excerpt
If it weren’t for the war, I wouldn’t have left my country. I’m not saying the name of the country on purpose. What matters isn’t being from one country or another but the fact you were forced to leave the place you live, then make the long journey, run the risk of not surviving.
I had to make a drastic decision … leave or die. Before I left, I couldn’t imagine what the open sea might be like, or the fear of being devoured by the water or even being murdered on the ship. Get out…this is my spot. Get out or I’ll toss you over. It was the law of the jungle on the ship and in the country where I arrived. Go back to where you came from. As if a man were forced to live where he was born. This land is ours. The sea is yours. Savagery…without the right to asylum, there is no civilization.
synopsis
Baal is a family story. The main character is Omar, the patriarch, who narrates the saga of an always contemporary topic: immigration.
In the late nineteenth century, Omar is forced to abandon his country when his best friend is captured by a militia and taken to serve in the enemy army. Brokenhearted, Omar flees his village in the Middle East, vowing to come back for his family and fiancée one day.
He crosses the ocean to the tropics and begins his life as a peddler, like so many of his compatriots who have immigrated to the New World. Thanks to his physical strength and intelligence, he surmounts myriad obstacles to become a prosperous wholesaler. He builds a palace for his only daughter, Aixa, and her family; the building, named Baal, is “an Eastern jewel in the West.”
When the patriarch dies, it is not to rest in peace. His family is constantly fighting, and from the afterlife he sees how the conflicts he knew in his birthplace find echo in his adopted homeland. His grandchildren fritter his wealth away. Corrupted by money and fearing bankruptcy, they decide to tear Baal down and sell the cleared lot, hoping to maximize their profit. They move their elderly mother out of the only home she has ever known and place her, her longtime servant, and her dog into what is nothing more than a cubicle.
Enraged by his grandchildren’s behavior, Omar accuses them of not appreciating how long and hard he fought so they would be born into wealth. He believes their ruthlessness is somehow linked to shame over their origins. He says they are not only xenophobes; they have lost their memories, “sinking into the darkness of oblivion.” His way of countering this is to remember history.
This act of remembering, however, demands that Omar recognize his mistakes. He had never made it a point to pass on the lessons he learned from immigrating. Because of his bias against women, he hadn’t taught his daughter how to carry on his legacy. He had used her to make his small tropical empire of Baal an exciting place, instead of ensuring that the palace would go on after his death, becoming what it was meant to be: a memorial to immigration.
Baal brings the drama of uprooted lives into sharp focus and shows us that memory is a prerequisite for peace.
history
Baal, the twenty-sixth book by the writer and psychoanalyst Betty Milan, is a novel about immigration. The prelaunch was held on June 8, 2019, in Beirut, where the author, who has now written two books inspired by the Lebanese diaspora, was honored by the country’s Minister of Foreign Relations (photo) “for her contribution to her ancestors’ homeland.”
Baal was officially launched on June 18, 2019, at the Livraria da Vila bookstore in São Paulo (photos). The opening talk was by the literary critic Manuel da Costa Pinto, who said the book belongs to two traditions: novels written by descendants of immigrants and stories told by a deceased narrator, as in Machado de Assis’s The Posthumous Memoires of Bras Cubas.
A launch party was also held in Rio de Janeiro, at Livraria Travessa bookstore (photos). The evening opened with talks by the writer Deonísio da Silva and the psychoanalyst Marco Antonio Coutinho, who underscored the value of the author’s historical and cultural research and of her concision, which reflects Lacan’s notion of “full words” (parole pleine).
Both events in Brazil were filmed and can be viewed on YouTube (São Paulo | Rio de Janeiro). Folha de S. Paulo featured an article by Naief Haddad (article), while reporter Bete Pacheco interviewed the author for her regular spot on GloboNews (video). Articles by the writers Claudio Willer and Deonísio da Silva appeared in Estado de S. Paulo and Globo, respectively. Other articles were published in a number of states around Brazil.
opinion
In Baal, the author has blended the intimist tone of her great earlier novels with the chronicling of Brazilian life, while she introduces a new ethnic group whose culture has enriched Brazil.
Deonísio da Silva
Baal is part of a narrower, and somewhat peculiar, tradition: stories recounted by a dead narrator. In a way, Betty Milan “creates” this tradition by casting a retrospective light on the threads shared by her illustrious predecessors – first, of course, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, by Machado de Assis, but also O pirotécnico Zacarias (Zacarias, the pyrotechnist), by Murilo Rubião.
Manuel da Costa Pinto
areas of interest
Literature and psychoanalysis.
critical reaction
Baal, the savagery of memory destruction
Manuel da Costa Pinto