O rei da baixaria

 

 

 Pablo Marçal conseguiu parasitar o debate eleitoral,
preso a um anacrônico modelo que não esclarece mais ninguém

 
P O R  M A R I A N A  S E R A F I N I

Eu gosto de baixaria, eu gosto
do que vocês estão fazendo
aqui, vocês estão mexendo
com a pessoa errada”, adver-
tiu Pablo Marçal, candidato
a prefeito de São Paulo pelo PRTB, duran-
te o debate promovido pela TV Gazeta e
pelo canal MyNews no domingo 1º. Quan-
do algum de seus adversários fugia do
script e insistia em discutir algum tema
relevante para o futuro da cidade mais ri-
ca e populosa do País, lá estava o ex-coa-
ch para esclarecer a que veio: “Isso aqu]

não é um jogo para ver quem tem melhor
proposta. É para ver quem aguenta mais
essa encheção de saco”.

 
O teatrinho de Marçal dá resultado. O
influenciador não perde tempo discutindo
propostas, até porque não teria o que apre-
sentar. Quando arriscou propor a criação
de uma rede de teleféricos para conectar
favelas e estimular o turismo local, virou
alvo de chacota nas redes sociais. Ciente
de que não tem como vencer no debate de
ideias, usa todo o tempo disponível pa-
ra provocar os adversários com insultos,
calúnias e difamações, tudo milimetri-
camente encenado para caber em vídeos
curtos, editados para viralizar na internet.
Não precisa sequer mobilizar sua equipe
para fazer o trabalho braçal. Em vez dis-
so, promove gincanas, com ofertas de prê-
mios em dinheiro aos produtores de con-
teúdo que fazem os melhores cortes, aque-
les com maior número de visualizações no
pantanoso mundo digital.

 
Semanas antes, durante um debate
promovido por Estadão, Terra e Faap,
Marçal conseguiu desestabilizar o pso-
lista Guilherme Boulos com a leviana in-
sinuação de que ele seria usuário de dro-
gas – chamou o adversário de “aspirador
de pó” e ainda levou o dedo à narina, simu-
lando o consumo de cocaína – e ao cha-

 má-lo repetidas vezes de “vagabundo”,
enquanto erguia ao alto uma carteira de
trabalho. Agora, no estúdio da Gazeta,
conseguiu a proeza de fazer o tucano Jo-
sé Luis Datena, experiente apresentador
de tevê, abandonar seu púlpito para tirar
satisfações com o arruaceiro. “Ninguém
tem sangue de barata”, protestou Datena.
“Quem aguenta ser xingado a todo inter-
valo? Ou mesmo quando outro candida-
to está falando, o cara fazendo mímica do
seu lado para tirar a sua atenção.”

 
O festival de baixarias é recompensa-
dor. Após as molecagens de Marçal, o de-
bate previsto para a semana seguinte, na
Jovem Pan, foi cancelado por desistência
dos participantes. Algo que tende a favo-
recer o ex-coach, no momento em que ele
avança das pesquisas. De acordo com o
instituto Real Time Big Data, Marçal ago-
ra lidera a corrida pela prefeitura paulis-
tana com 21% das intenções de voto. Bou-
los, do PSOL, e prefeito Ricardo Nunes, do
MDB, figuram com 20%. Considerando a
margem de erro da sondagem, divulgada
na terça-feira 3, os três estão empatados.

 
Apesar de incorporar novos elemen-
tos, como os cortes de vídeo para virali-
zar nas redes, a estratégia de Marçal não
é nova, há tempos vem sendo ensinada
por gurus da extrema-direita, observa a
cientista política Vera Chaia, professora
da PUC de São Paulo. “Basta lembrarmos
que um dos princípios do Olavo de Carva-
lho era justamente não respeitar os ad-
versários, não admitir regras. É isso que
o Marçal está fazendo”, diz. Um antigo ví-
deo do ideólogo bolsonarista, que voltou a
circular na internet há poucos dias, expõe
com clareza a tática: “Se você faz questão
de apresentar a sua tese exclusivamente
dentro das vias normais e admitidas, você
está provando lealdade ao sistema, e não
a veracidade da sua tese”.

 
Ao inviabilizar os debates, Marçal cor-
rói a própria democracia, avalia o sociólo-

go e jornalista Laurindo Leal Filho, pro-
fessor aposentado da Escola de Comuni-
cações e Artes da USP. “Não se trata de
um programa como outro qualquer, ele
faz parte do processo de esclarecimento
da população, precisa ser regulamenta-
do de forma mais refinada.” O especialis-
ta defende uma “reformulação total” do
modelo usado no Brasil, “com regras rí-
gidas, como a Justiça Eleitoral estabelece
ao horário de propaganda gratuita”. Nos
EUA, observa, os debates são realizados
apenas por emissoras públicas, de forma
a evitar a briga de audiência.

 
Até mesmo a linguagem corporal nos
debates precisa ser objeto de algum tipo
de regulação, avalia Leal. “O comporta-
mento do Marçal ultrapassa o que se es-
pera do convívio democrático. É preciso
ter padrões. Não se pode permitir algo
anárquico, ainda mais na tevê aberta.” As
emissoras operam sob concessões públi-
cas, mas parecem estar mais preocupa-
das em atrair público com esse show de
horrores, critica o especialista. O espe-
táculo protagonizado por Marçal no do-
mingo 1º rendeu à TV Gazeta a maior au-
diência para o horário desde 2018, com
2,5 pontos aferidos pela Kantar. No dia
seguinte, em entrevista ao programa
Roda Viva, da TV Cultura, o candidato
bateu recorde de audiência no canal da
emissora no Youtube, com pico de 2 mi-
lhões de espectadores simultâneos.

 
Uma das autoras da pesquisa “Bolso-
narismo sem Bolsonaro”, publicada em
junho pela Fundação Friedrich Ebert,
a cientista política Thaís Pavez identifi-
ca Marçal como um expoente desse mo-
vimento, mas com elementos próprios.
“A novidade é que ele é um nativo digital,
um influencer, o que reforça o fato de vir de
fora do sistema político e, portanto, poder
fazer e dizer coisas de um modo diferente.”

 
Em toda a América Latina, esses influen-
ciadores estão assumindo protagonismo
no debate público e, de certa forma, par-
ticipam da formação política dos jovens,
mesmo que tenham feito fama falando de
outros temas, como moda, cultura ou em-
preendedorismo. Na Argentina, para citar
um exemplo, a cosplayer Lilia Lemoine
conquistou uma cadeira na Câmara dos
Deputados na aba do ultradireitista Javier
Milei, de quem foi conselheira de imagem.
Marçal faz parte, portanto, de um fenôme-
no mais amplo, que ganhou força sobretu-
do durante a pandemia, quando as redes
sociais eram, para muitos jovens, a única
forma de sociabilização, observa Pavez.

 
“Repare: ele trabalha com as angústias
das pessoas endividadas, com desse dis-
curso de ‘coach da prosperidade’. Da mes-
ma forma, apresenta um futuro sem em-
prego, onde todos estão ameaçados pela
tecnologia. Consegue lidar com os espec-
tros que assombram o século 21. Por isso,
tem tanto apelo.”

 
Já a coordenadora do Observatório
da Extrema Direita, Isabela Kalil, aler-
ta que, quando a normalidade é alterada
e a sociedade passa a aceitar o que até en-
tão não era aceito, não há retorno. “Antes
do Marçal, vimos o Bolsonaro agir como
bem entendia, e nada aconteceu. Não tem
como voltar ao cenário anterior, porque
a sociedade passou a ter novos parâme-
tros de normalidade, por mais absurdas
e desrespeitosas que possam parecer.”
O maior risco, acrescenta Leal, é que
ninguém sabe exatamente quais são os
planos de Marçal. “Nós sabíamos onde o
gabinete do ódio de Bolsonaro pretendia
chegar. O objetivo era alcançar o totali-
tarismo clássico, o golpe cívico-militar.”
Com suas eficazes gincanas na internet,
o coach ganha terreno, mas seu projeto de
poder segue desconhecido. “Ele está cor-
roendo a democracia sem apontar qual-
quer temor de que ela está sendo esgar-
çada. É muito mais grave, porque não sa-
bemos se tem volta.” •

CARTA CAPITAL

 

 

Pregnant in Gaza With Nowhere to Go

 

As war killed all hope around her, Nevin Muhaisen fought to bring a new life into the world.  

 

By Nicholas Casey

Nicholas Casey, a staff writer for the magazine, followed the pregnancy of Nevin since her second trimester in Gaza last year.

Before the leaflets fell from the sky telling her to evacuate, before all that was left of her home was its western wall, before the food shortages left her baking her own bread, before her daughters slept under a chalkboard in an abandoned kindergarten, before a sniper killed an in-law who was bringing back blankets because it was getting cold — that is, before the war came to Gaza and obliterated most of what she remembered of life there — Nevin Muhaisen, a middle-school teacher and mother of four, was listening to her doctor give her some good news. Nevin, he said, was pregnant.

It was early August last year. Nevin had dressed that morning, put on some makeup and gotten her daughters — Zaina, Lina, Maise and Doa’a — ready for the day. Her husband, Mahmoud, flagged a taxi, and the couple set out from the warren of buildings in her neighborhood in eastern Gaza City to a leafy street near the center of the capital. She looked up at the clinic. The doctor worked most days in Al-Shifa Hospital and had come highly recommended. There was a long wait to see him; the high demand must have been a good sign, Nevin thought. And now, 90 minutes later, she was there with Mahmoud hearing the news. Nevin had been aware she was having another child. But the doctor knew something that even the mother did not. “You’re carrying twins,” he said.

The couple walked down a boulevard in front of the clinic, past the men playing backgammon in the park and the hookah bars where smoke hung heavy in the summer afternoon. She was 36. Mahmoud was 39. Theirs hadn’t been a love story in the romantic sense: Nevin’s two aunts married Mahmoud’s uncles years before, and their families arranged for Nevin and her sister to marry Mahmoud and his brother. But even at their first meeting, she laughed and felt relaxed with Mahmoud. Their life together began in a tiny bedroom in her in-laws’ apartment where the couple lived for two years before they moved into their own home in Shajaiye, the neighborhood where both their families lived. Zaina and Lina, now 14 and 13, came into their lives first, the two girls growing close because just a year separated them. Next came Maise, now 11, who loved order and memorizing the Quran; and then Doa’a, who, though the youngest at 7, was the most stubborn and strong of the sisters.

The couple stopped for some lemonade in a cafe and thought about the new life they would now be bringing into Gaza. Yes, there had been wars after the births of each of her last three children. But it had been close to 10 years since they had needed to evacuate. And what if one of the twins was a son? Or both? They had never had a son. But they were struggling financially, Mahmoud pointed out, especially because of the home they just built. Nevin was about to start work at a new school, and there would be more income, she replied. As one partner expressed doubts, the other resolved them. Nevin assured her husband that she had been a mother four times before and knew everything would be fine. “When God sends a baby, He will handle the rest,” she said. They took a taxi home.

Image

The Muhaisen family in their home in Gaza in April, 2023.Credit...From Nevin Muhaisen

The good news, however, was followed by bad. After several checkups, the doctor told Nevin that he could no longer find a heartbeat on one of the twins. It was the first trimester of the pregnancy, when miscarriages weren’t uncommon. The other fetus was still growing, the doctor said. It was Oct. 2.

On the warm morning that followed just five days later, she would have rather stayed asleep. “It’s time to wake up!” her daughter Maise said. Not during any of her pregnancies had the mornings been so difficult; she thought of the two flights of stairs at her school, the stairs that had felt impossible to climb because of her exhaustion each day. Now Maise, who had gotten up before the rest of the family to do her morning prayers, was gently shaking each of her sisters awake, starting with Doa’a, who still slept next to her mother. Nevin lifted her head from the pillow and wiped the sleep from her eyes.

Suddenly, a boom. Maise was back in the bedroom, screaming and flinging open the windows. There was no mistaking the noise now — rocket fire — first a crack, like thunder, and then a long hiss that petered out into the sky. They had been startled before this year by that sound. Hamas had called them “test rockets,” new weapons for its next war against Israel, they said. But there were too many this time to be a test. All of the children were screaming now, looking at their mother for what to do.

At the moment when this family needed answers, there were none — only the morning programming on television, continuing on as if nothing had happened. The rockets kept hissing into the air. Finally the newscaster from Al Jazeera was talking about the attack. But it wasn’t just about the rockets now; it was about an incursion into Israel.

Image

Nevin, center, and her daughters, from left, Maise, Doa’a, Zaina and Lina watching the news in March.Credit...Rehab Eldalil for The New York Times

Immediately her thoughts turned to the practical. There would be no school that day. The children would stay home, and she and Mahmoud would walk the length of their crowded neighborhood in search of sugar, flour, feta cheese — anything that was for sale, at whatever quantity they could carry. There had been some luck, she thought: Nevin had just gone to the pharmacy and picked up a month’s worth of folic acid and vitamins for her pregnancy. No war had lasted much longer than the prescription, she thought. Maybe they would just close the door and wait out whatever happened.

Yet when she returned, Nevin could see little safety in her surroundings. She now saw windows that could shatter into a thousand tiny knives and blind her daughters. Walls that might crumble in an airstrike and bury all of them. This had been her dream home, one they spent two years completing before moving in just the year before. Their final purchase had been the curtains in April. That night, the children slept in their living room as Mahmoud stayed up, listening to the news.

Nevin awoke the next morning to a Facebook post that was circulating from an Israeli lieutenant colonel. The message was in Arabic, and the tiny red boxes on the map below it showed the blocks that Gazans were now ordered to evacuate. One was theirs.

The thought of leaving Shajaiye was impossible for her. How could she abandon her home over a Facebook post? Nevin and the adults of the family — Mahmoud, his parents, Nevin’s brothers-in-law and her sister — deliberated over what to do next, and finally made the decision to leave. The parents would depart first, then Nevin’s sister-in-law, whose home was closest to Israel. The attack would come soon, they knew.

Nevin looked up. “Leave me here and you go,” she said.

“You’re pregnant!” someone shouted back.

Nevin, trying to buy time, refused to leave until she could make something to eat. She took her daughters with her to the kitchen. No one interrupted her at first. She cooked the green beans and rice slowly; she ate them and packed the leftovers. Mahmoud took her by the arm. They flagged a taxi for the next neighborhood, Zeitoun, with only a few things packed in the girls’ school bags, hoping to be back for more when the attack was over.

A photograph of the Muhaisen family’s home before the war.

From Nevin Muhaisen

A video of their home in April taken by Mahmoud’s sister who has been monitoring the damage from repeated bombing.

From Nevin Muhaisen

In an abandoned kindergarten, they moved the tiny desks and chairs and laid down their blankets. Another room was their kitchen. As they slept, explosions poured down in the area of the evacuation map and began to level it.

For days, Nevin begged her family to come with her back to their home in Shajaiye, and finally they relented. She breathed a sigh when they saw the building was still intact. Nevin’s body was exhausted from the pregnancy again. She took a nap on the sofa and woke up to the sound of artillery in the distance. She needed to go, but first she needed to sit on each of the beds of her children. She needed to look at every piece of furniture again. This was the last time she would see her house during the war. Nevin knew she was saying farewell to it.

On Saturday around 2 a.m., all their phones rang at the same time. The message, recorded in broken Arabic, called for another evacuation, a much larger one this time. Everyone in Gaza’s north was ordered to move south immediately, more than a million people. A day later, the ground outside the school was covered in Israeli leaflets telling them to flee. Still, Nevin did not want to go. Then her mother, Halima, who had already left for southern Gaza, called. “You need to come to Rafah, think of your daughters,” she said. “You’re pregnant.” It was Nevin’s 13th week.

Getting to Rafah meant driving nearly the entire length of the Gaza Strip, more than an hour’s car journey across a war zone. It took Mahmoud three hours to find a taxi driver willing to go to Rafah. He wanted six times the normal price, and he wanted to leave right away.

They raced down mostly empty roads, Nevin bracing her stomach with both hands to cushion her belly whenever they sailed over a speed bump. One roundabout was filled with the charred remains of cars and trucks, smoke still rising from a recent bombing. “Why were they hit?” Maise asked.

In Rafah, Nevin’s fear abated only at the sight of her father, Jamal. His embrace was warm, and the house, though not theirs, almost felt like home. More relatives kept arriving; in all three dozen family members packed themselves into a living room and two bedrooms. Mahmoud went to a less-crowded house — just 14 people. The couple slept apart for the first time since they were married.

Nevin’s life before the war had been largely confined to Gaza City, but as the days went by she felt little sense of liberation in Rafah, with its strange accents and unfamiliar streets. Approaching the fifth month of her pregnancy, she saw a doctor for the first time since the war began. There was backup power that day, and the ultrasound machine was working. Her baby was a boy, the doctor said.

“His name will be Sobhy,” said Mahmoud, Arabic for “bright like the morning.”

One day when the airstrikes sounded far away, Nevin pushed herself to venture outside into the market. A faint blue feeling of longing grew in her for her neighborhood, which was still being bombed. She wanted her son to be born back home in Shajaiye, she thought. She was someone who grew attached to things and places. Her pillow, her sofa. Her land. She wondered: Do places feel nostalgia for the people who have left them as people do for the places they have left? After a month in Rafah, the apartment now too crowded, Nevin and her family left for another city called Deir al Balah.

Image

A house in Deir al Balah where Nevin, Mahmoud and their daughters temporarily moved along with 40 others.Credit...From Nevin Muhaisen

She began to bleed near the end of November. A temporary cease-fire was announced, and for days, the world watched to see if the war might be ending. Nevin, well into her second trimester, kept bleeding. She thought: I am losing the other child now.

That any hospital could take Nevin was itself a miracle. Al-Shifa, where her first doctor had practiced, had been wrecked by a near two-week siege. Al-Nasr Hospital in the south would be next. At the strained emergency room that accepted Nevin, strangers were looking for outlets to charge their phones and begging nurses for clean water. The doctor told her that Sobhy would be fine. But she needed to stay in bed for at least a month.

And so Nevin lay on her mattress on the floor in Deir al Balah, listening to the news of the temporary cease-fire on an Israeli radio broadcast in Arabic — they told their side of the war, but it was the only signal that reached her bed. Prisoners were exchanged for hostages; an extension was announced, the broadcast said. But Nevin’s hope fell when a deadline passed and she could hear the airstrikes again. She now knew this war would not be over by the time Sobhy was born. Doubts filled the dark bedroom where a dozen other family members slept. She didn’t want to think about the premature babies who died in their incubators at Al-Shifa after the generators ran out of fuel.

In December, there was no bread in the bakeries. There were three dozen relatives living in the apartment now, all of them hungry, more always coming as their neighborhoods were demolished by soldiers who controlled them. The electric stove was useless — there had been no electricity since she arrived — and so someone started ripping the wires out of it; where the motors and coils had been, they added coal and a match. The stove was ruined, but at least it was heating up. Nevin could feel the baby kicking as she kneaded dough. They spent five hours baking, trying not to breathe in smoke.

The weeks went by, and the war ground on. Nevin hated this life. She hated the people who took the bags of aid and resold them at prices higher than before the war. Salt and sugar were 10 times more expensive now. They no longer could afford potatoes. She hated the parachutes landing with boxes of supplies; it was humiliating. She had taught her daughters to be strong women, yet here they were, living like caged animals awaiting death.

Image

Lina, Doa’a, Zaina and Maise (left to right) in April, 2024.Credit...Rehab Eldalil for The New York Times

One morning in February, as Nevin was tidying the room, she could see that her daughter Zaina had scrawled some numbers on the wall in pencil. “What’s this?” Nevin asked, looking at the arithmetic.

Zaina, the eldest daughter, had inherited her mother’s eyes but not her attachment to places. Zaina wanted out of Gaza. She wanted to be a surgeon one day and study in Germany; she didn’t want her life spent saving children her age from bombs. Her mother, Zaina knew, could get on a list to leave Gaza to give birth in Egypt. The numbers on the wall, Zaina told Nevin, were her calculation for how much it might cost. It was thousands of U.S. dollars, an impossible sum.

One night when there was finally a phone signal, Nevin called a Palestinian friend in Romania. The women didn’t know each other well — they had only met on Facebook, where they had common friends — but it helped Nevin to talk to someone outside Gaza.

“Let me help you get out,” the woman said.

Nevin knew the sentiment was genuine, as it always was with Palestinians abroad. But a divide separated the women, like the pane of glass that separates a visitor from an inmate at a prison. Only one woman was sitting in a war. The two said good night to each other, and Nevin tried to sleep, jammed on the floor with her daughters and more relatives seeking shelter.

There were now 38 people in a fourth-floor apartment meant for a single family, without running water or electricity. The war had left Nevin no privacy: just the buzz of a drone watching her from above or a child of a cousin stumbling through the door when she needed a moment alone in the bathroom. The kindergarten floor had been better than this — they had space in that classroom. The children told Nevin they were bored, that they wanted to go home.

Something started to snap in their mother. She looked over at her husband. “I need to see the beach,” she told Mahmoud.

Nevin had always loved the sea in Gaza. No matter how trapped she felt there, when she walked to the shore, when she saw the Mediterranean carrying on endlessly to the horizon, she felt as if she was looking at infinity, and for a moment, Nevin felt free. Before they reached the beach, Mahmoud and Nevin stopped at a tent camp to check in on a relative there. The couple then set off again and Nevin could feel her body relaxing as she approached the shore.

Yet when they reached the top of the bluff, there was only silence. There were no waves that day, no seabirds and no families like before. There were just Israeli warships.

Below, a child was fishing, alone. He couldn’t have been 12. What was he doing there? Some instinct told Nevin to climb down and warn the boy that the warships could kill him at any moment. But that same instinct told her that she was a mother of four — of five, soon — and that the ships could kill her too if she got any closer. “Let’s go,” she told Mahmoud.

It was now Nevin’s eighth month of pregnancy. Sobhy moved so much that she could no longer sleep many nights. The boy was telling her that he was almost ready for the world. But the world was not ready for this boy.

There was no doctor. Nevin pictured going into labor at night. No taxi would dare to drive her then. If the phone lines were disconnected, there would be no calling an ambulance. Zaina’s hope of passage for her mother to give birth in Egypt seemed to fade with each day; Israel was preparing to invade Rafah, the very city they would need to reach to escape. Besides, there was no money to leave. “I am now chasing a mirage,” she said. “The nightmare of me giving birth here is now going to happen.”

Image

Nevin in March, 2024.Credit...Rehab Eldalil for The New York Times

Nevin looked at the figure in the bank account. Then she looked at her daughters who were playing a game beside her. She looked at the numbers again. This was no mirage. This was the money they needed to leave Gaza.

The war had brought tanks and airstrikes to Nevin’s life, but it had also brought her a guardian angel. After her late-night call with Nevin weeks earlier, the Palestinian woman in Romania started collecting funds to pay an agency to arrange for passage for Nevin so that she could give birth in Egypt with her family. The friend had pushed donation links to Palestinian contacts throughout Europe. Now the money was there, enough to move Nevin and her children from Gaza for good.

A week passed as the agency made arrangements to put them on the humanitarian list. Nevin only told Mahmoud and her daughter Zaina, fearing she might jinx their luck. Finally at midnight the phone rang. Nevin took the call out of earshot. Everything is in order, the caller said. It was time to go. The agency made no promises about Mahmoud, but other Gazans assured Nevin that wasn’t unusual; he would likely be waved in with his family at the border. The next morning Nevin told her sister there was something she needed to say. Mahmoud was standing in a corner, near her sister’s husband. Nevin tried not to cry. She tried not to think of the years the four had spent together, two brothers and two sisters, two families that had lived through peacetime and conflict. She tried not to think she was abandoning them now.

She just tried to get one phrase out, to start. “We are leaving,” Nevin said.

On a Wednesday in March, Nevin got into the taxi with her four daughters and Mahmoud, one hand on her belly above her unborn son as they headed to Rafah. The road was a graveyard to Palestinians, only traversed by Israeli tanks. Rubble sat where there had been towns. A vast tent camp stretched out to the south, eventually to be bombed in an airstrike. Nevin had spent so much time in hiding during the war, she had no idea until now just how little remained of the place that she was leaving.

Image

In March, Nevin and her daughters on their way to the Rafah border crossing to enter Egypt.Credit...From Nevin Muhaisen

In Rafah, they stopped to see her father and mother. Jamal, the strong man who raised her, was more gaunt than she had ever seen him; he had lost 30 pounds in the war and was now about to lose his daughter as well. Nevin and Jamal had always had a tradition when she said goodbye after visits. They would embrace, kiss and then her father would give her 15 shekels. “That’s for you to get some sweets,” Jamal said this time. “I am praying for the child to come healthy.”

Fifteen minutes later, they were at the border: a Palestinian checkpoint, a no man’s land and then Egyptian officials standing before a vast desert. One Palestinian lugged a mattress. A large number were wounded. Just 500 people had papers to cross south that day — 500 of two million people who were trapped in Gaza. An official started collecting passports.

“He can’t pass,” the official said. He was pointing at Mahmoud.

Nevin had spent the entire war worrying about her unborn son. But it was her husband who was facing problems that day. She pleaded with the border guard: She was pregnant, she needed the father beside her when she gave birth, she said. Was this a question of a bribe? The Palestinian guard grew angry, pushing the family back in the direction of Gaza. He threatened to cancel all their papers. “Enough!” Mahmoud yelled. “You’ll go without me.”

Image

At the Rafah border crossing, just before Nevin and the girls left Gaza and entered Egypt.Credit...From Nevin Muhaisen

She couldn’t believe what was happening; they were within sight of their freedom. The war had taken her home from her, her mother and father, her sister, her privacy, her beach, her life — she was giving them all up, willingly now. But she could not, in this instant, give up her husband too.

The next moments moved by quickly. They approached the no man’s land where a bus was to take them to the Egyptian side; Nevin and the girls went above with the passengers, their bags of belongings in the hold. Mahmoud talked to the daughters, trying to calm their panic.

“Don’t cry, I’ll be coming soon,” he said.

It was Mahmoud who she saw crying when Nevin looked out the window as the bus pulled away. She had never seen her husband cry like that.

Image

Nevin and her daughters sending a message to Mahmoud.Credit...Rehab Eldalil for The New York Times

Sobhy Muhaisen was born just after 4 p.m. on March 24 at El Fayrouz Hospital in Ismailia, Egypt. He weighed six pounds and 10 ounces, a bit less than his sisters when they were born, but he was healthy, a nurse assured her; there had been no complications. Nevin had gone into labor just 15 days after arriving in Egypt.

The anesthesia still hadn’t worn off when Nevin asked her family for the phone. She wanted to speak to Mahmoud.

“Did you name him Sobhy?” was the first thing he asked from Rafah. Yes, that’s what she had named him, “bright like the morning.”

In early May, Mahmoud got permission to join his family, as Israel prepared to seize its border with Egypt making the crossing impossible for Gazans. They met him at the bus station in Ismailia on a brutally hot afternoon, and Nevin showed Mahmoud their son for the first time.

Image

Sobhy at 13 days old.Credit...Rehab Eldalil for The New York Times

Sobhy had made it from her womb and into the world outside, just as her family had escaped Gaza and into the world outside. Nevin realized this was as close to a happy ending as this war would ever provide her family: Sobhy was now lying in Nevin’s lap, with any possible future before him. His mother wanted him to learn English. She wanted him to be an important person one day.

Yet Nevin also knew this was unlikely to happen here in Ismailia. In May, Sobhy’s doctor found a small hernia in his digestive tract, and Nevin had to pay for his surgery in a private clinic because the public ones did not take Palestinians. The same laws barred her daughters from attending Egypt’s public schools so they were taking online classes organized by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Israel had never welcomed Gazans, but Egypt, in its own way, didn’t either. As Nevin sat in a rented apartment in a strange neighborhood, she looked at other countries, equally unfamiliar, where they might finally settle: France, Italy, the Netherlands.

The life of the Muhaisen family as refugees had now begun.

In Nevin’s dreams, she traveled back to her home in Shajaiye; in her nightmares, she could see an Israeli settlement built on its ruins.

Nevin had wanted to stay in Gaza. But in the end, she chose motherhood over land. She chose Sobhy.

THE NEW YORK TIMES\

Image

Sobhy napping at home in April, as Doa’a and Maise watch cartoons.Credit...Rehab Eldalil for The New York Times

---

Additional research and translation by Abu Bakr Bashir.

BRAZILIAN LEGEND MILTON NASCIMENTO, STILL DREAMING IN HARMONY

 

 

 

 Mat Snow

A CULT HERO in the Anglophone
world but a giant in Brazil, at 81 Mil-
ton Nascimento is just four months
younger than one of his inspirations Paul Mc-
Cartney – Abbey Road is a particular favourite,
he tells MOJO. Debuting on 33rpm in 1967,
his own catalogue is similarly classic-packed.

His delightful new album Milton + esperanza
spalding, not only boasts a sensational version
of A Day In The Life, but such stellar guests
as Paul Simon, Dianne Reeves, Lianne La
Havas and Shabaka Hutchings. From early on
Nascimento has attracted jazz
and jazz-adjacent A-listers;
as myriad stars have found,
to hear him is to love him. The respect and
affection is mutual.

“Some of the biggest dreams I realised in
my career were because of Wayne [Shorter]
and Herbie [Hancock],” he tells MOJO.
“In the late 1960s I met Herbie at Marcos
Valle’s house in Rio, and when he saw me
playing, he recorded several of my songs.
A few years later, Wayne was in Brazil with
Weather Report and watched the show
Clube Da Esquina. In 1974, Wayne gave
me one of the greatest gifts of my life,
recording Native Dancer. Wayne and Herbie
are my blood brothers.”

He has an unmistakable singing voice
ranging up to ethereal falsetto – “in my
childhood head, only women sang,” he says,
“Ray Charles’s Stella By Starlight changed
all that” – and a no less signature way with a
tune, as his wistful, philosophical songs float, 

flutter and trill just above life's adversities a la 

Marvin Gaye. Yet he is inspired rather than
stiffled by colaborations. Having worked with
the likes of Sarah Vaughan, Carlos Santana and
Earth, Wind & Fire, he seems to bring out the
inner Milton in everyone he plays with, even
Duran Duran, whose 1993 song Breath After
Breath he co-wrote and performed on.

Friendship is key, he explains. Adopted by
a musical white couple who’d employed his
mother as a maid, Nascimento grew up in tiny
Três Pontas in Minas Gerais, deep in south-
eastern Brazil. Energised
by the bossa nova boom
spearheaded by Tom Jobim,
João Gilberto, Sérgio Mendes
and Elis Regina, as well as The
Beatles, he and friends would
perform covers of Brazilian
and foreign hits played by
Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo
radio stations which barely
made it through the Serra da
Mantiqueira mountain range.

When these transmissions’
harmonies were inaudible,
he’d make up his own, his
harmonic gift a musical
mutation inspired by creative
necessity and over the years
embellished by orchestral and
choral arrangements.

Yet for all his diversity over
the decades, his early songs
remain core repertoire, with
1967’s Outubro, as in his
birth month October, revis-
ited on the new album. “This
song is part of my beginning as
a national artist. My partner,
Fernando Brant, wrote the
lyrics and it was the second
song we wrote together,” he
says. “It’s a song that talks
about a kind of rebirth.”

MOJO

 

What Will It Take for Hollywood to Grow Up?

 

Credit...Clay Hickson

By Freddie deBoer

By the end of this weekend, “Deadpool & Wolverine,” the latest film from Disney’s recently beleaguered Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise, will likely have surpassed $1 billion in worldwide ticket sales. This success would seem to be a win for audiences that want both big franchise movies and adult content. Unlike most of Disney’s superhero movies, which are carefully engineered to appeal to the widest possible commercial audience (adults, children and international censors), the R-rated “Deadpool & Wolverine” is stuffed full of foul language, sex jokes and gore.

“Deadpool & Wolverine” is certainly not for kids. But I’d struggle to say that it’s for grown-ups either.

Disney’s newest superhero film features plenty of violence, bloody and relentless and eventually mind-numbing. The titular characters have healing powers that render them effectively invulnerable, and the combat is just an excuse for more jokes, so most of the violence achieves nothing emotionally. Similarly, filthy wisecracks abound, but there’s no actual sex in the movie — nothing that could create real emotional stakes. Meanwhile, the character of Deadpool, as played by Ryan Reynolds, is defined by his trademark meta patter, through which he constantly reassures the audience that what they’re watching shouldn’t be taken seriously. At its core, this new made-for-adults film is still just another big-budget franchise movie based on empty nostalgia and catering to childishness, if not children.

I know I’m not alone in finding the film’s fundamental nature distressing (one headline branded the movie “the year’s most depressing success story”) or in lamenting Hollywood’s broader abandonment of popular entertainment made for adults. For decades now, Americans have been living in a period of all-conquering artistic populism; our culture industry has fully absorbed the notion that there is no sin greater than snobbery when it comes to appreciation of music or movies or television. We’ve essentially gotten rid of the divide between children’s and adult entertainment, insisting that it’s perfectly fine — maybe even preferable — to have the same tastes as an adult that you had as a child. (Or, perhaps, the same tastes that your child currently has, given the size of the adult “Bluey” audience.)

If there’s been one dominant message in 21st-century American artistic culture, it’s that you have permission — permission to consume nothing but superhero movies, Barbie, pop music by a recent Disney Channel star; permission to never eat your cultural vegetables; permission to never expand your cultural palate or stretch your attention span.

This permission may seem freeing. But when paired with ruthless, profit-maximizing market forces, it’s contributed to the death of grown-up entertainment.

There are core aspects of the human experience that, I’m afraid, can’t be effectively captured in superhero stories. It’s unavoidably relevant that the narratives driving so many of these movies were developed by comic book creators who were producing stories written for children, marketed to children and sold to children. Yes, there have been comic books written for adults and comics with substantial adult readership — Deadpool, the character, has always been more adult, although he’s also been folded into more kid-friendly Marvel comics over the years. My favorite comic book run of all time, Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz’s “Elektra: Assassin,” is a brilliant mini-series that’s adult both in content and themes — touching on mental illness, anti-communism, toxic but passionate love and Reaganism. But the exceptions don’t change the fact that superhero movies — the bedrock of the modern Hollywood blockbuster — are pulling from stories that, in general, have a limited emotional, thematic and narrative palette.

Some will argue that I’m being reductive. After all, isn’t Batman’s origin story fundamentally one of trauma? Inspired to vigilantism by the senseless murder of his parents, Batman is the poster child for someone who could benefit from therapy. And isn’t the discrimination that mutants face in the X-Men comics a metaphor for racism and other real-world bigotries? Sure. But you have to acknowledge that genuinely adult content had to be hidden in metaphor (or dealt with in a shallow manner) in classic comic books. For many decades, they were constrained by the rules of the Comics Code Authority, a censorious organization established following a moral panic over comics in the 1950s and eventually abandoned by major comic book publishers in the 21st century. (The scaremongering book that prompted this panic was titled, ludicrously, “Seduction of the Innocent.”)

The only way to fix this situation is for audiences to demand films that not only portray sex and violence and other mature content, but also the thematic depth and narrative complexity that once were common at the movie theater. This isn’t as fanciful as it seems. Yes, the logic of Hollywood today is driven by risk aversion and a relentless search to maximize profits. But sophisticated adult dramas were once hugely profitable. It’s no surprise that erotic thrillers produced big grosses, such as 1987’s “Fatal Attraction” (second at the box office that year in the United States) or 1992’s “Basic Instinct” (ninth). But in 1993, the Tom Hanks-led “Philadelphia,” a movie about a man wasting away and dying from AIDS, grossed more than $440 million worldwide in inflation-adjusted dollars; in 1991, more than $311 million in 2024 dollars was made by “The Prince of Tides,” a movie about going to therapy to address childhood sexual assault. Just last year, the three-hour historical drama “Oppenheimer” ranked third in global revenues.

There’s no inherent reason that movies made for adults — not just in terms of raunchiness and violence, but also narrative and thematic complexity — can’t be big financial winners. But there’s a contemporary culture that is largely afraid to champion them. I worry that a well-intentioned desire to legitimize media and genres traditionally associated with children has led to a vast overcorrection, where the very idea of appropriate social pressure to embrace adult art is now frequently treated as a kind of discrimination.

It’s a shame that the burden of reinvigorating art for adults has to be carried by fans and critics, given that ultimately it’s the studios and their rapacious desire for the biggest possible audiences that got us here. But carry it we must; the studios aren’t going to grow up unless we force them to. Going to see adult movies in the future, supporting them financially, is an easy and direct way. More fraught, but perhaps necessary, would be to gently prod the adults around you who watch nothing but superhero and Harry Potter movies to expand their range — maybe to suggest, even, that they should feel a little embarrassed if they don’t. When we demolish any expectation that adults consume more difficult, less immediately pleasurable works of art, many people simply won’t do it, and they’ll find themselves starved for challenge and innovation in their media diet without knowing why.

 

'Ainda Estou Aqui', de Walter Salles, emociona público durante Festival de Veneza

 

 

 Sites especializados já preveem que Fernanda Torres pode conquistar indicação ao Oscar por seu papel no longa

• Teté Ribeiro

  Veneza (Itália)

  Na manhã deste domingo (1º), no Lido, ilhota quase colada a Veneza onde acontece o festival de cinema mais antigo do mundo, cerca de 1.500 pessoas assistiram à primeira exibição pública do novo filme de Walter Salles, "Ainda Estou Aqui".

  Pela reação inicial do público, dá para dizer sem muito medo de errar que este é o longa-metragem mais profundo e completo entre os concorrentes ao Leão de Ouro de 2024. Não que eu tenha a mínima pretensão de ser objetiva ao fazer essa definição, verdade seja dita. Muito do que me fez vir a este festival foi, além do convite oficial, a curiosidade de ver justamente este filme.

  o

  A união de Walter Salles, diretor dos incríveis "Central do Brasil" e "Terra Estrangeira", Fernanda Torres, uma das atrizes mais empolgantes e surpreendentes do Brasil e Marcelo Rubens Paiva, neste projeto, é como se um "dream team" tivesse sido escolhido a dedo para contar uma história que minha geração, de quem foi adolescente nos anos 1980, não tinha visto na tela de uma forma tão tocante até agora. A história da ditadura militar.

  Paiva, autor do best-seller "Feliz Ano Velho", de 1982, lançado portanto ainda durante a ditadura, conquistou os jovens leitores da época com a história do acidente que o tornou paraplégico aos 19 anos. O livro também contava, paralelamente, a história do desaparecimento de seu pai, o ex-deputado Rubens Paiva.

  Foi a primeira vez que um relato que interessava aos jovens despertando para a vida e para a literatura naquele momento falava sobre a ditadura. Como regime, a ditadura brasileira já estava meio capenga nos anos 1980, e isso não era um assunto lá muito atrativo para uma adolescente.

  Mas Marcelo Paiva, com seu estilo meio beatnik de escrever, fez muita gente entender que aquela conversa chata dos adultos tinha muito a ver com a gente. Com todo mundo, aliás.

  Então, em 2015, Marcelo lançou "Ainda Estou Aqui", um livro ainda mais bem escrito que "Feliz Ano Velho", dessa vez contando a história de sua mãe, Eunice, uma personagem que parecia trágica no primeiro livro, uma mulher que perde o marido provedor e cujo único filho homem sofre um acidente que o deixa paraplégico.

  Eunice surge como uma super-heroína no segundo livro. Uma super-heroína pós-feminista, pós-qualquer tipo de rótulo barato, que faz questão de sorrir para as câmeras como uma forma de resistência e que luta pela demarcação das terras indígenas muito antes de a gente ter que escrever "indígenas".

  Com duas horas e quinze minutos de duração, o filme se passa em três períodos marcantes da vida da protagonista.

  Tudo começa no início dos anos 1970, quando os Paiva viviam na frente da praia do Leblon, no Rio de Janeiro, em uma casa grande, cheia, barulhenta, amorosa, com as filhas mais velhas entrando na adolescência e os mais novos, como era o caso de Marcelo, o único menino, brincando solto no mar, rodeado de amigos e agregados.

  Era uma família que vivia como se o Brasil já fosse o tal "país do futuro" de que tanto se falava naquela época. Tinham um projeto de construir uma casa ainda maior, onde cada filho teria seu próprio quarto, recebiam amigos de todas as idades e todo mundo convivia como se, de fato, a vida fosse melhorar.

  Tinham uma empregada doméstica para dar conta do serviço da casa mas que fazia as refeições junto com a família e os amigos. Era uma família burguesa, sim, mas fundamentalmente humanista.

  O Brasil vivia sob uma ditadura militar, Rubens Paiva tinha sido cassado alguns anos antes e forçado a deixar a política, havia gente exilada, sequestros de embaixadores, violência policial, luta armada. Mas, naquela família barulhenta, cheia de vida, de arte, de encontros, de luz, de sol, a esperança de um Brasil melhor parecia algo latente, que se podia quase tocar.

  Pelo menos é assim que Walter Salles reproduz os Paiva na primeira parte de seu filme. Eunice nada vigorosamente no mar do Leblon, Rubens faz graça com as filhas, fuma charutos e confabula com Marcelo para jogar pebolim tarde da noite, escondido da mãe e das irmãs.

   

  O som da vitrola se alterna conforme Nalu, Eliana e Veroca, as irmãs mais velhas, botam os novos LPs que trazem para casa, e assim a Tropicália entra na sala da família e nos ouvidos de todos os amigos que a frequentam.

  Um deles era o próprio diretor do filme, Walter Salles, que disse na entrevista coletiva que aconteceu logo depois da primeira exibição do longa, em Veneza, que sua relação com a história dos Paiva começou na sua adolescência, quando fez amizade com Nalu e passou a frequentar a casa do Leblon, como tantos outros amigos.

  Fernanda Torres vive Eunice intensamente, mas sem deixar o esforço aparente, é quase uma metamorfose, não uma atuação. A mulher apaixonada pelo marido e mãe de cinco crianças, que vê sua vida desmoronar, não se deixa dominar pelo horror da situação.

  Um horror que acontece com ela também, que é presa e interrogada durante 12 dias, junto de uma de suas filhas mais velhas.

  Sem dinheiro e sem ter como explicar aos filhos o que teria acontecido com o pai, já que ela só teve essa certeza quase 30 anos depois, Eunice toma a rédea de sua vida e da criação de seus cinco filhos, que ela proíbe que pareçam tristes publicamente. Muda-se de volta para São Paulo, para ficar perto dos pais, e decide voltar a estudar.

  O segundo momento do filme acontece 25 anos depois, já no meio da década de 1990, portanto mais de dez anos depois do acidente do filho, da publicação de "Feliz Ano Velho", best-seller instantâneo que deu origem a uma peça-fenômeno logo em seguida e fez do nome Marcelo Paiva a grande promessa da literatura brasileira e a cara do que seria a juventude dos anos 1980.

  Nada disso está no filme, uma opção talvez por não contar mais uma vez uma história célebre. Mas são passagens determinantes na vida daquela mulher, certamente, e das quais senti falta na trama.

  Na segunda parte do filme, bem mais sombria, Eunice já está completamente mergulhada na luta pela demarcação das terras dos povos originários, quando recebe uma notícia pela qual batalhou por mais de duas décadas: o certificado de óbito de seu marido. A confirmação, afinal, de que Rubens Paiva foi torturado até a morte por agentes da ditadura naquele janeiro de 1971.

  Ao receber o documento, Eunice, serenamente, diz aos repórteres e fotógrafos que cobrem o evento que acredita que todos os crimes devem ser punidos e todas as famílias prejudicadas devem ser indenizadas. E sorri ao posar para os fotógrafos. É uma vitória triste, mas é uma vitória.

  A parte final, a mais curta, corresponde ao fim da vida da protagonista, agora interpretada por Fernanda Montenegro, e já completamente tomada pelo Alzheimer, de cadeira de rodas, alheia ao barulho que agora são os netos que fazem à sua volta.

  Ali ela só parece voltar à vida ao observar atentamente uma reportagem na televisão que fala justamente de Rubens Paiva. É o último lampejo de memória, e também o fim de um filme inesquecível.

  FOLHA