EXTRACTS | Djamila Ribeiro takes a stand

To see my first book Where We Stand translated into English is a huge pleasure, after my years of working to transform the Brazilian publishing landscape.

Publishing is power, and in Brazil, as in the US, publishing is an industry in dire need of transformation. Amid racial reckonings across the Americas and beyond, it is crucial to name the relationship between the publishing industry and the exercise of cultural, political and social influence, and to explore the ways in which the dynamics of this relationship often align with racial and gender-based inequities.

But before telling the story of my mission to publish and promote black thinkers and writers in Brazil, I would like to share my own journey as a black intellectual and publisher, and describe what motivated me to seek to bring about change in this sphere of Brazilian cultural life.

I was born in 1980 in São Paulo, and spent most of my life in Santos, a coastal town in the state of São Paulo, where my father was born. I am the daughter of Joaquim José Ribeiro dos Santos, a longshoreman who worked at the Santos port, and Erani Benedita dos Santos, a homemaker who worked as a domestic cleaner until she married my dad. I'm the youngest of four, with two older brothers and an older sister.

My father was an activist in the black liberation movement, a union organiser, and one of the founders of the Communist Party in Santos. He read to us, gave us books, and insisted that we get good grades in school. From early on, he impressed on us the importance of race and class consciousness. He made us go to protests, participate in social movements and attend the theatre; he even enrolled us in chess lessons. I was reading fluently by age six, and at eight I won the Santos bronze medal in chess. Though we were working-class kids, we had access to a quality education — and to critical consciousness-raising — from the time we were small.

While our father encouraged us to study, our mother washed our uniforms, combed our hair, and above all taught us to walk with our heads held high. When I was eight, she initiated me into candomblé, a religious tradition of African origin, and she modelled the spirituality that would form the bedrock of my identity.

My father put us in an English school; he said education was the only way for us to transcend the obstacles imposed by racism, so he worked hard to make sure we had access to it, though he struggled to pay our school fees. I was the only black girl in my class for years.

When we returned to school after holidays, my classmates would talk excitedly about their trips to Disneyland or Europe. I spent my holidays at my grandmother’s house in the Brazilian interior or at a beach town near Santos. I learnt to live within this paradox: I studied at one of the best English schools, paid for by scrimping, but I came home alone on the bus; I played chess with white kids but had to tutor for extra money. I grew up doing this ginga, the back-and-forth dance of capoeira.

My parents had both died by the time I was 22: my mother in May 2001, and my father in November 2002. I suddenly found myself an orphan, forced to navigate life alongside my siblings. At the time, I was studying journalism at a private college in Santos and barely managing to make ends meet. A few years earlier, when I was 19, an acquaintance of my mother’s had hired me as a general services assistant, cleaning buildings and fetching coffee.

I often arrived at my university classes smelling of bleach. Even though I had a stronger resume than the young women working in the company’s administrative office, even though I knew English and was well spoken, I was offered only menial work. When I told them, my parents were incensed: my mother, who had been a domestic worker for years, did not want her daughter “scrubbing toilets for white people”. My father would not speak to me for months after I began working as a cleaner, saying he had “worked himself to death carrying sacks of sugar on his back” so I could have a better future. After my parents died, to honour their hopes, I decided to investigate other possibilities.

I had begun working in a black feminist organisation called the Black Womenʼs Cultural Centre, a place that proved vital to my political education. There, as I helped put together seminars and discussions about black Brazil, I gradually came to understand myself as a feminist. What was most significant, however, was access to the centre’s library, where I encountered the black women writers who changed my life. At 21, I read Toni Morrisonʼs The Bluest Eye for the first time, and a new world opened up to me. I was barely able to pay for college, but working at the organisation strengthened my self-esteem and sense of belonging.

This article is an edited extract from Where We Stand by Djamila Ribeiro, published by Yale University Press. Available at Exclusive Books