Me, Myself and My Book at Brazilian Festa

On Sunday the 28th of February, I will be attending the Brazilian Festa, a special event inside the Starlight Cinema, at North Sydney Oval, where I will be giving a brief insight of my book Meu Avô A’uwê (My Indigenous Grandfather).

The book is a report of my three visits to an Indian settlement in Mato Grosso (countryside of Brazil), where I had the opportunity to stay with the Xavante people, live with them and write about my experiences and their story.



If you don’t know anything about Meu Avô A’uwê, below is a small introduction written by the Brazilian writer Antonio Penteado Mendonça.

The chat will start at 5:45 pm, and I hope to see you there. Tickets on sale at Ozzy Study Brazil (with discount) and here (all activities included in the ticket price).



A different book

In a time when people and things are labeled according to famous brands not always the best, a book such as this one makes an enormous difference. Since the end of communism, a whole class of people, “the old militants”, became orphan of ideals, without knowing why to fight or what to do, in face of a world which, in practice, proved that everything they did was wrong.



The great way out was to protect the environment, therein included, to their bad luck, the native people, namely incapable and, therefore, constituting raw-material for everything foolish that is been done on their behalf.

Africans, American Indians, natives of Oceania, of the Pacific Islands, Eskimos, Latvians, people lost on the Himalayan hillsides, in the Asiatic forests, all of them were fit into a huge plastic bag and underwent pasteurization. They were equaled, distorted and painted according to such senseless standards as those in Hollywood films, in which the good girl, submitted to a cruel ritual, was thrown into the volcano to save her tribe and the island.



That is why My Indigenous Grandfather is so fascinating. It rescues the Xavante as they truly are. Without being pretentious, conceited or caricatural, the book truly portrays the discovery of another group of people by a white man, young and namely civilized, brought up in the great city.

Pablo Nacer tells us about the everyday life of the Indians, rescues their past and, moreover, transmits the great emotion he felt upon entering a new, rich and different universe, which took him in, amidst other values, all of them strikingly humane.