São Paulo – Professor Dr. Leonardo Tonus is a scholar, writer, and poet who, amid his studies in literature, found the migration issue a theme to which he would end up dedicating himself for many years, until today. For 20 years, he has been a professor at Sorbonne in Paris, studying and teaching Portuguese-speaking literary production, mainly Brazilian and of immigrants of different nationalities to Brazil — including the tremendous literary output of the Syrian-Lebanese community in Portuguese — and French literary production, including authors from Arab countries in North Africa. He bridges these migratory flows in his classes, lectures, books, and projects.
Born in São Paulo, Tonus lived until he was 21 years old in the neighboring city of São Bernardo do Campo. With an eclectic background, he began his studies in Music, Composition, and Conducting at the São Paulo State University (UNESP). He moved to France in 1988, where he studied French and German Studies, and since the end of his undergraduate course, he has been interested in territorial displacement and migration issues.
“As I studied Comparative Literature, I have always been focused on studying literature other than national one. And of course, being in France and having a solid presence of this literature, often of French or Arabic expression produced in the Maghreb (as the region of Arab countries in North Africa is known, which includes Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Mauritania, and Tunisia), since then I have always been a keen reader of this literature,” said Tonus in an interview with ANBA.
Later, he dedicated himself to Lusophone Studies, working with Brazilian Lusophone literature in the first place but also from other Portuguese-speaking countries. “I tried to make this connection of how Brazil, being this space of reception of several nations, nationalities, and cultures, also thought about its relationship with the Arab world, and that is where all my research on authors of Arab origin producing Brazilian literature comes from, how is the case of Milton Hatoum, Raduan Nassar, and Marcelo Maluf,” he said.
At the beginning of these twenty years of research, the Brazilian of Italian descent made a recap of everything that had already been produced around the issue of migration. “In the 19th century, this character appears in our literature, when the immigrant begins to be debated in the public space, and initially I tried to really make catalogs, surveys, in which way that is discussed, depending on each origin,” he said.
So Tonus created a list of authors of literature, both migrants and native peoples, because the first texts written by people from the migratory process in Brazil, according to him, only appeared around the 1950s. “The insertion of these immigrants in this social and economic fabric was necessary; there was also the need to learn the language of the host country and to establish a network of contacts so they could be published and read by people who were not from their own origins,” he explained.
The survey work first focused on how Brazilian authors portrayed immigrants in their books, and secondly, how writers from the migratory process began to emerge within the literary space, taking this step from their native language to the language of reception, in this case, the Portuguese.
“In the case of the Arabs, all this Mahjar literature is initially written in Arabic. It was produced in several newspapers that circulated mainly in São Paulo and were legitimized by associations but were very restricted within a foreign space the Brazilian public did not have access to. So I started a survey by origin; Italians, Japanese, Arabs, Chinese, Koreans, everything there was about each community,” said the researcher.
Throughout the research, Tonus read a lot about the migratory process and identified sparse studies about an author or a community, but none made a relationship between these different communities. “I think maybe that was something I brought into this discussion about the migration process. Often the represented image, the stereotyped image, does not necessarily refer only to a community but to the set of several communities. This says a lot about how we Brazilians behave in relation to foreigners,” he said.
According to Tonus, the first foreigners represented in Brazilian literature were mainly English and Portuguese. Then came the Japanese, Arabs, and Italians. “What I mean is the studies often delved into ethnicity and did not engage in this dialogue with other cultures to understand, for example, the reason for the stereotype. So what I bought in my research is a study often punctual concerning some cultures – the Arab culture represented in the Brazilian culture, the Japanese culture – but at the same time, I came to bring a dialogue of this representation process. There are often common elements that say a lot about who we are as Brazilians, about how we see these immigrants,” he continued.
He remembers finding an old political satire newspaper in São Paulo called Diario do Abax’o Piques. “To make the satire, the newspaper often used foreign characters, such as Arabs and Japanese, to discuss local politics. So, why is that? Then you see, in fact, the foreigner is always the element of the laughable. Still, it is the one that allows a distance for you to talk about yourself, to talk about Brazilian issues, and this has a long tradition in literature,” he explained.
Tonus emphasized that studying migratory flows by communities is interesting, but it is also essential to establish these dialogues and commonalities. “If we take the most contemporary literature, there are, for example, dialogues on issues of cultural heritage. What does [Marcelo] Maluf bring in A Imensidão Intima dos Carneiros [”The Intimate Immensity of the Sheep,’ in free translation]? It does not only bring the report of Arab migrants to Brazil, but an essential issue of our contemporaneity addressed in other texts, which is the traumatic legacy of a migratory process. In this sense, Maluf dialogues with other authors such as Adriana Lisboa, for example, who in other books talk about Brazilian emigrants in the United States, but who will also reflect on this issue of a traumatic transmission of the migratory process,” he said.
Since the outset of his studies, the researcher has tried to create a broader view of the migratory process to understand how Arab, Japanese, Italian, and other authors dialogue with each other to debate these issues, whether racism, stereotyped representation, the traumatic permanence of the immigration process in future generations, or even what he calls the “constitution of utopias.”
“There are several figures of the time to punctuate the book. There’s the clock, which runs through the whole story, a turtle, which symbolizes time, and the image of a comet that represents time, so the book makes a much more profound reflection about time. Which is the current time. That is the time of the democratic transition process and the construction of a new country, a civilizing project. It’s what he brings inside,” he explained.
Tonus mentions that other books published in that same period [of redemocratization] that deal with the immigration issue also reflect on the current time in Brazil. “[They portray] the end of a period of dictatorship, but above all a project for a new time for Brazil to come,” he said.
In his habilitation thesis, which he defended in 2016, Tonus established a dialogue between ‘Tale of a Certain Orient’ (1989), by Milton Hatoum; ‘A República dos sonhos’ [‘The Republic of dreams’] (1984), by Nélida Piñon, (about Galician immigration to Brazil); and a little-known book by a Brazilian author of Danish origin called Per Johns, ‘As Aves de Cassandra’ [‘The Birds of Cassandra’, in a free translation] (1990), and which also brings, from the perspective of Danish immigrants, this new projection of construction of a nation; Brazil.
“I don’t limit myself to just one community, but I see how expatriate communities within a historical period are talking to each other about contemporary issues, current issues. Of course, it has some specifics. In the case of Milton Hatoum, there is a whole cultural source of Arab culture there, which he brings even in this perspective of creating a consensus. In his book, there is a character of Maronite [Christian] origin and a Muslim character, which apparently causes a clash, but which, based on images of his journey, establish the vision of a consensus that would then be, in my interpretation, for the reconstruction of a country coming out of a dictatorial process,” said Tonus.
Tonus, who is not of Arab descent, sees Brazilians feel much closer to the Arab world than to other immigrant communities. “I don’t necessarily have a specific link with Arab culture, but it is clear working with immigration, the Arab world takes a leading role in my research. Furthermore, the Arab migratory flow to Brazil also stands out quantitatively in terms of literary production,” he dissected.
Arab world and academia
Leonardo Tonus teaches Civilization and Brazilian Literature at Sorbonne University, in the department of Lusophone Studies, for undergraduate and graduate students. Classes are in French and Portuguese. “The Arab world has been part of my academic and curricular structure for many years. In the Brazilian civilization course, there is a whole part related to migratory processes, so I bring up the issue of Arab migration to Brazil. Not only from the 19th century and the early 20th century, but also this more current immigration related to a tragic situation of the flows resulting from the war in Syria, and how Brazilian artists have rethought this issue of the flow and this humanitarian drama, the issue of refugees,” he said. He said, for many years, ‘Tale of a Certain Orient’ and ‘Dois Irmãos’ [‘Two Brothers’], by Milton Hatoum, were part of his university program.
Another link with the Arab world in his classes, according to the professor, is the presence of many students of Moroccan, Tunisian, and Egyptian origin in the course. “I find it interesting to try to establish this triangular link between these worlds, no longer the triangular linkage of slavery, but a link of cultural flows between countries. And it is curious because many students who come from the Moroccan universe say they feel close to Brazil. It seems we have the same concerns, same questions, and the literature has dealt with this a lot,” he said.
Texts by Tunisian philosopher Albert Memmi are also present in Tonus’ classes. “’The Colonizer and the Colonized’ are critical texts about the process of decolonization in the Maghreb, so I enjoy bringing them to the classroom because they allow you to think about the issue of colonization in the Arab world but also as spaces of colonization and how we have rethought this colonial issue within the structure. I think he is a fundamental thinker, so Brazilian students become aware of this researcher, and students from the Maghreb can establish this relationship,” he said.
Tonus has already visited three Arab countries, the United Arab Emirates, Tunisia, and Morocco. In 2017, he began the compilation of the Arabic anthology of Brazilian authors, which took him to Abu Dhabi, From the Land of Migration to the Homeland (Min al mahjar ila al watan), a collaboration with Revista Pessoa and the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism, UAE (Editora Kalima, 2019). The anthology project had the partnership of the Arab Brazilian Chamber of Commerce (ABCC). “This trip to the Arab world made me fall even more in love with this universe and try to establish these links between our cultures,” he said.
In addition to a vast academic curriculum, Leonardo Tonus has organized seven fiction books and anthologies, and written three fiction books, ‘Diários em mar aberto’ [‘Diaries in the open sea’] (Edições Folhas de Relva, 2021), ‘Inquietação em tempos de insônia’ [‘Inquiet in times of insomnia’] (Editora Nós, 2019), and ‘Agora vai ser assim’ [‘Now it will be like this’] (Editora Nós, 2018).
He intends to resume the Migra Project later this year or in 2023. The project was carried out during the pandemic on social media and brought together artists from different countries in online meetings. “It should come back in a hybrid format, with the increasingly strong presence of artists from the Arab world, from migratory processes or not, with the prospect of including the Maghreb, Morocco, Canada also on account of great authors I have met, such as Nora Attala, a Canadian of Egyptian origin, an excellent poet, and of course, for the next Migra Project there will certainly be the participation of authors from Saudi Arabia,” he said. The idea is to establish exchanges in meetings around themes not only of literature but of fine arts, gastronomy, politics, and social and humanitarian issues.
First contacts
In June, Tonus participated in two important Arabic literary events. The professor, author, and poet lectured at a conference at the International Book and Publishing Fair (SIEL) in Rabat, the capital city of Morocco, and was the first Brazilian at the Sidi Bou Saïd International Poetry Festival in Tunisia.
Participating as a guest of the Brazilian Embassy in the SIEL in Morocco, Tonus gave a lecture on relations between the Arab world and Brazil from a cultural point of view. He focused on encounters from the 19th century onwards, linked mainly to the Maghreb, telling first about Dom Pedro II‘s trip to Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and the territory where Sudan is currently located.
“He went not as an emperor, but as an individual, with his own patrimony, in this perspective of discovering the eastern world, involving a little in those orientalist journeys the great intellectuals made at the time, but perhaps with a differential, perhaps there was not on his behalf, that lofty look, which often colonizers have about these spaces,” he said.
Tonus said Dom Pedro II went to the Arab countries as a great curiosity, and this ended up opening doors, initially for the first contact between the East and Brazil and for the arrival of Lebanese migrants to Brazil. “And what I call the creation of an imaginary of Brazil as a host country for these populations from Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria who arrived there at the end of the 19th century and especially around 1913 and 1915, which is the great heyday of the economic and social crisis in the Lebanon region,” he said.
In a second moment, Tonus spoke about Brazilian painters and their orientalist vision. “Pedro Américo [de Figueiredo e Melo], who, while in Paris, ended up making a trip to the region of Tunisia and Morocco at the request of the French government, ended up reproducing in some paintings a little of this Orientalist vision of Delacroix, this aspect of the east as the source of a still protected civilization, which is a bit of that 19th-century orientalist dream of painters.
According to the scolar, this vision has to do with a great imaginary built around the East. “They are seen as exotic travel countries, often with the eroticization of the easter woman, the Arab woman, or as a space that preserves a culture not affected by civilization,” he said.
This can be seen in some paintings by Pedro Américo and Dario Villares Barbosa, a little-known Brazilian painter who traveled to Morocco in the early 20th century. “He is also an academic painter, but the themes he works on, such as the Moorish, the Moroccan, Tanger’s wife, bring this slightly exotic look,” he said.
Still on the visual arts subject, Tonus informed the Arab world is absent from the modernist movement. “There is a painting, for example, by Anita Malfatti, the only painting of hers that portrays the eastern world; in fact, it is a study, a copy, she makes of [Eugène] Delacroix, of the ‘Women of Algiers in their Apartment’ (Delacroix, 1834 – Malfatti, 1928). So this oriental world remains; it does not enter the era of our Brazilian modernism. But it is interesting to see there is a first rapprochement between the painters,” he contextualized.
He stated his concern in the lecture was to bring these first contacts, which may have taken the later paths for our cultural relationship between Brazil and the Arab world.
From the point of view of literature, according to Tonus, these paths were followed by the presence of scholars of Lebanese origin in Brazil. “The first is called Fawzi al-Maluf, and the other is Chafic Maluf, from the same family as Amin Maluf. They are Lebanese immigrant writers who arrived in Brazil, and around the beginning of the 1920s, they founded literary academies with people from the Middle East, trying to establish the recognition of what we call Mahjar literature, which is this Lebanese emigration literature as innovative literature, focused on the aesthetic concerns of modernism,” he said, comparing it to the movement of Khalil Gibran in the United States.
“So in this lecture, I tried to give a little bit of this perspective, how the first contacts were formed, and then reach out to Brazilian authors and how they have rethought this cultural heritage, presented Arab characters in their books, or reflected on this Arab presence originating from of the migratory process,” he said, mentioning the peddlers in the works of Jorge Amado to the literature focused on migration issues, with Raduan Nassar, Milton Hatoum, and Marcelo Maluf.
At the poetry festival in Tunisia, Tonus said the experience was completely different. “I lived poetically for four days, it was a fascinating experience,” he said. He pointed out that what he found most interesting was the participation of poets reading in public spaces for those who were there.
“Reading was done in both the original and foreign languages; a lot of poetry was read in Arabic without translation, and what’s interesting about poetry is that you don’t necessarily need to know the language to be hit by the force of poetry. Musicality in itself brings a sense of well-being. I think we need more and more and poetry has this strength, indeed,” he reckoned.
Saudi Arabia was the guest country at the event, and Tonus said he met several authors from the Arab country. “I was amazed by the poetry of Saudi Arabia, which I did not know. Translated into French, these texts bring literature I was totally unaware of. I found myself reading about the history of Saudi Arabia because I didn’t know anything about that place to enter that poetic universe. It makes you shift your viewpoint of reference completely. The poems brought pre-Islamic mythologies beyond the jinn and a pre-Islamic vision we practically don’t have access to unless you’re an expert on the Arab world. Still, an ordinary reader doesn’t,” he said.
Tonus said he is passionate about the Arab world. “My bond [with the Arab world] is a passion for a culture I don’t know about, an artistic production of great value not only in terms of ancestry but of this contemporaneity. Artistic production in the Arab world is very fertile, and literary production is very fertile […], so my relationship is one of passion, always from a critical perspective, as a researcher, trying to establish these possible relationships and not only being strictly bound to a cultural community,” he concluded.
Translated by Elúsio Brasileiro
