Rio fire gives Brazil a national lobotomy

The video images of flames shooting skyward out of the National Museum of Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro, stabbed me in the heart.

I spent close to 20 years alternating between president, secretary, and grunt volunteer with the infinitely smaller Lake Country Museum.

I know firsthand how hard it is to document the past, especially from societies that maintained no written texts.

Every artifact, every letter, every story, is like a clue in a mystery novel. Clue by laborious clue, a museum puts together a coherent picture of what life was like, back then — whenever “then” was.

The Rio fire, in effect, ripped out almost all the pages from the novel about South America. How can you read a novel that isn’t there any longer?

Brazil’s National Museum held the largest collection of artifacts and archives in South America. Over 20 million items, ranging from the skeleton of a uniquely South American dinosaur to the skull of a woman who lived 11,600 years ago.

It had vast collections of textiles, of beetles and insects, of indigenous crafts. They’ve gone forever.

Also a number of irreplaceable mummies. One came from Egypt, where you expect mummies to come from. Others had been preserved by the thin air and bitter cold of the high Andes, or by the heat and aridity of the Atacama Desert. And a shrunken head from the Amazon, another example of mummification techniques practised by indigenous tribes long before Columbus “discovered” the New World.

It was not just a Brazilian museum. It was the museum of a whole continent.

Which befits Brazil’s unique status in South America.

Aside from being the only Portuguesespeaking nation in a Spanish-speaking continent, Brazil’s land area is roughly equal to all the other countries combined. Its population is roughly the same as the total of all the other countries.

Only the scientific library of some 470,000 volumes, including 2,400 rare works, survived the fire; it was housed in a separate building.

An estimated 90 per cent of everything else is gone. Or damaged. If not burned in the fire, then soaked by the tons of water poured into the flaming ruins by firefighters.

Former environment minister Marina Silva called the fire “a lobotomy of the Brazilian memory.”

Anthropologist Mércio Gomes compared the loss to the burning of the library of Alexandria in 48 BC – a catastrophe from which the world has never fully recovered.

Yet there is a sense that the National Museum’s destruction is a symptom of Brazil’s own economic malaise. Rio’s fire chief Col. Roberto Robaday said the firefighters did not have enough water to fight the fire. “The two nearest hydrants had no supplies,” he said.

Water had to be trucked from a nearby lake. Brazil has taken a long time to recover from the military repression of the 1970s. Although its governments are democratically elected now, the legacy of privilege and corruption persists.

Austerity programs have meant that essential infrastructure — like fire hydrants — didn’t get maintained.

And the museum itself had no insurance. Another economy measure.

I fell in love with Rio when I first saw it, early one morning after a sleepless overnight flight from Miami. I thought it was the most beautiful city in the world. Fifty years later, after travel to about 50 more countries, I still think so.

Yes, I know, Rio also has some of the most squalid and desperate slums in the world, its favelas And taxi drivers who think they’re all Juan Manuel Fangio re-incarnated. Plus a level of street crime that makes it unwise to carry anything valuable with you when you visit Rio’s fabled beaches. That doesn’t change the city’s beauty. Or the legendary joie de vivre – “alegria de viver” in Portuguese -- of its people.

Last Sunday night, thanks to its government’s financial priorities, a huge part of their collective memory went up in smoke.

Tragically, most of us give little thought to preserving the crucial clues of our past. We trash our grandparents’ diaries. We use precious china for a cat feeding dish. We sell military medals at yard sales.

When annual budgets have to be cut down, archives almost always rank near the bottom of the priority list.

The tragic truth of the Rio fire is this – once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Jim Taylor is a Lake Country author and freelance journalist. He can be reached at rewrite@shaw.ca