Tobias Hecht – författare

Latin American history - the stuff of wars, elections, conquests, inventions, colonization, and all those other events and processes attributed to adults - has also been lived and partially forged by children. Taking a fresh look at Latin American and Caribbean society over the course of more than half a millennium, this volume explores how the omission of children from the region's historiography may in fact be no small matter. Chidren make up one-third of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean, and over the centuries they have worked, played, worshipped, committed crimes, fought and suffered in wars. Regarded as more promising converts to the Christian faith than adults, children were vital in European efforts to invent loyal subjects during the colonial era. In the contemporary economics of Latin America and the Caribbean - where 23 per cent of people live on a dollar per day or less - the labour of children may spell the difference between survival and starvation for millions of households.

Through innovative fieldwork and ethnographic writing, Hecht lays bare the received truths about the lives of Brazilian street children. This book changes the terms of the debate, asking not why there are so many homeless children in Brazil but why, given the oppressive alternative of home life in the shantytowns, there are in fact so few. Speaking in recorded sessions they called 'radio workshops', street children asked one another questions that even the most experienced researcher would be unlikely to pose. At the center of this study are the children who play, steal, sleep, dance and die in the streets of a Brazilian city. But all around them figure activists, politicians, researchers and a global crisis of childhood.

Bruna VerÍssimo, a youth from the hardscrabble streets of Recife, in Northeast Brazil, spoke with Tobias Hecht over the course of many years, reliving her early childhood in a raging and destitute home, her initiation into the world of prostitution at a time when her contemporaries had scarcely started school, and her coming of age against all odds. Hecht had originally intended to write a biography of VerÍssimo. But with interviews ultimately spanning a decade, he couldn't ignore that much of what he had been told wasn’t, strictly speaking, true. In VerÍssimo’s recounting of her life, a sister who had never been born died tragically, while the very same rape that shattered the body and mind of an acquaintance occurred a second time, only with a different victim and several years later. At night, with the anthropologist’s tape recorder in hand, she became her own ethnographer, inventing informants, interviewing herself, and answering in distinct voices.With truth impossible to disentangle from invention, Hecht followed the lead of VerÍssimo, his would-be informant, creating characters, rendering a tale that didn’t happen but that might have, probing at what it means to translate a life into words.A call and response of truth and invention, mental illness and yearning, After Life is a tribute to and reinterpretation of the Latin American testimonio genre. Desire, melancholy, longing, regret, and the hunger to live beyond the confines of past and future meet in this debut novel by Tobias Hecht.