I am so happy you're joining me today...
I just came back from one of
my many visits to Brazil, where I was born...
where I lived... before I came here,
the United States of America, in 1987.
I am exhausted from traveling, carrying heavy suitcases...
But this trip was incredible!
It included four days of Carnaval!
Four days of Carnaval! It was sunny!
It was summer!
Carnaval is my favorite holiday!
People, all over, playing
wonderful music, dancing,
wearing stunning costumes like
the beautiful woman I saw
yesterday on my way to the airport.
Every year, for four days,
everything stops in Brazil, and people embrace beauty,
desire, fantasy, and hope for better days to come.
Carnaval is a “welcome” to all,
it stretches social boundaries
that outside Carnaval would be a real drag!
Yesterday was the last day of carnival.
I thought about the Christ the Redeemer in
Rio de Janeiro, His welcoming arms inviting us to stop,
pray, listen...
Today, Ash Wednesday;
we look upon the Christ and from the ashes
we’ll bear his cross,
a reminder of our mortality.
Lent starts today: forty days of fasting and abstinence.
But fasting is hard for me to do!
When I'm in Brazil,
I eat way too much - pounds of candies,
I gained 10 pounds in
my belly and come back home and looking pregnant.
Do I look pregnant to you?
I hope you like the ribbon I got for you...
did you make a wish?
Since I was a child,
I’ve wanted to tell the story of my sister Marília.
How did she die?
What happened to my family after she died?
What happened to my mother after the funeral?
What happened to me?
In Brazil, I visited her in the cemetery …
Now I wish to share with you what I found,
my memories, my baggage…
I'm so angry
no one was there to save Marília
that bus. Where were my mother, my sisters, everybody?
I was 10 months old when Marília died.
She wasn't even three years old.
t’s strange, as an adult, to think of
my elder baby sister who died on the last day of carnaval,
the day we call Fat Tuesday
in the United States.
Yesterday was the anniversary of her death.
My mother tells me that the day Marília died,
Marília took my mother’s lipstick and
she smeared it all over herself;
she did the same to me and to our little pet rabbit!
With Marília’s encouragement,
I kept pulling the rabbit by the ear
over and over until it made funny faces.
Very worried,
MaríIia rushes to tell
my mother, “Mommy,
mommy, o Rogerinho ’tá matando seu gatinho.”
Little Rogério is killing your little cat!
I don't remember any of it;
I wasn't even one year old.
My mother told me that, later that day, MaríIia died;
she was in a fatal accident involving
the local bus that is stopped
right outside the apartment building
where we lived. I often asked
my mother to tell me what happened
but she would yell me that that was all I needed to know;
that and that Marília
looked like an angel in her casket.
I grew up conjuring up all sorts of images
about an angel in a white box inside the earth.
I was curious to know how
the long wings could fit inside the little box.
But I knew not to ask.
Even today, I still hold those images in my head,
faint recollections of stories I heard about my sister,
a never-ending puzzle,
further complicated by my immigration
to the United States.
As an immigrant, all my possessions were some clothes,
a few letters, some photographs and a rosary.
Sometimes I feel I can pack
my entire life in a tiny little box,
maybe a little bigger like the one
you’re carrying now.
Yes.
Would you like to try?
I have placed small objects in three of the stations,
Station #2 where I am, Station #12
and Station #22.
When you get to there or if you are already there,
please collect small objects
that conjure up your own images….
Perhaps someone you miss?
You may wish to write a note to that person?
Perhaps a note to yourself?
Yes.
At the end, you can keep you box for yourself
or you can leave it with me at
the last station of the exhibit.
This way your box
becomes a part of the Realm of the Dead.
In a few moments I'm going to ask
you with the help of the ushers
to unveil the sculptures I created to convey my life
and the grief I felt for the loss of my sister.
When you hear this bell,
it is time for you to move from the station where you are
to the next station into the next and the next...
along the way, I will tell you the story of my life…
and together, we will assemble and
complete this puzzle.
You can begin to open your boxes.
There is one more thing
I know. Early the day Marília died,
my mother asked the
two of my older sisters to watch
me and Marilia while she went downtown to run some errands.
Before she left,
she told Marília, she promised Marília that she would bring
cookies when she came back.
Later on, when the bus
stopped in front of our building,
Marília saw my mother and
she ran in front of the bus.
Like many poor children,
Marília died because
a few cookies made a big difference.
After that wake,
my father cut a loaf of bread,
one slice for himself,
one for my mother,
and one for each of us children.
The slices were bigger
now that Marília was dead.
My mother mourned Marília in 1966
and then my father in 1973.
She didn’t remarry because she didn’t
want any other man raising her kids
She worked all day in a grammar school,
cooking for the kids and
cleaning, two hours away from home.
And then she came back home to clean
and cook for us, her own kids.
My mother was like a bull to me: big; beautiful;
grounded; loyal; and tender. In retirement,
she painted a picture of a bull for me.
I think of it as her self-portrait.
Marília was the youngest of my five sisters.
I also have two brothers,
I’m the youngest of them all,
I am the baby!
By the age of 3,
I sounded like Marília,
I smelled like her, too.
They even dressed me up in Marília’s clothes.
It was really hard to tell us apart.
My mother was embarrassed
that her boy was so much like a girl,
and ashamed for wanting
me to replace her dead daughter.
Throughout my childhood, my mother
asked a few doctors,
“Why is he so much like his sisters?
Why are his friends
all girls?
Why is he feisty and yet so sensitive?
Is he normal, my son?”
Growing up
the same boys who mocked me
also chased me around
and treated me like a girl. In public,
they taunted me; in private,
they seduced me into doing things for them.
was particularly confused and scared
when adult men asked me,
“Are you a boy or a girl?”
I had so many questions about how my dead
sister figured in my gender identity.
With the exception of Marília,
every year, in May,
all my sisters participated in the Catholic pageant,
the coronation of the Virgin Mary.
Only girls were allowed...
From the church floor,
I watched the angels flowing in church and singing.
Mês de maio…mês d’alegria.
Cantemos
louvores a virgem Maria.
After the pageants, the angels
received little bags filled with candies,
but according to the authorities,
I wasn’t a “real” girl,
so all I could do was dream of lollipops,
chocolate, jelly beans...
all the candy we would never have –
I wasn’t a “real” girl”
and Marília, Marília was dead!
Even today, more than 50 years later,
I still ask myself,
“Did she see the tires before she closed her eyes?
Did she feel the weight of that bus?
Did she feel any pain?
Does anyone know?”
The brain controls everything we do, everything we feel...
brain cells allow us to feel love, pleasure, and pain…
Those miraculous cells are the caretakers and
the wardens of all our feelings and memories.
I often wonder … How would Marilla look today?
What type of hair would she have?
As a child I
looked at her photograph on her grave.
I felt that my boy’s body
looked just like hers;
I even felt her inside me, as
though we were one and the same…
I suffered not from multiple personality disorder;
I simply longed for her, so desperately.
Before my mother passed away,
in one of my many visits to Brazil,
we talked about how I felt when
I first came into the United States in 1987,
long before I moved to Ann Arbor.
I explained to her how I still
hated the memory and the fierce
loneliness I felt as
a recently arrived immigrant
in a big city like New York...
I don't know how,
but I ended up revealing to her
how I had imagined Marília all these years all these years –
an angel, cold and lonely,
deep in the earth.
My mother listened
and then she showed me a letter she had received
from the public cemetery where Marília had been buried.
The letter my mother received explained
to us that heavy rains had
destroyed all the graves in
the children's section of
the cemetery where Marilia was buried.
They told us that we had to
move her remains to a safer place.
So, my mother and I went to
the cemetery to to unbury her.
There, the gravedigger swung his pick;
the pick hit the ground;
the ground opened. There,
we were, inside the Brazilian earth.
The pick pierced the ground over and over;
those first few moments felt like
an eternity waiting to see my sister.
Suddenly, from down below,
I heard the sound of metal against
metal. The pick hit the handle of her coffin.
I looked at my mother;
she looked back
“Is this the handle of her coffin?”
I heard not a sound from her.
Dirt piled all around us.
I began to dig using my bare hands,
looking for anything I could find.
Deep in the pile,
I found pieces of fabric.
Could this be from the lining of her coffin?
My mother nodded,
"Yes."
I kept searching … Deeper in the pile,
I found her little sock, and deeper still
I found what appeared to be bones.
“Look Lora, these must be
her bones; Marília’s little bones…”
And then … as if by a miracle,
I found a lock of her hair…
and then another. Oh my God! My baby sister’s hair,
so pretty,
so soft, good hair!
Lora,
there is nothing here.
No flesh!
There is no more Marília. Oh Lora,
I'm so sorry,
my love.
Witnessing my mother’s dismay,
I asked the gravedigger,
“where is my sister”?
By the time I was a teenager,
I already believed that is straight hair was
good and curly hair was bad.
And mine was bad!
I felt doomed! So,
I made my hair straight!
I was so happy...
but my mother was furious,
“Você ficou parecendo uma puta!”
My long straight hair,
made me look like a whore,
my mother said!
So often, I felt like one,
from the moment my father first touched me.
As a child, I thought that what made a girl
a girl was having a pussy, like all my sister's had.
If I had a pussy,
I’d be just like Marília,
Right?
But though I didn't have a pussy,
I knew I was a girl.
Did my father know?
The way he looked at me…
showed special interest in me…
he touched me, intimately …
he was a man;
so, I must be a girl.
I was seven when my father died.
If I had been a "real" girl,
would he have stayed?
Could I have made him happy?
Could my sisters have made him happy?
He touched me,
he touched my sisters,
he molested all of us.
We all avoid thinking that my mother might’ve
known what my father was doing. Yet
she did nothing…
Under the Brazilian dictatorship of 1964 to 1985,
lack of privacy was commonplace.
he police often raided our building where we lived
for no apparent reason.
I was terrified of them.
Ten of us lived in
a small two-bedroom apartment in
the housing project … with the little pet rabbit.
I shared a bed with two of my sisters.
When my father died,
I slept in the same bed with my mother,
to be close by, in case she died.
Dorme nenê … mamãe tem o que fazer …
tem roupa pra lavar e costura pra cozer…”
In the 1980's, when I was in college,
there was no LGBT liberation in Brazil.
Not yet. No possibility of
a “gender non-conforming identity”
such as the one I carry toady…
I so wanted to get out of
Brazil… Being gender non-conforming,
I feared I’d be killed by bigots or the military police.
Voices I still hear today, echoed inside my head:
Bichinha! Mulherzinha!
Veado! Sissy!
Little girl! Faggot! …
these voices were meant to drown me.
I came to New York City in 1987
after I received my degree in biological sciences.
There
I wanted to be a hairdresser.
But I didn’t speak English,
I didn’t have a cosmetology license,
and, for nearly a decade,
I was an illegal alien! A threat
to the United States of America!
So, I take different jobs,
I took many different jobs:
As a dishwasher,
I worked eight hours a day,
seven days per week, for
$200.
Delivering pizza, believe it or not,
I fell off my bike in the busy streets of
Manhattan in the middle of a rainstorm.
Working in construction,
surprisingly, I did well
painting, patching things, doing “butch stuff;”
but one of the construction workers
attacked me, he called me
faggot,” and smeared patching compound all over my face
my eyes I couldn’t see a thing.
I didn't complain...
poor immigrants die at the border, shot,
of heatstroke, suffocated in shipping containers…
Knowing all that, we take all sorts of
just to keep any job we can get.
I feel old
and fat! Growing up I was skinny!
Many times a day,
I opened the refrigerator hoping to find food…
I found nothing.
I dreamed of finding candies,
delicious candies …lots of candies!
Now that I can buy all the candy I want;
I worry about my weight.
Do I look fat?
Does it even matter … knowing
where we all will end up?
Coming back from Brazil yesterday,
I could still hear
the faint carnaval music
coming from the streets of Rio de Janeiro.
At the airport, they weighed my suitcases.
I weighed my emotional baggage…
all the things my mother and sisters gave me over
the years —time, love, encouragement.
I felt the weight of pink lipstick,
hair products, mirrors reflecting our faces …
Without my mother and all my sisters,
I would not be here today. I am at once
each and all of them.
Before I flew out of Brazil,
my sister Millie gave me this rosary.
This morning as the plane was landing,
images of Marília took over
my mind... Holding my rosary,
I contemplated the miracle of Jesus’ Resurrection,
, his welcoming my sister to life everlasting …
the Holy Spirit descending upon Marília.
My sister’s Ascension to heaven.
I felt the ribbon around my wrist…
so many wishes fulfilled,
so many yet to come...
Marília’s epitaph said: “Fui para Deus
e voltarei na memória de meus
meus pais e meus irmãos.”
I went to God, and I’ll be
back in the memory of my parents and siblings.
I've waited for her all this time
even though she's been here all along...
my dead sister lives on inside me.
Have you seen her? I cling to her;
she clings back.
Can you see her?
She clings to me,
I cling back.
My Sweet Sister Marília
Where did you go?
Leaving me here,
So lonely a boy
Without you
I went to school
Learned about the earth
The turns it takes
There you disappeared
You left me here without direction To follow you;
how? Where are you? Have you left?
I never let you Held you closely
Made my chest cry
My most darling
How we will forever miss you
But you stay no longer
I’m letting you go
You deserve to rest
Sweet sister, Marília
Marília, go,
go to heaven On earth
no more