This is the text read by António Cabrita in presentation, in Portimão, of the magazine Zeus:
I wasn't supposed to be here; the normal thing would be to find myself in Mozambique. But I have a wife who is more lucid than I am and who didn't take half measures, and on the third day of the protests she sent me a plane ticket and ordered, without asking me, "Come on tomorrow's flight." And since I obey fate and affection, I came. But I'm sad, and I'm very apprehensive about my friends, my students, my books and my cats, because unfortunately I think the embers could reach the city and reach the savannah.
And as I'm bordering on depression and not very talkative, I didn't really know what to say or how to say it at this moment, with my head tilted towards the dark side of the moon.
Meanwhile, for the express trip to Portimão, I decided to put some books by Hannah Arendt on my Kindle, as it's time to reread them, and others by the American historian Timothy Snyder, who has some very accurate analyses of the state of political change we are going through.
And almost involuntarily, just by looking at the indexes of the books, I found connections between what is stated there and the purpose of the book. Zeus a pleasant magazine, but also and above all a useful and relevant magazine for these dark days.
See, what a lucky boy I am?
Thinking without a Handrail, is the name of one of Hannah Arendt's books, which I put on the device. Thinking without handrails, or outside the box, is all we hope to convey in this travel culture magazine, which aims to be recreational but also problematizing.
Because we enjoy the pleasure of the text, the pleasures of escape that literature, art and travel marginalize, the pleasures of life, if possible shareable and with a hint of cosmopolitan flavors, but we are also driven by responsibility and the need for ethical rigor that situates us. Thinking without handrails is a delight, like all the daydreams of free freedom, but the choices we make now will necessarily have an effect on this bipolarized world of increasing isolation and identity that awaits us and we will have to have an energy that is equal to the maintenance of the freedom that we long to dignify.
Travel, literature, and thinking that wants to be free and not encapsulated, presuppose a need for nomadism, this thinking without handrails, that acts as a kind of spiritual and even political counterpoint to the agendas of the time, and this is already quite evident in this first issue in four figures who knew how to levitate above the dominant thought of their times: the writer Teixeira Gomes, the poet Kenneth White, the essayist Walter Benjamin and the artist Marina Abramovic.
If we can achieve this balance, which I would call ecological, in each issue, and add to that the presentation of a beautiful city, such as Venice in this case, impeccably irrigated by João Ventura's art, I believe we will have a project and a function: we make people dream by presenting alternatives to the instrumental restraint with which the world imposes on us.
Meanwhile, on the trip I read excerpts from another book, this one by Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons for the Twentieth Century. And there were three lessons that caught my attention the most.
The first one is called: Treat your tongue well,
this is clearly one of the objectives of Zeus. And for that, as João and I are already vintage, we have a team of collaborators who can ensure that rigor is combined with the pleasure of language. Not only in stylistic terms but also at a conceptual level, since semantic distortion has moved from horror films to our daily and political landscape and we must protect ourselves from this stain.
A good example of this semantic distortion was exercised yesterday by President Filipe Nyuse, who visited two stores in Maputo that were looted so that he could call the protesters “barbarians”, forgetting to say that some of the looters, as seen in the videos, were members of the police who were repressing the protesters.
Na Zeus, against the customs of this post-truth era, and knowing that the distortion of reality always begins with the distortion of language, we will not have semantic slips, each word will stand out due to its exact weight in the meaning that validates it.
Another chapter that attracted me is called Believe in the Truth.
One method of disbelieving the truth in this post-truth world is open hostility to verifiable reality.
This is how Frelimo won with 70% of the votes, even though in most districts there were more ballot papers in the ballot boxes than registered voters in the area, and although in the street demonstrations we can see that 70% of the population is protesting, which already amounts to a demographic explosion of 140% of voters. It is magnificent. We swear that everything published in Zeus is reliable and verifiable.
These two errors are possible because of a Third Lesson, Beware of Magical Thinking, which always occurs when an open adoption of contradiction overrides any index of rationality.
And this is a vice that is widespread throughout the world today. Trump promised to reduce taxes for everyone, eliminate the public debt, and increase spending on social policies and national defense. These promises are in contradiction with each other. Now, Snyder recalls: “It’s like a farmer saying, ‘I’m going to go to the chicken coop and get some eggs, then I’m going to boil them and serve them to my wife, then I’m going to fry them to feed my kids, and finally I’m going to return them to the coop, intact, and I’m going to watch over them until the chicks hatch.’”
Here is a type of deceitful fable that we will not serve in Zeus, because thinking of three impossible things before breakfast is exclusive to the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland. And we are sadly Aristotelian and will fight for the verisimilitude of things, discursive structures and narratives.
If we fulfill these prerogatives, I believe that we will not betray the good promise that this issue of Zeus constitutes and that there are good reasons for the party to be public.
Finally, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Portimão Council for supporting this romantic project, and, more personally, I would like to thank João and Maria da Graça with a thousand hugs for welcoming me as a partner in this adventure and for the friendship they have shown me, despite the physical distance that separates us, all of which is so unlikely at our ages and yet so invigorating.
Author António Cabrita has published twenty or so books in Portugal, Brazil (three fiction books) and Mozambique (books of fables, poetry and essays). He was a journalist for 23 years and an editor. In 2005, he emigrated to Mozambique where he is a professor of Drama at the University of Maputo. He has written numerous films and is also a translator. He co-edits the magazine Zeus.
Photos from the magazine presentation Zeus, in the Portimão Library (by Miguel Veterano):
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