Thinking about Lula: the known unknown

Last month, Hilary wrote a thoughtful post about her grief at the death of Steve Jobs.  This post is sort of a response piece, in the sense that Hilary’s words were on my mind on the day I found out that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — hereafter, Lula — had been diagnosed with cancer of the larynx.  I’m not grieving for Lula and hope not to do so for a long time — his prognosis, it now seems, is excellent — but the news hit me hard and, like Hilary, I was surprised at my own reaction.  (The fact that precisely nobody else was surprised is neither here nor there.  I know I’m a soppy creature who once cried at the unseen demise of an imaginary dog in a comedy sketch,* but I still get to introspect, don’t I?  Is introspect even a word?  You know what I mean, anyway.)

I am, of course, going to keep this post Vulpes-appropriate.  That’s easy enough to do, because first of all I’m going to talk about the sources.  I am a historian, and it’s a tribute to (or perhaps an indictment of) my academic mentality that I was so baffled by my own upset; more than that, I was uncomfortable with it.  I felt I had no right to my own partisanship; after all, I never lived under his government, did I?  This might seem like an odd line of thought, given that I write about places that aren’t mine, people I’ll never meet and times I never experienced.  But that distance is one thing when working on an academic study, with archival access and a good range of primary and secondary literature; it can even be helpful, if used correctly.  When it comes to current events, though, how many of us really have the information to build an independent analysis, even if we have the time?  News reporting, however informative, is ultimately a story written for concision and ease of understanding; at best it can give a partial insight, although this is far better than none at all. (The breadth and depth of that insight can vary considerably, even within the same news outlet; something that comes home to me every time I click from bbc.co.uk’s Latin America page to the infinitely more informative BBC Mundo one.)  The only people who can tell you what it’s actually like to live in a given country, to be affected by a given set of policies, are the ones living there; and even they all disagree with each other, sometimes violently.  The rest of us can only read the stories, perhaps visit if we’re lucky, and try to figure it all out.

Like all figureheads, Lula has appeared in a number of stories over the years.  (For the sake of clarity and brevity, this very schematic outline refers to observers from outside of Latin America, not those who have supported or opposed him in the Brazilian context or the continent in general.)  Some commenters paint him as a Latin Tony Blair, a glib third-wayer propagating the Washington Consensus from a nominally socialist platform.  Then there are those for whom his friendly (if mutable) relationship with Cuba and Venezuela makes him a dangerous radical masquerading as a democratic reformist.  Both of these parties tend to agree that support for Lula is an affront to basic values; they just disagree on the values.  Some portray him as an acceptably “Westernised” figure, a “third world” leader doing things in a “first world” way; they often point to Brazil’s economic growth during his mandate as if that alone were indisputable evidence that Good is Being Done, which does reflect nicely on their own assumptions.  And then, of course, there’s the really insulting tendency: the tendency to treat the former head of the world’s seventh-largest economy as a sort of curiosity; a funny little man with sticky-out ears who thinks he’s a statesman.  (This kind of condescension is irritatingly common in the Anglophone media, and I wish it would stop.)

Mingled with all these stories is the evidence, such as we have it, of the impact of eight years of the Lula government: the impressive headway made in alleviating poverty in a country where the problems are more massive, in both scale and severity, than many of us can imagine; the revelations of corruption and the persistence of crime; Lula’s own extraordinary popularity and the criticisms of former allies.  (Please note: the links here are intended to be a representative sample, not authoritative evidence.)

Amongst all of this, where is the real Lula?  The answer is annoyingly predictable, I’m afraid: I don’t know.  I know only that “my” Lula, the one I sincerely hope not to be mourning in the near future, is a construct, put together over years of watching and reading, approving, despairing, ranting and raging, enthusing, thinking and questioning.  My opinion of him has changed considerably over the years, sometimes moving sharply from admiration to disappointment or back, whether in response to the evidence or the flux of my own evolving political outlook.  As ever, it took the shock of mortality to bring me sharply into contact with the bottom line: this public figure, this stranger from another context, has come to mean a great deal to me.  Whether I agree or disagree with what I can see of his actions, Lula has come to be an essential part of my political and cultural world. He has inspired me to new fields of enquiry. I may not know him, but I wish him well.

*  Seriously.  The Scotch and Wry sketch where Rikki Fulton is a driving instructor who’s terrified of his elderly lady student, and he says, “She killed a wee dug.  It ran up a close, but she got it!”  To be fair, I was really tired.

The photographs above were produced by Agência Brasil, a public Brazilian news agency. Their website states: “O conteúdo deste site é publicado sob a licença Creative Commons Atribuição 2.5 Brasil“ (The content of this website is published under the Creative Commons License Attribution 2.5 Brazil)

Advertisement