Brazil’s Crisis of Memory: Embracing Myths and Forgetting History

Abstract

In the late evening of Sunday, September 2, 2018, shortly after closing time, a fire broke out in Brazil’s National Museum. In little more than an hour the blaze had completely engulfed the building, gutting its many galleries and storage areas holding priceless scientific and historical artifacts. Though firefighters valiantly attempted to squelch the conflagration, their job was impeded by the fact that the two closest hydrants were inoperative and water had to be pumped from a nearby lake on the property. All hope was lost when its wooden roof, covered in red terra-cotta tiles, caved in, crushing any objects that might have withstood the heat and leaving only the outer shell of the building standing. Though miraculously there were no injuries reported, because the fire took place after closing hours, the depth of the catastrophe did not fully become visible until the dawn hours of the following day, when the remains of what once had been Latin America’s largest natural history museum and, for more than 60 years, the residence of Emperors Dom Pedro I and Pedro II lay in smoldering ruins. Gone were over 20 million irreplaceable specimens of Brazilian flora and fauna and taxidermic animals (many of them the sole examples of now extinct species) collected over two centuries; Egyptian mummies, Middle Eastern clay tablets, and Greco-Roman artifacts brought over from the Old World by the second monarch; Luzia, the oldest known human skeleton found in the Americas; thousands of books, documents, notebooks, illustrations, paintings, and letters; scientific equipment; and the revered building itself, with its frescoed walls and decorated ceilings, once the symbol of the Brazilian monarchy. Senator Marina Silva, the former environment minister, likened this disaster to a “lobotomy of the Brazilian memory.” The museum’s vice director stated sadly that the destruction of the museum was “an unbearable catastrophe. It is 200 years of this country’s heritage. It is 200 years of memory. It is 200 years of science. It is 200 years of culture, of education” (Horton, 2018) Though losses of this magnitude have occurred before (indeed, World War II was the most destructive period in human history for the erasure of collective memory), it is particularly ironic that, only three months before, the museum had, after many years of governmental neglect, received the federal funding it needed to equip the building with fire protection sprinklers. It is emblematic that when the museum celebrated its two hundredth anniversary in June, not