Memory as Method, Methods of Memory: Writing the Life History of a Brazilian Political Prisoner

Aluízio Palmar is a former political prisoner and torture victim during Brazil’s dictatorship in the 1960s who, later in life, became an influential human rights activist. He is currently 80 years old and still active in various social movements. He is also a prolific writer, often about his own list history in radical politics: he wrote in memoir in the early 2000s, he runs a website dedicated to archiving documents from Brazil’s military regime, and he maintains a Facebook page where he reflects constantly on Brazilian history, politics, and his own place in those histories. I am writing a biography about Palmar’s life, based largely on extensive life history interviews that I conducted with him over the course of two years, totaling nearly 40 hours of recorded conversations. This paper draws from my research into Palmar’s life and my reflections on writing a biography about someone who a) is still alive, b) has made his life story into a public narrative, and c) remains in close contact with me throughout my writing and editing process. With key examples from Palmar’s life and my own process of writing about his life (including instances where I discovered inconsistencies in his various platforms of self-narration), I explore questions of memory not only in the aftermath of violence, but also in the context of actively writing a biography.