The Brazilian Exile Experience

Abstract

The story of the Brazilian exile experience (1964—1979) from the perspective of the exiles themselves highlights the loss of roots and references and the discovery of new possibilities. The quotidian side of exile involved doubt, certainty, distress, emptiness, fear, insanity, death, difficulty with documents, work, study, reconstruction of pathways—in short, a redefinition of identity imposed by day-to-day life. At the same time that the exile experience meant the removal and elimination of the “generations” of 1964 and 1968, it also meant their survival: it was the locus of free thought, critical inquiry, learning, and enrichment, the locus of resistance and transformation, the negation of negation.