In “Clara’s Loves”, writer and educator Simone O. Marques portrays a part of Brazilian history, honouring the women who fought for equality in the 20th century and paying homage to the memory of her immigrant ancestors. Inspired by the experiences of her great-aunt, the author sheds light on the harsh reality faced by Portuguese and Italian immigrants who sought a better life in Brazil, but were faced with precarious working conditions.
The plot takes us on the journey of Clara and her family, who come from Portugal to the interior of São Paulo with the promise of opportunities. However, they are suddenly confronted with debt bondage, putting them in a struggle to pay off the obligations imposed by a landowner. Clara, the protagonist, individually faces this oppressive reality while harbouring the dream of pursuing an education, even though her social role assigns her only to domestic chores.
The story reveals a time marked by gender inequalities and financial challenges, elements that, narrated from the character’s maturity, reveal the complexities of childhood and the social context of that period until 1932, when women won the right to vote in Brazil.
What motivated you to choose Clara’s story and the immigrant experience as the focus of “Clara’s Loves”?
Clara’s story was inspired by stories from my family and the experiences of women, some of them very close to me, like my grandmothers. Many of my ancestors, both paternal and maternal, were Portuguese immigrants who arrived in Brazil between the 19th and early 20th centuries, most of them to work on coffee plantations in the interior of São Paulo. All these stories motivated me to tell Clara’s story and put together a patchwork quilt with them, creating a new story, but one full of the past.
How did the memory of her great-aunt influence the construction of the protagonist and the narrative of the book?
My great-aunt wrote a book in the 1970s in which she recounted her life since leaving Portugal. In her story there is a very particular perspective of a 74-year-old woman who was never able to go to school and the bitterness she bore for it. The book gave me a panorama, a context, a perspective of what life was like at the beginning of the 20th century on a coffee plantation and the society built in the interior of São Paulo and lived by immigrants. I collated this information and gave Clara hope, a lightness that my great-aunt deserved, but I also built her up from the stories of my grandmothers, my mother-in-law (the daughter of Italian immigrants), their experiences, the difficult lives they had and how they coped with everything with enviable resilience. Clara is this woman made up of several women and also carried by their dreams.
What is the central message you want to convey to readers through Clara’s journey in search of knowledge?
I believe that the central message of the story Clara’s Loves is not to give up on your dreams, not to stop believing in them and to use everything you can to help make them come true, just as Clara used the branches of the tree and the roof of the school. Strength, hope and resilience are words that define much of the story and help you find your way. If the door won’t open, climb on the roof…
In your view, what are the similarities and differences between the struggles Clara faced and the reality of women in contemporary society?
A lot has changed for women, although much still needs to be changed. The struggle that Clara and the women of her time faced was to first find their own voice. The story takes place at a time when a woman’s role was predetermined and there was no room for a voice, for what she wanted, desired or thought, so she withdrew.
In Clara’s time, women had no rights, but many duties: things that were expected of them, responsibilities that were not shared. If the marriage didn’t work out or the couple didn’t have children, it was the woman’s fault, who was always taught to take the blame on herself. Although there are still traces of that time today, women’s voices echo, shout, demand, rise up against women’s pains, there are laws that guarantee their rights, there is more space for their voices to be heard – even if there is still much to be achieved.
How do education and a passion for stories, represented by Romeo, play a role in Clara’s evolution and ambitions?
Romeo’s stories and his efforts to ensure that Clara had access to education functioned like the branches of the tree in which she hid her book. It was something she could hold on to, reach what seemed out of reach. Romeo also had the limits imposed by the society of his time and faced the social and cultural ban on taking a course that involved art.
Fortunately for him, when she came of age she would leave the control of her father’s will, something that would be possible for a female daughter, although this path was not easy for someone who lived in the countryside and worked as a farmer. Romeo helped to keep Clara’s ambitions alive and, in the way that was possible at the time, offered what he could to feed her voracious desire for knowledge, such as getting a book of poetry, even if it was forbidden by her father and she had to keep it hidden. There are significant gestures, such as opening the school door for her, even though she couldn’t attend, or giving her a notebook and a pencil. Romeo, then, is the other tree that supports Clara.
The representation of gender oppression is a central theme in your book. How do you think these issues have evolved from Clara’s time to the present day?
A lot has certainly changed. Today, by law, a woman doesn’t need her father’s or husband’s permission to study or work, for example. Women have the right to vote, to occupy positions of power and to take part in politics. In Clara’s time, there was an educational consensus that subjects such as maths, algebra and the like didn’t need to be taught to women, because according to the men who made the laws, they wouldn’t understand them. Today, they are physicists, chemists, mathematicians, economists and stand out for their knowledge all over the world.
The inclusion of historical context, especially the year 1932, was a conscious choice to contextualise Clara’s journey. Can you share your thoughts on this decision?
The choice of the year 1932 was really something I did to illustrate the “turning point”, not only in Clara’s life, but also that of her descendants, as it marks the first step towards the inclusion of women as citizens. The moment also corroborates the hope for change that marks the whole story. The fight for the vote. A woman also portrays the resilience and hope of the women who came before us and who, in their own way, didn’t put their dreams aside, didn’t give up and also waited with confidence, just like Clara when faced with the challenge of learning to read and write.
“Clara’s Loves” also deals with financial inequalities. How does this facet of the story reflect on Clara’s life opportunities and dreams?
The vast majority of immigrants, mainly Portuguese and Italians, who arrived to work in Brazil in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, were not wealthy people. Most of these immigrants left for the interior to work on farms, where a hard and difficult life awaited them, with great financial difficulties. As the Brazilian government paid for tickets and travel for entire families through the farmers, these families arrived in debt and had to pay off the costs of working on the land: the more family members worked, the faster they could pay off the debt.
However, they needed to eat, dress and consume in the farm’s emporiums, which generated more and more debt. “Account” books were born at this time and kept families tied to landlords. Clara is part of this group whose opportunities were limited and the prospect of conquering their own land (which was the dream of most immigrants) did not materialise; what was left was to be content with having a place to work and survive.
Many left the countryside in search of jobs in the cities, but that wasn’t an easy path either. Education was not everyone’s right, even in the cities, and access was very limited for poor people. The cases of patronage were those that helped provide education for the children of poor labourers, which in history appears in the figure of the “godmother”, something quite common at the time, but which was a matter of luck.
You mention that Clara recalls her memories through a mature perspective. How do you balance the innocence of childhood with the wisdom of experience when writing about the past?
This was a very interesting exercise I did to build the story. I had to “listen” to the voices of childhood at that time, something like our grandparents’ memoirs, the ones that many people love to tell. These narratives are loaded with their particular vision of childhood and the naivety with which they saw and experienced the challenges of the time.
These stories emphasise valuable details for children’s eyes and this is so sweet that it’s touching. So the idea was really to show not only Clara’s growth, but her emotional development and her slow realisation of the harshness of the world around her. In Clara’s narrative, I let her childlike gaze reveal the world as it changed.
It’s worth remembering that we’re talking about the beginning of the 20th century, when the world known to the vast majority of the population was the one in which they lived, with narrow borders, often just the small village, the fences of the properties where they lived and worked. We can’t expect Clara in her childhood and adolescence to be aware of what was happening beyond her world and this comes across in her adult speech, often saying that “at the time, I didn’t understand“. I believe this is a reflection that we often need to make in order to face today’s world, or a necessary exercise in putting ourselves in the other person’s shoes, even if that other person is our childhood self. And that’s where we see how Clara has grown and matured.
How can literature be a tool to give voice to stories that have been silenced and to celebrate the strength of women over time?
Literature is certainly a rich tool for voices to be heard and I have my own peculiar way of doing this, by focusing on narratives that present characters in their own context, without imputing anachronistic speeches and actions to them, but presenting them in their own universe and showing the real possibilities of overcoming in their own time. I think it’s essential to go into the past, find the narrative elements there and be really credible. I use literature, in its historical genre, as a tool for understanding the past in order to analyse the present, but not as an instruction manual, but as those stories told by ancestors. In addition to The Loves of Clara, my historical novel The Daughters of Dana celebrates, the strength of women over time and the persecution of witches in an even more distant context, the 17th century. Literature is a vast field where voices can echo and spread.
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