culture served as a constant reference point for their emotions, ideas, and relation to their history and future. Manuel Bandeira, Jorge Amado, Waldick Soriano, Solano Trindade, Alfredo da Rocha Filho, Vinícius de Moraes, and Paulo Freire are the philosophers, activists, singers, and writers who shape the atmosphere, ideas, and words of this radical world. Beyond those boundaries, Don Quixote, the works of Marcel Proust and Gabriel García Márquez, the poetry of Goethe and Lorca, Marx’s dialectics, and Mao Zedong thought, even the vocal renderings of Ella Fitzgerald, inhabit the deliberations and debates of our heroes and heroines.
Indeed, Mota’s narrative constructs imaginative bridges to the historical past through cultural connections, the lived past through memories of political struggle, and the present and future. This philosophical sense of transcendent collectivity, of an identity with other humans and strugglers for liberation, with the creators of life, ideas, and the world itself, rises over the present of the alienated individual under repressive capitalism. The death and funeral of his close friend Luiz do Carmo, whom the narrator-protagonist describes as “my Sancho Panza,” motivates the writing of the book. He attempts to reconstruct a narrative of the memories of his youth, his friends, close comrades, and fellow travelers.
More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/06/05/never-ending-youth-urariano-motas-novel-memoir-of-resistance-to-brazilian-fascism/