MARKED AS CATTLE

To the American people, my apologies for do not like of you, that happens because JFK sponsored all revolutions in Latin America, including the one that I was hit when I was 6 years old, on the way to complete 7 years old. At my 7, during the public high school, I had the bad luck of having a teacher who was wife of a military man, so I was treated as if I had Hansen’s disease. Once she called me in the middle of the classroom to tell everyone I was subversive and people like me should be threw in high sea. The colleagues that caught or touched me for any reason, they washed their hands and used alcohol for washing them, and after all, I was daughter of a man who had been removed from the office. We lost a great apartment. How to explain it to a child who is still learning how to read, what is subversive?

During the birthdays that happened at the high school, I did not receive any piece of cake. That happened to me and to my colleague called Elisa, an afro-descendent, and in that time, there was none of the laws existing today. They did it thinking they were doing a wonderful thing, but today, by the experience and by what we see in the newspapers, it proves that happened a mistake on Mr. John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s and Mr. Lyndon Johnson’s (his vice-president) judgement. I want you to put yourselves in my place, the country of freedom and the American Dream gave me a hellish nightmare. I know you people have no guilt, but it will not cure the scars that I have from the humiliations suffered during my life. I should prosecute you for moral damages, but God does not take a nap and not even sleeps; see what happened with Kennedy Family. You have created monsters and then they turned against you, let us remember about the Twin Towers. There must have a reason and the reason is the Divine Justice. Who seeks, find it. You cannot give me back my childhood and here is a detail, my father was the only one that was not amnestied, because he was removed from the office by mistake and thereafter, absolved by the Supreme Court. His name was João Marques Paes Filho. Because of this, I can prosecute you. My anger from you is so much that I think that to prosecute you is unworthy and you keep making, over and over, more victims like me.  There is no need of telling about the recent facts. An example: once when I was at the high school, my colleagues were not aware about the situation of my father, so a girl asked me a little bit of my Coca-Cola and then, other girl, when she saw her friend drinking my Coca-Cola, she told her that I was a daughter of a man who was removed from the office - of a subversive man, how they liked to say -  so the girl spited out the drink and washed her mouth with soap. After this fact, she started bugging the teacher saying she would contract a disease for drinking the drink of a subversive girl, son of a man that was removed from the office.

Because of it all, my life became a living hell and, in the eve of completing my 60s, I would like you to know that I bled, I was bruised, almost sexually aggressed, but I was already there, with the “thick leather” of being hit with the belt. It unbalanced even my mother because she hit me for any reason, because she told me that I was the reason about what happened to my father. Forgive me, but I cannot like you. Liking you would be like making myself null, to make null everything that I suffered, what I passed through and you tell me, by the first constitutional amendment, that the dream of you destroyed my life. Put yourself in my place, please.

Kátia Paes