Elisa Lucinda: Marielle tree, present!

On the night of March 14th, I was in the hall of the theater hotel, I had gone up to leave my things from the dressing room in the room and was going with the gang to dinner in Minas Gerais. Director Sérgio Maggio’s eyes looked like two saucers, and they came towards me with the gun-like phrase: “They killed Marielle in Rio de Janeiro!” What?! And he repeated the pump, dumbfounded.

My soul, hit unexpectedly, bent my body over the chair and everything sobbed in despair. Suddenly everything went dark, everything was confirmed. What times are we living in? What will happen? Do we have a president full of accusations against him, without representation, and who is still talking about running for office in this now-destroyed country? I was floored. This parliamentarian had dreamed. By the way, all of us, with the fights for the rights to citizenship, built a girl like Marielle: Black, intellectual, from the favela, mother and lesbian. A parliamentarian who, in one lifetime, represents thousands of voices at the same time.

When we met, it was as if we recognized each other: the colors, the necklaces, our turbans, the cultural identity of this immensity that is the ancient African culture, so unknown to the dominant Brazilian minority. We had a very beautiful conversation the last time we saw each other. As I wept inconsolably on my knees, fragments of that conversation intruded on my tears. We commented on how difficult it was for each one of us to free ourselves from being able to mix prints, to combine them in the fashion of various African countries, and we observed how the oppression of Eurocentric aesthetics imposed on everyone the notion that associates such mixtures with bad taste. I remember telling her about going through a bizarre situation in a movie I made. At the time, I suggested that my character, who was an elegant and sophisticated woman, wear turbans. To which the costume designer immediately responded by asking: “But do you want to use a turban as an afro thing or a chic thing?”.

I remember that Marielle commented on this, when listening to my story, noting how we have racism structurally rooted in the basis of our subjectivity and our symbolic field dictated by Casa Grande. Splashes of my thoughts remembering the conversations with that warrior hit the ground of reason, and I asked, still incredulous: Why did they kill the good? Who does good bother? She was innocent. There was struggle on all sides of Marielle’s life, have you noticed? She was the only black councilwoman and certainly her “race” was full of obstacles that the white councilor’s “race” does not have. She was from the favela of Maré and fought for more Marielles to exist in Brazilian civilizing life. Mother of a girl she had when she was young, aged 19, and a lesbian in a society that still condemns and even kills (these are called lesbocides) women for loving women. A life without rest, a struggle, not for her to get there, but an opening of spaces for many others to occupy. Colonel Robson Rodrigues made a moving statement: “Marielle was interested in these causes, which, unfortunately, still do not touch our institutional sensitivity. With her flags she defended our police officers much more than we were able to understand her and do it”.

I suffered. But when I looked up the other day, I saw that, less than 24 hours after his cold execution, the world was talking about nothing else! It was a phenomenon on Twitter, breaking all records for any political topic in recent times. Gradually I understood that it clearly seemed like the awakening of a crowd that that death had provoked, because the murdered woman was not just one as it might seem. And her mandate was not restricted to the territory of Rio de Janeiro, she was no longer a “little councilwoman” as some might think. No, her name was Marielle Franco, the watershed!

In a way, she was the head of a tribe much larger than her constituents, and when she was reached, she was immediately transmuted into much more than she represented, she multiplied more than her tormentors could have imagined. She’s had more media than she’s had in her life. I have the honor of having interviewed her on the program “Cidade Partida”, on Canal Brasil, and I regret that we have so few interviews with her in the mainstream media. In spite of that, like a miracle, a spell, Marielle became an entire tribe, and from one day to the next, Brazil took to the streets, Brazil became numb. While they killed the anonymous black man and the child with no last name from the favela, we continued life in our armored cars, our security bought at a price in gold. But now, the victim was a sociologist, also trained in public administration, a child of PUC, she was a thinker, a dreamer, who persisted in hope, even though treading an extremely adverse path. Because every time a black occupies a prominent and recognized place in a society of white and classist domination, he experiences the look of those who believe they are the owners of privileged spaces in the world. A mute look that scornfully asks: “What are you doing here if you don’t belong here?”

Marielle’s death set the Brazilian people on fire, outraged all the humanist leagues in the world, exposed all good people, clearly announced that the innocent are not protected and asks which side are you on? Its seeds are scattered in the words I say here and in what its constituents witnessed: the clarity and transparency, the honesty and competence with which it exercised part of its first mandate. An honor for the new policy of this country.

Four shots took the life of the Brazilian flag of dignity. Three more shots killed worker Anderson Gomes who was driving her. From now on, every time a person is racist, lesbophobic, corrupt, stealing school lunches, misogynistic, in favor of the gun policy and traitor to the popular vote, he will be killing Marielle again. The “Marielle tribunal” was installed, as the filmmaker Juliano Gomes so rightly said, in which ethics prevails over brute force and the seeds of the great tree reproduced and will reproduce, in an immense army of warriors and tireless warriors in the craft of realize the dreams of this big tree. Martin Luther King had a dream. We are all Marielle’s dreams now.

Elisa Lucinda, fall, 2018.

*Elisa Lucinda is a writer, poet, singer and actress. She is on tour with the play “O Musical”