Translator: David DeRuwe
I was born in Bambuí,
a city of 23,000 inhabitants where I lived until I was 15.
There I built my strongest bonds and many of my beliefs.
I believed, for example,
in order to be successful, I needed to have a good name.
We can believe in anything,
but I didn’t have much faith in Marilda Silveira, not at all.
Sorry, Dad.
I fell in love with a young guy with the surname “Carraza.”
So I imagined: “Marilda Carraza. Now I’ll have a chance to be successful.”
It turned out our love wasn’t right,
so I’d looked for Carraza and found Silviera.
I came to peace with my name, and I never changed it.
But maybe it was then that I got in touch with the fact
that this wasn’t my only belief I would have to dialogue with.
It was in Bambuí that I heard many times:
“Run inside. The milk run is coming with people from the colony.”
“Be careful where you sit - it’s really dangerous.”
“You can catch this disease.”
In 1949, Law 610 regulated public policy for the fight against Hansen’s disease,
which authorized people with a Hansen’s disease diagnosis
to be taken to a place and to be compulsorily isolated -
a place called a leper’s colony.
This law also authorized that these people’s children be taken to orphanages.
We don’t have much information about these children of Hansen’s disease people,
but Bambuí was one of 40 cities where there was a colony,
a place that, up until now, we call “the colony.”
The most trustworthy information about the Hansen’s disease children
is from the Minister of Human Rights of the President of the Republic.
It’s from this information source
that we learned there were 40,000 babies born in the Hansen’s disease colonies.
Many of these children never saw their parents,
and of those who did, many never saw them again.
My mother always told about José’s case.
José first saw his mother leave, then his brother.
He said he prayed everyday to get sick too,
because he knew that only by getting sick would he be able to see his mother again.
He said that the happiest day of his life was the day he found out he was sick,
because that was the day they met again.
During almost all of my life, Hansen’s disease has had a cure,
and isolation was no longer mandatory, but I was still very afraid.
I was afraid of getting sick.
I was afraid of being separated from my mother.
I was afraid of everything, even that my ear or nose would fall off.
Believe me, we heard this, and it was no little thing.
The problem was I wasn’t only afraid of the disease; I was afraid of people.
I learned to be afraid of people.
I was afraid because I believed Hansen’s disease didn’t have a cure,
despite there had been a cure for more than 30 years.
I believed that those people who were there were bad people,
ready to spread the disease to me, only waiting for their first opportunity.
At the time,
if I wanted to reinforce my thoughts about life and Hansen’s disease,
all I had was what people told me,
the library at my school,
and the Barsa encyclopedia, which we had in my house.
It was very difficult to have access to knowledge,
and it wasn’t much better, even at university law school.
I remember going to the university library
to look at the latest issue of a jurisprudence magazine,
trying to find information on legal theory.
I thought, “My God in heaven, the day that this is easy to find,
we won’t need a judge, prosecutor, intern, lawyer, or anything else.”
Little did I know that the world would change so rapidly,
and we would have the answers here with one click.
It’s really hard not to ask myself if, in this world with so much knowledge,
my way of dealing with Hansen’s disease might have been different.
The point is we’re very good at finding answers,
but we’re not so good at asking questions.
When we ask questions,
are we prepared to find answers different than those we want?
I am a lawyer and a law professor.
I do research and guide master’s and doctoral students
on democracy, new technologies, and women’s participation in politics.
Generally, my students know what they want to research.
The problem is they come with a question, but they already have the answer.
I always ask: “If you already have the answer, why research this?”
Is this research just to be able to enlarge the justification?
This doesn’t make any sense.
Maybe what you have is a hypothesis - research and evaluate the alternatives.
Then see if your hypothesis coincides with the answer.”
Many times the results we get from research
aren’t the same as we hypothesized.
When Jonathan Haidt introduces us to his theory of moral foundations,
he describes the human mind as a machine for storytelling
not a machine for logic.
He says that we could have been born with a scientist in our heads,
one who looks for alternatives and tries to find answers without bias.
Or born with a judge in our heads, one who analyzes the fundamentals,
finds the best rationale, and presents it with a justification.
But the truth is we were born with a lawyer in our heads,
the one who is ready to put our hand on the shelf of justification,
the one who already has the answer and wants to find the rationale.
How to deal with this?
Each area finds its own strategy:
Science developed the scientific method.
Law has some tools and principles
like due process and the right to a fair trial.
But at times, we fail miserably,
and this happened with Hansen’s disease people.
We failed in our ability to dialogue.
And along came the law, which is a little more imposing.
In 1995, Law 9010 prohibited the use of the word “leper,”
and its variations in public documents.
The law resolved: “It is forbidden to use the word leper in public documents.”
This happens in countless areas of life.
It’s not much different with women and Blacks.
It wasn’t only the culture that put women and Blacks in an unequal position.
It was the Brazilian State.
Until 1962, women were considered relatively incapable.
To practice acts of civil life, they needed their husband’s authorization.
It was only with the 1962 Statute for Married Women
that women lost their status as relatively incapable.
Of course, this had an impact on our lives.
This resonates until today.
It’s not a surprise for anyone that women have an unequal position in politics.
We don’t need to go far to see this; we only need to look at the second round.
There were four candidates for president and vice president - four men.
There were 24 candidates in the second round - two women.
If we change this equation and analyse the race-color issue,
the result won’t be much different.
We had 50 candidates, considering the supplementary elections:
36 white,
11 brown,
two Indigenous,
one Black.
We segregate what is different,
and the lawyer who’s in our head
isn’t ready to turn into a scientist or a judge.
He is ready to go to the shelf of justification.
He is ready to go shopping for justifications as it’s done now.
This gets worse when we know things or think we know things.
Or when we study a lot about something.
Or when we have a lot of experience with a particular thing.
Who doesn’t know someone who says: “I have experience, I have common sense.”?
If good sense resolves the problem, the problem is resolved, right?
Everyone who has studied something a lot thinks what they know is sufficient -
there’s no need to dialogue any more.
But it turns out life sometimes gives us an encyclopedia from a new world.
Normally, we really don’t know everything.
I, for example, didn’t think I’d find anything new in the shower.
After all, I’ve taken a shower everyday for my whole life,
or almost every day, according to my mother.
It happened that life brought me an opposing point of view.
I was really sick, and I couldn’t take a shower on my own.
This job fell to my mother.
She’s the one who bathed me. Everyday was a struggle.
“Mom, scrub harder. Mom, don’t scrub so hard.”
You can’t imagine how itchy it feels
to have all the hair on your body growing at the same time.
I’ll never forget the first time I took a shower alone again -
the water falling on my head
and the liberating power of lifting my own arm and scrubbing my own head;
or picking up the sponge and rubbing it so hard it bleeds
in order to get rid of that infernal itch.
That day I had the opportunity to step in a place I’d never been before,
but more than that, into a place that wasn’t mine.
I had the opportunity to experience the feeling of an open heart.
That day I wrote on the mirror:
“You can take a shower by yourself. Be thankful,”
so as to never forget that sometimes I can take a shower alone,
and sometimes I can’t.
Sometimes I’m in the group of those who can,
and sometimes I’m in the group of those who can’t,
but above all, to not lose the ability
to understand the reasoning of the group I’m not in.
Making contact with the other side, with the divergence,
isn’t just an opportunity, it’s a right.
It is the right to learn to differ, to learn what we do not know.
Not contacting the other side doesn’t make it go away.
It will never go away.
It only makes me unaware.
It’s really important that we know how to dialogue with the other side.
This is a prerogative that we use in law, and we must bring this to everyday life.
The first lawsuit I ever filed was for my parents:
an indirect expropriation lawsuit.
I was so inexperienced. My poor parents! Guinea pigs.
When I took the initial petition to my mother and she read ...
“We won! It’s for sure we’ll win!”
Then she read the defense …
“We lost, we lost, we lost.”
When she read the reply, it rekindled some hope.
In the end, we won.
But this whole journey has taught me that the contradictory statement saves,
that it is more important to know how to ask questions than to give answers,
and that every victory is provisional.
Maybe this doesn’t solve the war problem or save the democratic state of law,
but it can bring some peace to our lives in the family’s WhatsApp group,
and who knows, it might distance us from beliefs like the Earth is flat,
a woman’s place is not in politics,
and we’ll only be successful if our name is Carraza.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)