Brazzil File

It was about six in the afternoon at the home of Lebanese Mohamed Mustafa El Orra, in Sultan Yacub, a small Lebanese city in the Bekaa Valley, when his wife Telma Ribeiro Orra was preparing some traditional Brazilian food for dinner: rice and beans.

Strange? No. In the same way that it is not strange to hear Portuguese being spoken by almost all the inhabitants of Sultan Yacub and other cities in the region, such as Kemed Lauz, Jeb Janine and Ghazzé.

The Brazilian researcher and writer Roberto Khatlab, who has lived in Lebanon for more than 20 years, explains

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Just recently we remembered Zumbi of Palmares, on Black Consciousness Day (November 20). He did not fight for territory or glory, but in legitimate self-defense, for the right “to be,” for the right to recover our dignity. Palmares and all other quilombos, today some even urban, discard this hypocritical and cynical society. which today sees the black race as something passive, trying to take away from the black person his or her pride in his/her blackness.

We honor the resistance of Zumbi of Palmares and countless unnamed ancestors and survivors of a war of terror and deception.

Dates like this

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I had not thought to publicize my stroll through the world of prostitution until I read that bookstores in São Paulo and Paraná had initially questioned whether to sell the Portuguese translation of Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s new novel Memórias de minhas putas tristes (Memories of My Melancholy Whores).

These booksellers weren’t alarmed that Latin America’s most important novelist and Nobel Prize winner had become a pornographer. What incensed them was the title of the book. And their reaction reveals the widespread prejudice that surrounds the oldest of professions.

I also shared that puritanism – that sleeping with a prostitute was

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