(MENAFN- Brazil-Arab News Agency (ANBA)) Thais Sousa
São Paulo – Letícia Sé first heard about the Middle East issue during high school. After a class about the history of the Arab countries and Palestine, Sé started studying the theme on her own from several perspectives. 'I feel like the Arab issue is barely discussed. I intend to help people to have a more delicate view, specially about Palestine. It is addressed only as a religious problem, about religious extremists, and that is not good. I hope to contribute for a less crystallized view on this theme and these people,' concluded Letícia Sé.
The recently graduated journalist contributes by giving a space for other women to talk. Over one year, in 2018, she produced the book 'Baulistanas: Histórias de mulheres árabes em São Paulo' [Baulistanas: Histories of Arab women in São Paulo]. The title is a wordplay with the interviewees accent, since in Arabic there is no 'p' as Brazilians know it. The most similar sound in the Arabic alphabet is 'ba.'
The text was written last year in as an end-of-course paper the journalism school in Faculdade Casper Líbero in São Paulo. Now the content has been edited and became a book she self-published in order to distribute a few copies. The author is looking for a publishing house to make a large-scale publication. In 2015, when she moved to São Paulo, the student started covering events and demonstrations with Middle Eastern themes. 'Because my mother family has a history of migration, I feel close to this, even if it is about the Arab people. I get the question of identity, of not being in a place where you came from. There's this empathy, but our situations are very different,' reveals the Portuguese-descendant journalist.
Her passion for the Arab history led the journalist to teach Portuguese to refugees. And learn Arabic from them. In this process, Sé became increasingly interested in the language and its dialects. Traveling with her college to Morocco during the 2016 Conference of Parties/United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP22), held in Marrakesh, she was in contact the Moroccan Arabic.
After that, the journalist studied this dialect with the Moroccan Arabic teacher Felipe Benjamin from USP, and is now learning the so-called modern standard Arabic. 'This experience gave me an idea of the differences inside the Arab world. Learning dialects opened my mind to understand the specific contexts of each migration before simply categorizing them under one umbrella. The very idea to call someone 'Turkish' has a political bias behind it,' she told.
Those experiences made her want to produce the book. The introduction gives an overview about the Arab immigration to Brazil and who these people were before becoming merchants in São Paulo downtown. 'So, starting from the interviews, I started to see the different in the Arab communities. The Palestinian community, for example, wanted to preserve their identity as a matter of activism, resistance,' she exemplified.
Baulistanas, Arab women
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