MARGOLIS: What will be your message for Davos?
GIL: It’s an economic and social forum, but with many interfaces between the economy, culture, the environment and social organizations. We want to express the importance of culture–literature, music, cinema–in international relations. We also want to talk about the Brazilian spirit: the cordiality, the peaceful nature of Brazilian people.
What is the cultural significance of Lula’s landslide election?
This is Brazilian political culture rising from the bottom to the top. Lula also personifies this national spirit of solidarity, a people committed to pluralism, a mixture of races and customs, with a pacifist outlook on the world. [Andre] Malraux said the 21st century will be the century of spirituality or else it will be nothing. This is what Brazil and Lula represent.
Was the Workers Party’s move toward moderate politics a factor in your decision to join the government?
It was important, because I basically favor the middle way, of dialogue amid extremes, of sitting down at the table and keeping away from the more radical positions. What I think is important now is social radicalism, addressing the deeper question of how to reach those excluded from society’s benefits. This is a kind of democratic socialism, without discrimination or totalitarianism.
How will you promote social radicalism, as minister of Culture?
By maintaining policies that benefit the less-privileged classes. The elites also have a role to play… but we must preferentially attend to the so-called popular segments of society, so that culture may flourish again from the bottom up.
But so much of Brazilian culture already flourishes from the poorest regions.
Brazil’s image abroad is associated with popular culture: samba, the way we play football. But what we need to do is break the prejudice that popular culture is a lesser product. Blacks and Afro-Indians are the soul of the country. Brazil needs to come to terms with itself, different from the Brazilian elite, who want to be a copy of Europe or the United States.
What’s it like to swap the stage for a desk in Brasilia?
The instruments change, but my project is the same. As an artist you make art, meaning you are attuned to the voices, the spirit, you might say the ectoplasm, of the Brazilian soul. In the ministry [we] work with policy instruments to create the means by which this ectoplasm can manifest itself.
But the ministry has little money.
The shortage of resources challenges our creativity.
Why did your appointment draw such criticism from the left?
It’s because I am part of a new left. Tropicalismo sprang from a new left allied with existentialism and Sartre, with a belief in counterculture. We had a conflict with the old left and with the old right. And that’s the way history is, the old polarities resisting the new. The new always surges from the center, the point of convergence. This is what tropicalismo was about, the beatniks, America’s New Left, the Soviet dissidents and African liberation groups. Novelty is uncomfortable.
Brazil now has a minister with international recognition, but has the world lost an artist?
I don’t think so. Politics is an art form. I came here to practice the art of politics in a ministry dedicated to the politics of art. This is a change of place, not of substance.
Lula said that if in four years all Brazilians are able to eat three meals a day, his government will have been a success. What is your goal?
A cultural dessert after the meal. Music, quality television programs, going to the theater, reading books, access to the Internet. If Brazilians have three helpings of this a day, the ministry will have done its job.
Will you take your guitar with you to Davos?
Why not? People don’t want a separation of politics and art anymore. Either I take my guitar with me or else I’m not fit to be a Culture minister of the 21st century.
