Paula Beiguelman died yesterday, June 5, leaving us with a deep sense of loss and a wealth of memories. A professor emerita at USP, forced into retirement by the dictatorship, she was my aunt and, together with my mother, Sylvia, was responsible for my sentimental education. She gave me my first record, Gilberto Gil’s “Aquele Abraço”, and my first two books, Cecilia Meireles’s “Ou Isto, Ou Aquilo” and “Televisão da Bicharada”, with brilliant graphic design and illustrations by Fernando Lemos.
It was with her that I learned to recite Romantic poetry in improvised literary gatherings, to the rhythm of “Oh, how I long / For the dawn of my life / For my dear childhood / Which the years will never bring back,” later shaken up by Oswald de Andrade’s verses, “My land has Palmares,” which she also introduced to me and taught me to read. All this while I marveled at the cadence and beauty of a line like “Take care of me, Maria Antonieta d’Alkmin” [Cântico dos Cânticos para Flauta e Violão, 1945]. Every Saturday she took me to Pró-Arte, and afterward we ate turkey-and-raisin sandwiches at Sanduba, where the Anglo school on Rua Sergipe is now (I assume). We read Eric Hobsbawm together until the end of her life. If she gave me my first book, I gave her her last… I had had a crazy week, traveling endlessly between Yucatán, São Paulo, and Recife. I asked her to wait for me. I landed on Thursday. Friday, at seven in the morning, she was gone. That embrace…
Paula Beiguelman (1926 – 2009)
(by José de Souza Martins)
Professor Paula Beiguelman, professor emerita of the University of São Paulo’s Faculty of Philosophy, Languages and Literature, and Human Sciences, where she graduated in Social Sciences, died and was buried on June 5. In 1969, Paula was included on the list of professors stripped of their posts and compulsorily retired by the military dictatorship, with salaries proportional to their years of service, and consequently barred from teaching at Brazilian public universities. That list included Professors Florestan Fernandes, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Octavio Ianni, José Arthur Gianotti, Bento Prado, Emília Viotti da Costa, and Ada Natal Rodrigues. She would return to the Faculty after the declaration of political amnesty, only to retire permanently shortly afterward, disillusioned with the school she found, so different from the one of her day and mine.
Heloisa and I were students of Paula, as we all called her, at the old Faculty on Rua Maria Antônia. We stayed in touch throughout the years after her dismissal; she remained steadfast in her nationalist concerns, the subject of several newspaper articles she wrote during that period. This had been, and remained, the focus of her political activism, particularly alongside veteran campaigners from “O Petróleo é nosso” (The Oil Is Ours), which led to Getúlio Vargas’s creation of Petrobras.
She was an assistant to Professor Lourival Gomes Machado, whom she succeeded in the Chair of Political Science when he became a director at UNESCO. Her doctoral thesis addressed Teoria e Ação no Pensamento Abolicionista. She earned two livre-docência qualifications in Political Science, with the thesis Contribuição à Teoria da Organização Política Brasileira and, later, with a thesis on A Formação do Povo no Complexo Cafeeiro: aspectos políticos. She published the following books: Formação Política do Brasil (2 volumes), A Formação do Povo no Complexo Cafeeiro, O Pingo de Azeite: a instauração da ditadura, Companheiros de São Paulo: ontem e hoje; Pequenos Estudos de Ciência Política.
Paula belonged to a generation of women who became USP’s first female lecturers, under conditions that were not always easy because they were hostile to women’s intellectual work. She experienced a great disappointment when she proposed Celso Furtado as an examiner for one of her theses. Furtado was read voraciously by social-science scholars and students in the 1960s for his coherent interpretation of Brazilian history, particularly in the vibrant intellectual atmosphere of Rua Maria Antônia. Furtado accepted the invitation and, at the public thesis defense, announced that he had not read it. He asked Paula to give him an oral summary so that he could pose some questions. In truth, in that gesture and at that moment, Furtado failed to live up to either the candidate or the institution welcoming him into what, for all of us, was the Faculty’s most solemn ceremonial hall, and honoring him with its invitation.
Paula was an outstanding researcher. She had an erudite knowledge of Brazilian history, often acquired through direct reading of documents. She developed a rich method of her own for reconstructing and explaining political history and understanding the political process. I learned a great deal from her and from her method of understanding the present within an unfolding history. Her classes were treasures of fruitful, grounded, and documented intellectual craftsmanship: the work of a meticulous researcher who reconstructed events down to the very essence of their smallest details, discovering in them the meaningful connections that linked them to the broader dimensions of social and political history—a history at once alive and significant.