Among Prisons and Forests, a pearl

Margarida Patriota is a Brazilian writer, translator, and literary critic. A member of the Brasília Academy of Letters, she lived in several countries during her childhood and youth, an experience that shaped the cosmopolitan character of her work. She has also been active in cultural outreach and has, for many years, hosted the radio program Authors and Books (Autores e Livros) on Rádio Senado. Holding both a Master's and a Ph.D. in French Literature, she taught Literary Theory, Brazilian Literature, and French Literature for twenty-eight years at the Department of Letters of the University of Brasília (UnB).

Her work moves among literary criticism, essays, fiction, and translation, marked by a strong presence of erudite references, psychological reflection, and social observation. Her novel Private Imprisonment (Cárcere Privado) was shortlisted for the Oceanos Prize, and her prose often combines intellectual sophistication, irony, and an investigation of contemporary subjectivity. Her work as a translator parallels her literary writing: sophisticated, erudite, and highly attentive to language, she has brought classics by Gaston Leroux, Henry James, and Charles Baudelaire into Portuguese. Her most recent translation, The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du Mal) by Baudelaire, was published by 7Letras.

Margarida Patriota's poetry is introspective, elegant, and highly intellectualized, marked by themes such as memory, solitude, time, and identity. Her poems unite reflection, irony, and cultural references through an elaborate language and a strong psychological dimension.

Arendt: Dr. Margarida, thank you for the privilege of granting this interview to my readers. Shall we begin with your name? Did your mother or father have a fondness for daisies?

Margarida: My mother chose my name because of a book she read in childhood: Les Petites Filles Modèles, by the French writer Countess of Ségur. One of the exemplary girls was named Marguerite (the one who set a bad example was named Sophie). In Latin, Margarida means “pearl,” and in English, for instance, Margaret does not refer to the flower.

Arendt: As a member of a diplomatic family, you were, in a sense, required to represent your country even as a child, even when you might have preferred to escape from such obligations. Is that correct? Did you ever work in the foreign service afterward? Has diplomacy helped inspire your writing, or did the vocation for literature come first?

Margarida: I never worked in the foreign service. As a child, I showed talent for drawing. My family imagined I would become a visual artist. But around the age of fifteen, literature spoke more powerfully to me than painting.

Arendt: Tell me, as a great writer of broad intellectual horizons, about the risk of reducing literary works to literal autobiography. Is it advisable to speak of thorns? Or perhaps never? T. S. Eliot argued that “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” Why, then, do poets and writers feel compelled to write about their own experiences?

Margarida: I believe that both the escape from personal experience and personal experience itself can be transformed into quality literature. Flaubert, in escaping from himself to write Madame Bovary, ended up saying, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” Montaigne wrote about himself in the Essays based on the premise that each person contains within himself the entire form of the human condition.

Arendt: On the other hand, Rachel Cusk suggests that writing is a way of making sense of things that cannot be directly said. Does literature approach reality through the synthetic? Or does the terrible pain of being also become inauthentic once transformed into literature?

Margarida: An authentic emotion does not guarantee a good text. A good text, for me, requires critical distance on the part of the writer. I am reminded of Fernando Pessoa’s image of the poet as a pretender, who pretends that the pain he truly feels is merely feigned. Poetry feeds on the pain of the one who expresses it, but in order to generate empathy in others, that pain must be worked upon as though it belonged to them.

Arendt: This reminds me of Ingeborg Bachmann, who proposed that the writer should maintain a hermetic posture.

“Today writers and poets speak at conferences, in interviews, and on every possible occasion that comes their way. Their positions are entirely false. Each person has the obligation to ask to what extent he can justify his work and, first of all, whether he can justify it to himself. For me, this comes down to two or three demands: what was once called intellectual honesty. There is no need to burden oneself with pseudo-problems adopted superficially. Real problems are assumed in a completely different way. They cannot be discussed in reports, lectures, or congresses. And when a real problem exists, it is indisputable in the best sense. The only answer to it is work, the work itself, or the realization of that work.”

“The only legitimate answer to a problem is the work itself.” Do you agree? Is literature a sanctuary in which we seek the solution that redeems us from the thorny terrain of our lives?

Margarida: I do not know whether literature solves problems. I think great literary works promote an encounter among souls, sensibilities, and intellects that enriches the existence of both the writer and the reader.

Arendt: Are you familiar with the poetry of Ambassador Dora Alencar Vasconcellos? What is your opinion of it? I confess I am afraid to open her books because of the tragedy that befell her, though one day I shall have to. I have heard that she never wrote again after that tragedy. What is your view? Do you identify with the atmosphere of her writing?

Margarida: I remember my parents speaking of that ambassador, partly because they lived in Trinidad and Tobago, where she also lived and died. I know that Villa-Lobos set one of her poems to music, and that is about all I know.

Arendt: Which decades have fascinated you most, thus far? In any period of history. And what distinguishes those decades from the years we are living through now?

Margarida: The golden ages of many civilizations fascinate me. Since I was not formed in the digital era, I resent the somewhat invasive character of social media and the degree of dependence humanity has placed upon the mobile phones it invented itself.

Arendt: Do you like trees? Why? What is your favorite tree? And forests—do you like forests? Which forests have you visited, and which is your favorite?

Margarida: I like trees from many different biomes. The forests of the Atlantic Rainforest move me in a special way—those of Itatiaia, for example. On the road to Petrópolis, I never tire of admiring the silver cecropias against the green forest. I love purple trumpet trees, acacias, araucarias, weeping willows, and many others.

Arendt: What are your favorite books and favorite passages? Why?

Margarida: I admire and cherish countless literary works. Sometimes my affection for a book is linked to a particular stage of my life, a certain age, and in some cases I am not sure whether that attachment would withstand the passage of time. Among the books I reread with undiminished pleasure are The Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire, Washington Square by Henry James, The Red and the Black by Stendhal, War and Peace by Tolstoy, and Combray by Proust.

The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is perhaps the book I have reread most often. Its prologue and the chapter “The Author’s Death” always impress me because of the beauty of their style. For instance: “A work by a dead man. I wrote it with the pen of jest and the ink of melancholy.” Or: “Now I wish to die peacefully, methodically, hearing the sobs of the ladies, the hushed voices of the men, the rain drumming upon the leaves of the taro plants in the garden, and the shrill sound of a razor being sharpened outside, at the door of a saddler.”

Arendt: What do you dislike in Brazilian literature in comparison with world literature? And what do you most appreciate?

Margarida: A difficult question. It presupposes complicated generalizations. I am not particularly fond of narratives built entirely around monologues in which cultivated authors reproduce, from beginning to end, regional and uneducated oral speech, something like: “How ya doin', ya doin' alright?” for two hundred pages.

Arendt: AAH! Hahahahahaha! Hahahahahaha!

Dangerous thing to say out loud these days! All right then... What are your beauty rituals? Female writers and readers want to know how you achieved such excellent results.

Margarida: I try to maintain a healthy diet, although sweets are my weakness. I practice water aerobics regularly, use sunscreen, and I have never smoked.

Arendt: Justice Ellen Gracie also practiced water aerobics! Perhaps one day I shall give it a try myself—it certainly seems to yield excellent results. Now, regarding your novel Private Imprisonment. I shall try to ask questions without revealing spoilers.

To the readers, I offer the following synopsis: Private Imprisonment follows an unnamed narrator who keeps Mara Dália—friend, rival, and a sort of emotional alter ego—bound inside an office in her apartment in Brasília. The story begins in the midst of the action: the narrator has just immobilized Dália with adhesive tape while her partner, Jonas, is away handling family matters outside the city. In her apartment, she assumes the role of jailer and watches over the prisoner throughout a tense night.

From there, the novel unfolds less as a police thriller than as a psychological descent, alternating between mundane events and philosophical reflection. At times it recalls the obsessive interiority of Clarice Lispector; at others, Crime and Punishment, through the moral rationalization of crime; elsewhere, it evokes The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas through its spirals, digressions, and witty asides.

I would like to highlight what seems distinctive about the novel: the way it alternates everyday banality—traffic jams, apartment buildings, doormen, bakeries, elevators—with extreme violence; the narrator's cultivated irony, filled with literary and historical references, yet employed to justify increasingly disturbing acts. Does this somehow distill something deeply embedded in Brazilian identity—the heroic act of survival amid the realities we read about in the newspapers? Or does it reflect your personal experience of living within a violent environment?

“After all, it was to avoid arousing suspicion that I refrained from going directly from the garage to the fifth floor. I had not realized how painful it would be to pretend that I was merely dragging routine along when, in truth, I was passing through the most dramatic peak of my existence. I feel false to the marrow, affecting an air of normality for Marcos, an almost-friend who deserves no one's deceit. ‘The remedy I am administering may prove worse than the disease,’ I warn myself, though convinced that finishing what I have begun requires maintaining appearances.” (Private Imprisonment, p. 9)

Margarida: The idea was to set in Brasília a fiction somewhat in the manner of Patricia Highsmith, from the point of view of someone committing the concrete crime of kidnapping, and to fuse this with a psychic allegory: the self attempting to imprison the monster within itself.

Arendt: While the narrator tends to the hostage, smokes, chats with neighbors, goes out to buy sweets, and struggles to preserve an appearance of normality, she recalls the events that led to her collapse: her traumatic departure from public service; accumulated resentment; emotional dependence on Jonas; a sense of failure; and, above all, her ambiguous and corrosive relationship with Mara Dália.

At this point I am reminded of the almost theatrical construction of the neighbors—Vinhadalhos, the erudite neighbor; Moca, the Korean shopkeeper; Marcos, the doorman; Lontra, the intelligence officer—as though the entire building were a moral microcosm orbiting the protagonist, amplifying her paranoia and her sense of being constantly observed.

I found this construction particularly interesting, because the character not only imprisons her alter ego but also inhabits a circumscribed microcosm. Does this microcosm become an extension of the protagonist's private sphere, in your view? Or does it remain something external to her?

Margarida: The narrator imprisons a woman who inhabits the same microcosm she does and who, in the end, may actually be part of her—her alter ego, as you suggest.

Arendt: My favorite part of the novel is the emergence of the author's consciousness around page sixty, when the boundary between fiction and reality seems to dissolve rapidly.

“We are heading into an Olympus of dogmatic gods,” I confided to her as we entered the enormous amphitheater prepared for the expected audience. “The ground here is mined,” I warned. “One false step and the mine explodes, tearing you to pieces. I know the fauna's ideology. I came mainly to honor the good-natured organizer who arranges translation work for me and insisted that I attend. So keep your dissenting opinions to yourself.” Following this warning, Dália and I sat in the middle of the second row of the stands, facing the rectangular table on the stage. (…) Western civilization had stalled at a Gordian knot from which only reconstruction from the ground up could save it. “I have my doubts...” Dália muttered in my ear. “To reconstruct something implies building it again according to the model it had before being destroyed. One does not reconstruct from scratch; one simply constructs... And besides,” she added, “is Western thought to be destroyed while Eastern thought remains happily untouched?” she asked ironically, while the speaker proclaimed: “We must reestablish the zero degree of the text, because Western intertextuality perpetuates injustice and prejudice.” I found myself inclined to agree regarding the evils mentioned, yet unable to see any guarantee that intertextuality reduced to zero would produce wonders instead.” (pp. 60–61)

How do you assess the narrator's reflection on this debate that the lecturer seeks to make substantive? What exactly is this lecturer?

Margarida: The university lecture scene is a parody of a certain type of modern intellectualized discourse. It alludes to titles such as Roland Barthes's Writing Degree Zero and to the jargon of the counterculture, structuralism, Russian formalism, and other so-called experimental and avant-garde currents of the twentieth century and beyond.

Arendt: “Keep your dissenting opinions to yourself.” In your view, does this mined terrain exist in the reality of our democracy? What role does literature play in a democracy that presents itself as already complete, one that does not tolerate being questioned, even in its own procedures?

Margarida: I see literary art as a space in which one can breathe beyond ideological policing, a space of freedom where a character may believe that, in the real world of social groups, political parties, and corporations, a dissenting opinion can leave the person expressing it in serious trouble.

Arendt: Erudition and eloquence are hallmarks of this book.

“At that moment I realize that I am rambling, if not gathering remnants of REM sleep. To return myself to the lap of facts, I press the fleshy part of my palms into my eye sockets, trusting that a momentary blindness will bring clarity afterward. To blink slowly and then, through the fringe of my eyelashes, find Mara Dália only inches away from me, drooling through a gap in her gag, was the last thing I expected. ‘Uh…!’ I collapse back against the cushion as though avoiding a kick.

Monstrous as she is, drooling there, Dália compels me to turn my face away and bury it in the back of the sofa, seized by the sudden fear that she possesses the powers of a Gorgon and will turn me to stone if I dare meet her gaze. While I lose myself in this ostrich-like evasiveness, something sharp hooks into my spine, hurting enough to make me arch my back and raise my neck, pulling my face away from the cushion. Out of the corner of my eye, I search for the object that pierced me. At first glance, I can detect nothing unusual nearby.” (p. 84)

Margarida, are you also opposed to the contemporary flattening of language? If so, why are we moving in the opposite direction?

Margarida: Excessive contemporary flattening of language displeases me. I appreciate a Portuguese that is clear, precise, and correct, yet rich in its idiomatic variety and aesthetically rounded, so to speak, capable of translating complex realities. This runs counter to a moment that places such emphasis on the so-called “standpoint” of the speaker, whatever that standpoint may be, as well as on a minimalism that sometimes reveals a lack of expressive resources.

Arendt: The Walking Lady (p. 101) is the famous Mrs. Joana, the homeless woman with long white hair and flowing skirts who wanders through the superblocks of Brasília carrying bags filled with books, correct? What were you seeking to construct—or deconstruct—through the narrator’s perception of that woman?

Margarida: I wanted to write about a real person who impresses me in everyday life, within the microcosm of the neighborhood where I live, and who relates to the theme of the novel, since I regard her as enclosed within a particular kind of alienation.

Arendt: In the following passage, it is striking how the narrator calculates the harm Mara Dália causes her based on her husband’s observations; and how profound the dissonance is between their understandings of love. For one, love is reduced to the carnal; for the other, it is conceived as something fraternal. The focus remains fixed upon the gap between them, leading toward misunderstanding. There is something universal in this conjugal crisis that your novel captures with remarkable fluidity.

“Jonas, with his index finger raised as though asking permission to speak in a classroom: ‘I am one of the neighbors you love, am I not?’ ‘Without a doubt,’ I assured him. But I aspired to love a greater number of neighbors, men and women alike, beyond the family circle. ‘In short, you dream of being promiscuous,’ he concluded. ‘Promiscuous, Jonas?! I’m talking about brotherly love! Is it really that difficult to follow?’ Dália obstructed my path through the city I inhabited. She appropriated my voice, setting me at war with the world. ‘Get rid of her,’ Jonas declared, with a firmness I had rarely seen throughout our meager epics together. With Dália in tow, my journeys would never expand; neither would my horizons. It was urgent to change the script that governed me.” (pp. 121–122)

Yet the narrator refuses to address the actual problem involving her husband. Mara Dália, as though she embodied all of the kidnapper’s misfortunes, appears to become the problem. A woman from whom she distances herself as if she were her own scapegoat. How should a marriage be?

Margarida: In the marriage portrayed in Private Imprisonment, the narrator’s husband—a practical man of seemingly uncomplicated temperament—fails to grasp half of his wife’s inner sensitivities (and perhaps the reverse is also true). This ignorance of the partner’s deeper recesses exists even in the best marriages, and I believe that excessive introspection on the part of one spouse can actually make life together more difficult.

Arendt: Regarding the psychological descent of the narrative. The narrator’s psychic fragmentation, and the uncertainty as to whether the imprisonment is real, symbolic, or psychological, make this work extraordinarily complex to analyze. It is true that I am neither a linguist nor a literary critic capable of uncovering every subtlety of the intricate structure you have created—merely a poet and a somewhat negligent student of psychoanalysis. Thus, when reading your novel, I remain astonished, uncertain what to think, suspended between the atmosphere of a forensic universe and that of a mordant social ritual. At times I seek the narrator’s macrocosm within the novel, hoping to stabilize her individuality and anchor my reflections upon her. Where would her macrocosm be found? Or was your intention precisely this—to trust the reader’s intelligence and leave that task of elucidation to them?

Margarida: The book employs what appears to be a traditional suspense plot and assumes that, little by little, the reader will begin asking: “What kind of kidnapping is this?” What is real, and what is delusion? In truth, I trust in the reader’s willingness to follow the novel all the way to the final page.

Arendt: I should explain to readers my impression that your novel seems to concern physical kidnapping, emotional imprisonment, and the narrator’s confinement within her own obsessions more than the captivity of a rival as such—though I am not entirely certain, and each reader must judge for themselves. This strikes me as something deeply familiar in excessively institutionalized environments. It also seems to be a novel that can be read in many different ways. One question I could not answer after finishing the book concerns Mara Dália. In the narrator’s view, she is responsible for her misfortunes and setbacks. Yet after binding Mara Dália, those misfortunes do not appear to be resolved. On the contrary, they seem to worsen. So perhaps the problem lay precisely in imprisoning her in the first place? Why could she not simply allow Mara Dália to live freely, set aside her unstable marriage, and wander through vast meadows creating freely? Why not stop obsessing over her professional crisis, embrace solitude like a monk, and thereby dissolve her internal conflicts? Why not cut the Gordian knot with a sword, leave everyone behind, clear out a habitable space of sanity for herself, and establish sovereignty over her own life? Given the complexity and the contradictory demands imposed by marriage, profession, and social integration, why does she not become a primitive woman—or at least contemplate returning to a more primitive existence?

Margarida: The narrator resorts to kidnapping as a mad attempt to eradicate an evil from which she longs to free herself. Yet through the extreme act she commits, she will probably fail in that endeavor and remain imprisoned herself.

Arendt: I would not be so pessimistic about the future! The future belongs to God, and God is fond of unprecedented feats... One never knows! Does a person become crueler toward others when they are capable of being cruel toward themselves?

Margarida: There may indeed be a relationship between punishing oneself and punishing others. On the other hand, I know people who are kind to others and terrible toward themselves.

Arendt: Where can women find compassion for themselves? And what is the solution to men's lack of compassion toward women?

Margarida: I turn to Augusto dos Anjos: “Man, who dwells upon this miserable earth among beasts, feels the inevitable need to become a beast as well.” I believe that education at home, formal instruction, information, and spirituality help restrain the beast that resides within us.

Arendt: Your novel reminded me of a traditional interpretation of fairy tales—Cinderella. For the benefit of readers, I should note that certain psychoanalytic traditions, especially those associated with authors such as Bruno Bettelheim (The Uses of Enchantment) and the Jungian tradition (Carl Gustav Jung, Man and His Symbols), interpret Cinderella as a kind of private imprisonment of the soul. As guardian of obedience, purity, hope, and dreams, she remains imprisoned by the stepmother, a figure associated with ambition, instrumentalization, luxury and power, rivalry, and the world of appearances. In this reading, the tale expresses a universal story of the human condition, captive to its own obsessions and vanities, whose resolution represents a spiritual and psychological liberation. The prince, therefore, would not merely be the romantic figure of the story but a symbol of recognition, integration, and inner liberation—the possibility of the soul's reunion with itself. Your novel is far more modern. It preserves the symbolic structure of imprisonment and the search for liberation, yet empties it of the classical promise of salvation. The protagonist achieves lucidity—but perhaps too late for that lucidity to save her. And yet, upon closing the book, the reader reflects. Does that liberation become possible in the reader? In that sense, the novel neither ends nor remains confined within itself but produces an effect in reality. Was this a gift deliberately intended by the author, or an unexpected consequence of literature's own power?

Margarida: The premise of my story could not continue indefinitely without being exposed. So I released the reader when I felt I had held their attention long enough. In Private Imprisonment, I do not seek to save myself, the narrator, or the reader. My objective is simply to lead the reader through the book and have them feel that reading it was not a waste of time.

Arendt: Was it difficult to finish writing this novel? Did you have doubts, false starts, revisions, alternative endings in mind? Which ones? Did writing the novel help resolve any kind of inner conflict?

Margarida: Writing the book fulfilled my desire to carry an idea through to completion. It was like finishing an embroidery or an oil painting. There came a moment when I told myself: “There. I have completed what I set out to do as best I could.” From that derives a feeling of accomplishment.

Arendt: And what do you enjoy doing while you are writing, or when you grow tired of writing and reflecting on your work and need to replenish your energy and renew your spirit? What are your favorite foods? And your favorite dessert—and why?

Margarida: I used to drink coffee while writing. Nowadays I drink tea. When I am not writing, I enjoy reading, because from any reading, whatever it may be, I always retain the gain of a word, a metaphor, or an expanded vision of the world. As for food, nothing compares to good bread with butter or a good plate of rice and beans. For dessert, strawberries with cream, chocolate mousse, and flambéed bananas.

Arendt: Henrik Ibsen once said that “a woman cannot be herself in contemporary society, which is exclusively a masculine society, with laws made by men and a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view.” Do you consider the narrator's perspective, in attempting to justify Mara Dália's imprisonment, to be masculine or feminine? Or a combination of both? Is there a gender dimension to this process of imprisoning another person, which you portrayed so masterfully in prose? And, taking up Rachel Cusk's reflections on literary creation, as well as the rejection suffered by some women writers such as Isidora Sekulić when narrating from a female perspective: do you agree with Cusk's suspicion that readers might prefer a narrator who seems not to exist rather than an explicitly female narrator? Or are you convinced that a female narrator awakens greater interest in readers?

Margarida: I believe that contemporary women readers greatly appreciate female narrators, but I have the impression that many men still harbor certain reservations about them.

Arendt: Turning now to your poetry in the collection Time of Informing (Tempo de Delação), we encounter an atmosphere remarkably consistent with that of Private Imprisonment. Semantic displacements, shifts in register, literary allusions, highly precise imagistic condensation, decadence, psychoanalysis, and irony coexist within a series of verbal miniatures.

“I withdraw obediently

To the boudoir of my spleen.”

We also find philosophical allegories.

In “Outlaw,” the hummingbird that unintentionally causes a fire becomes a meditation on guilt, causality, and freedom:

“He who governs the flight of birds

Possesses safe conduct.”

Does your poetry concern itself with moral questions? Is that what gives rise to the philosophical epigrams that often appear in your verses?

Margarida: Yes, philosophical and ethical questions inhabit my poetry. In “Outlaw,” I comment upon the amoral character of nature: a bird brings down an airplane, two hundred people die, and so what? Humanity creates laws based on ideas of justice and moral values, but what lies outside those laws ultimately subjugates it.

Arendt: There are also verses that inhabit a diplomatic, cosmopolitan, and existential universe:

“In the world to which I do not belong, I am a tourist.” Would you say that poetry arises from the difficulty of coinciding with oneself? What are the sources from which poetry originates within your spirit?

Margarida: The sources are many. Sometimes they come from outside: an impression produced by a sound, a vision, an encounter with something or someone, an impact or disturbance that asks to be given a voice.

Sometimes they come from within: an emotion provoked by a memory, a need for understanding or release, a creative impulse of mysterious origin.

Arendt: In the lines

“What I retain of your person

I keep within my tear duct,”

you display intellectual sophistication without sacrificing emotional depth. Yet the use of a technical anatomical expression to refer to feeling perhaps suggests a need for emotional survival in the face of loss, displacement, memory, desire, guilt, and irony... although your irony is as light as one of Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s feathers. Which verses in this collection did you write with the greatest intensity of feeling?

Margarida: I do not have an easy relationship with writing. Writing fiction, essays, or poetry demands intensity from me at every step. I am not an expressionist author from whom words pour forth in torrents.

Faulkner is said to have written As I Lay Dying in six weeks and never altered a single word afterward. I could never accomplish such a feat.

That said, I would highlight the poem “Time of Informing” (“Tempo de Delação”), which gives the collection its title. It was born from an intense desire to evoke the fear that cherished images of what we have seen and lived may fade or perish within us through the loss of memory or judgment that sometimes accompanies old age.

Arendt: Who are your favorite poets writing in Portuguese?

Margarida: Gonçalves Dias, Olavo Bilac, Fernando Pessoa, Manuel Bandeira, Mário Quintana, Cecília Meireles, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, João Cabral de Melo Neto, Manoel de Barros, Adélia Prado, and many others.

Arendt: And what about the role of academies, literary salons, and literary circles in a writer’s life? What is your academic routine like, and how would you define the companionship and contribution of your colleagues to your work?

Margarida: Academies of Letters help writers of creative literature feel less isolated. They offer encouragement and the illusion of recognition. Some of them promote cultural enrichment through lectures and publications.

Arendt: Finally, Dr. Margarida, the most important and most difficult question of all. What would you do if you won one hundred million reais in the lottery?

Margarida: I would establish a center for historical and literary research, an institute of the arts, as well as one or more prisons in which every inmate could have a dignified cell.

Arendt: Anything else you would like to add? What question would you ask yourself in an interview?

Margarida: Do you consider yourself a good poet and writer? Do you value the work you have written?

Books

PATRIOTA, Margarida. Private Imprisonment (Cárcere Privado). Rio de Janeiro: 7Letras, 2019. 180 pp.

PATRIOTA, Margarida. Time of Informing (Tempo de Delação). Rio de Janeiro: Ibis Libris, 2019. 110 pp.