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Deterritorialization and Poetic Form - Brazilian Contemporary
Poetry and Urban Experience
© Flora Süssekind (translated by Marise Barros)
E-mail - fsussekind@uol.com.br
I. Reterritorializations/Deterritorializations
Brazilian literary imagination has been predominantly urban over
the last decades. This is evident in reports with strong regional
content, such as those by Raimundo Carrero, in stories about migration
or difficulties in social adaptation, as in Marilene Felinto's As
Mulheres de Tijucopapo (The Women of Tijucopapo), or
where traces of the rural experience, such as in Angu de Sangue
(Blood Cornmeal) by Marcelino Freire, are sometimes juxtaposed
with everyday urban life. This dominance seems to point to the fact
that Brazil's population has become mainly urban in this period,
with only 30% remaining in the countryside, as well as to the reconfiguration
of tensions between localism and cosmopolitanism, the rural and
the urban. These are fundamental aspects for local cultural self-awareness
that are increasingly marked by the hypertrophy of one of the poles,
by the unfolding of mediations between the urban social organization
and the artistic form, where duplication and representability do
not necessarily mean an increase in the complexity of formal processes,
of literary practice, and of the recent historical experience. Therefore,
this growing complexity often results not exactly from explicit,
documented representations of the urban, but rather from the production
of non-representational spaces and liminal, ambivalent, transitional
zones of subjectivity.
Thus I have opted, in this work, to examine poetical production
rather than, for example, rap or funk lyrics, which register the
violent and excluding elements of everyday life in the outskirts
of large Brazilian cities; or recent prose, marked by direct accounts,
such as the novel Capão Pecado (Sin Capão),
which was purposely written in ghetto language, with autobiographical
material, by Férrez, a former baker, son of a bus-driver,
dweller of the neighborhood Capão Redondo in São Paulo's
south zone; or such as the prisoners' stories which have been compiled
into the volume Letras de Liberdade (Letters of Freedom).
This is a kind of testimonial prose also containing street memories,
such as the book Por que não dancei (Why I Didn't
Dance), written by a former homeless girl, Esmeralda do Carmo
Ortiz; or homoerotic itineraries, such as those by José Carlos
Honório; and dominated by a neo-documentary work that has
been intensified in Brazilian contemporary fiction. A fiction that
is sometimes marked by a kind of overlapping of the ethnographic
and the fictional - of which both the novel Cidade de Deus
(City of God) by Paulo Lins and the group of accounts and
fragments of everyday street-life that make up Vozes do Meio-Fio
(Curb Voices), by anthropologists Hélio R. S. Silva
and Cláudia Milito, are good examples-and other times marked
by a double record, where photos and accounts are mirrored, giving
place to a succession of illustrated books which would almost become
a genre pattern of this representational imposition.
This is what happens in Capão Pecado (Sin Capão),
where the narrative is accompanied by two sets of professional and
amateur photos that seem to materialize the Romanesque geography.
Estação Carandiru (Carandiru Station)
is an account by Dráuzio Varella of his voluntary work as
a doctor in a São Paulo Prison, to which he added a vast
pictorial archive taken from his private property, private collections,
and newspaper files by way of a supplement, lending the report a
photojournalistic referendum. This is also what happens, though
in a different way, in Marcelino Freire's Angu de Sangue
(Blood Cornmeal), where the purposely 'derealized' photographic
images nevertheless perform an illustrative function, or in Treze
(Thirteen), by Nelson de Oliveira, illustrated with photos
extracted from the admissions file of a Victorian English asylum.
In these books the grotesque aspect of the images serves equally
to perversely reduplicate the unusual, yet ordinary, urban scenes
and types in these tales.
The reiterated mutual mirroring movement between account and illustration
generally functions in these illustrated books as a presentification
expedient, as a production of evidence by means of shifting the
reader's attention from the narrative process towards the context,
towards the extra-literary referent of these accounts and fictions.
But, as they seem to capture the urban referent with documentation
and frequently bring it closer to the reader, when these images
are observed, we find that they operate as clichés, re-impressions
of a predictable repertoire of types and situations that (contrary
to what they seem at first sight) stress social distinctions already
fixed in everyday life. The broadening of the area of visibility
may partly correspond, in these cases, to a re-statement of the
distance between observer and documented matter, to restriction
and immobilization of the historical perspective, to a conservative
movement of reterritorialization.
This does not happen in Treze (Thirteen), where the
mere fact of resorting to a Victorian photographic/hospital file
already produces tension between this anachronistic photographic
image and present storytelling. Nor does it happen in Minha História
Dele ("My History of Him"), another illustrated
text, by Valêncio Xavier, published in the first issue of
the magazine Ficções (Fictions). There,
only four images of a Korean man are available, a street-dweller
of Curitiba who, as a sandwich-board man, carries his own story
handwritten and hanging on his body. In this case, the re-duplication
between text and image seems to reach such an extreme that even
the account and the handwriting used for it are elements extracted
from the posters hanging on the city wanderer's body-the account
itself apparently being inscribed in the photos. The alternation
between proximity and distance-noticeable in the internal contrast
of each of the two pairs of almost identical photos, which constitute
the tale-makes the beggar's observation temporal and points out,
by means of the pronominal ironic play on words ("My
History of Him") in the title, the link between the
observer and the homeless man.
Valêncio Xavier's story gets closer, in this sense, to one
of the most expanding topoi in Brazilian urban imaginary-that
of the "chance encounter" between disparate people, defined
by Ismail Xavier as "isolated experiences, marked by a certain
singularity," offered by "migration" or by the "city
space" [1]. It would seem that such experiences
also have recent cinematographic examples, as the critic from São
Paulo points out, in the fictional meeting between Sarah Bernhardt
and three 'hillbillies' from the interior of Minas Gerais in "Amélia"
by Ana Carolina; between Josué and a former teacher, Dora,
in Central do Brasil (Central Station) by Walter Salles
Jr.; between poor boys who, by chance, are armed, and an American
man and his family in Como nascem os anjos (How Angels
Are Born), by Muirlo Salles; between a fugitive prisoner and
a middle-class young lady on New Year's Eve in O primeiro dia
(Midnight), by Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas.
These meetings, in a dialogue with Baudelairean urban pictures,
also manifest themselves in Brazilian contemporary poetry. For example,
in "Spiritus ubi vult spirat," by Sebastião
Uchoa Leite, the subject is crossing President Vargas Avenue when
he comes across a "survivor" whose skirt is raised, while
all the other people pass by indifferently. Also, in "031197,"
by Régis Bovincino, it says, "He could suddenly have
drawn out the knife, on the sidewalk, they say," when referring
to a street dweller. "Em sua cidade" ("In
your town"), by Duda Machado, where, in the middle of the Bahian
landscape, boys and beggars circulate among vendors and fruit baskets.
Meanwhile, from the perspective of the speaking subject, "an
intimate device, / destined to annul/ all presence, / intercepted
the contact/ and retracted it, while tender, / to the root of the
panic."
But if from retreat we go to breathing, as in Duda Machado's poem,
to a "return to oneself" that "re-erected the world"
"beyond any attempt/ to escape or dominate," while going
back to the short story "Minha História Dele"
("My Story of Him") by Valêncio Xavier, then the
extreme realism of the photos -as well as their reduplication and
the fact that part of the text is presented on the boards hanging
on the beggar's body-, function as an almost immediate expedient
for removing perspective, for transiting-and not for separation-
between subject and object, between the invisible narrator and the
photographic image of a street dweller. This effectively erases
both the possibility of the subject retreating and of a merely illustrative
relationship between text and photo, since it is the very succession
of images (including those containing text) that produces the conflicting,
uncomfortable narrative, set in action by the meeting with the homeless
man, by the visual cut-outs and additions imposed on the board-text
that covers him, and by the exercises of moving away and getting
closer to this urban picture. Unlike the experience of segregation
that dominates everyday city life, the implicit violence in this
urban picture would then seem to result in a kind of unfolding of
the visual intake, producing a double perspective of the account.
For, in this case, the homeless man also seems to observe his text
observer, besides the fact that the raw reproduction of his handwritten
board also materially grants him a narrative function. This device
would become structural also in João Gilberto Noll's work,
where the narrators, invariably wandering and homeless, fictionally
re-portray the urban experience of the homeless and their multiple
strategies for surviving in the streets. The title of one of his
novels involves, not by chance, a type of erratic narratorial auto-classification
as a "quiet animal of the corner" (quieto animal da
esquina).
Nevertheless, what is habitual in this illustrated urban literature
is not the unfolding of perspective but rather the criminal-pathological
cataloguing of places and human types (which is ridiculed in the
collection of physiognomies in Thirteen), the fear of social
heterogeneity, the reiterated criminalization of social divisions,
and the reinforcement of a kind of endemic urban paranoia. The middle
classes and financial elite respond by imposing self-segregation
in the form of residential enclaves, shopping centers, business
centers with, oftentimes controlled attendance, with investment
in private security, bodyguards, night watchmen, alarms, fencing,
and the privatization of streets and squares. This partly explains
the popularization, in tune with this generalized insecurity, of
crime stories and detective thrillers in Brazil between 1980 and
1990, such as the fiction of Rubem Fonseca.
An imaginary representation of fear and violence is what fundamentally
organizes the dominant urban landscape of Brazilian contemporary
literature. That can be partly explained as a direct relation to
the rise in the rate of violent crime in the country's large cities
from 1980 to 1990, with the strengthening of organized crime, the
inefficiency of the police force and of the legal system in enforcing
public safety and justice, the growing visibility of the population
contingent in absolute poverty that wanders through big cities,
expelled from both the slums and from the fortified middle class
enclaves, and a kind of generalized violence, reaching from traffic
to family relationships, from football stadiums to professional
killers, and to private security and vengeance activities. This
sometimes brings detective fiction closer to "discourses of
fear", to the proliferation of "speeches of the crime"
[2]-both expressions used by Teresa Caldeira in
Cidade de Muros (City of Walls), a study on "crime,
segregation and citizenship in São Paulo." These "discourses"
reorganize symbolically not only urban panic but also, in an equal
measure, the fear of losing social status and property, financial
instability, internal dilemmas, and structural social issues of
Brazilian society. This criminalization of the social relations
became more marked precisely during the period of political redemocratization
in the country. This movement appears to function discursively by
means of rigid classifications, stereotypes, and segregation, and
is recurrent not only in crime-related news stories and individual
stories of muggings and different forms of violence and homicide,
but also in the literary production of recent decades. This literary
production reterritorializes, with well-known criminal vocabulary,
"a new pattern for organizing social differences in urban space,"
[3] a destabilizing process of social change that
affects the dominant relations of power and the exercise of citizenship.
The urban thematizations of the country's recent cultural production
are not limited, however, to literary workings of ethnographic or
criminal reterritorialization. Some disfiguration and deterritorialization
processes, which are structural to Brazilian contemporary poetry,
function as particularly critical interlocutors of an urban experience
of violence, instability and segregation. And it is these processes
that will be examined next.
This does not mean, of course, that disfiguration is the only path
to a critical dialog between literary form and urban experience
in contemporary Brazil. It is enough to remember, in this sense,
as a counter-example, the book Sob a Noite Física
(Under the Physical Night) by Carlito Azevedo. In this case,
one urban image in particular-that of garbage scattered around Rio
de Janeiro-turns into a privileged sign for the reader. The initial
poem of the book announces "the last flight of the blowfly"
from "the garbage on the corner," and runs it through
the initial texts of almost all sections, with their references
to "garbage dump," "the garbage bin in the corner,"
garbage bins that, in the "convulsed pitch-black" look
like indistinct shapes, and the "pain in the glimpse of a dream"
which "with its speck of dirt, infiltrates" into the body.
Transforming itself from external to internal, the garbage (which
is in fact an aspect of the city's physical space) almost turns
into an inhabitant, an animated shape and a constituent element
of the lyrical self, producing an incorporation through which an
aspect of the nocturnal landscape lends painful physical materialization
to the embodiment of the subject. In the case of Carlito Azevedo's
1996 book, thematization of the urban is employed in these images
of the garbage via proximity and via incorporation. However, this
movement seems to point simultaneously to an itching-a painful corporeal
experience that is close to disfiguration mechanisms-and to bloody
exposure of the bodies. These are means by which the subjectivity
in Brazilian cultural production (especially since the 1980s) has
been constituted, frequently by means of horror.
II. Guignol
It is in fact not difficult to notice a trace of the Guignol in
Brazilian cultural life in the last few decades: from the detailed
descriptions of the corpses and murders of women in Acqua Toffana
by Patrícia Melo, to the exhumation of the corpses of father
and brother reported in the short story "A Carne e os Ossos"
("The Flesh and the Bones") from the book O Buraco
na Parede (The Hole in the Wall) by Rubem Fonseca; from
the exposure of a child's corpse pierced by a wooden stake in one
of the photographs by C. A. Silva exhibited in FUNARTE's Gallery
in 1996, to "the homeless girl killed naked" in the report,
full of portraits and police registers, by Valêncio Xavier;
also the "teeth of putrefaction" that "swallow the
body" in one of the poems from Cheiro Forte (Strong
Smell) by Silviano Santiago; or the voracious living in the
poem "Os Vivos" ("The Living") by Ferreira
Gullar, where "ferocious gluttons...devour the other living
beings" and "even the dead eat/ fleshes bones voices;"
from the amputated leg of the narrator in the novel Hotel Atlântico
(Hotel Atlantic) by João Gilberto Noll; to the subject-"all
wired up"- stuck in a hospital bed in the section "Incertezas"
("Uncertainties") from the book Ficção
Vida (Fiction Life) by Sebastião Uchoa Leite.
Guignolesque reference is also particularly stressed and seemingly
methodical in recent theatrical production: from O Livro de Jó
(The Book of Job) by Antônio Araújo and As
Bacantes (The Bacchante) by José Celso Martinez
Correia, to the descriptions and exposures of torture that constitute
Bugiaria (Monkeyshines) by Moacir Chaves, and to Gerald
Thomas's shows in general. Nowhere Man, for example, starts with
its "Faust" wearing rather bloodstained clothes, with
a female pseudo-cadaver as interlocutor. And, in his second production
of Quartet by Heine Müller, the two characters, also
with bloodstained clothes and knives, walk around amidst huge pieces
of suspended meat and a backdrop with blood dripping everywhere-a
horror component that has regularly been present in his theatre.
Remember the body parts scattered on the floor in Matogrosso,
or the heart and head pulled out of the female figures in The
Flash and Crash Days.
However, what seems to have happened in some of the most recent
Gerald Thomas productions is an increase in emphasis on these signs
of blood, mutilation, and physical torment, accompanied by his own
ironic explanation that he is working, much of the time, with some
of the most characteristic tricks of the "Grand Guignol"
genre: knives with retractable tips, tables that hide corpses, color
nuances to variations of composition and texture of the fictitious
blood, the loose head of the actress Fernanda Torres, pulled out
from her body in The Flash and Crash Days and in O Império
de Meias Verdades (The Empire of Half Truths), or to
bodies riddled with arrows (such as Fernanda Montenegro's) and large
knives (as in the opening of Nowhere Man).
If the theatre of Grand Guignol, hugely popular from the end of
the nineteenth century until the period between the World Wars,
anchored its scenic effect to the medical or criminal fait divers
and to a mixture of interpretation and skillful exercise of magic,
what seems to make it specially curious is, on the one hand, its
transformation of technical innovations (lighting tricks, sound
effects for telephones, automobiles, and medical novelties) into
dramatic elements. On the other hand, its presentation of a kind
of horror pastiche of not only the modern experience of the body
and of subjectivity itself as unstable and fragmented, but above
all of the figuration of the body as "body in pieces,"
which is dominant (though with variations of meaning) in modern
and postmodern art. In this sense, in recent Brazilian Guignol,
there is undoubtedly a dialog that involves extreme cruelty to the
body present in some examples of contemporary body art, a dialog
with tormented figuration, the paradigmatic and multivalent fragmentation
in artistic production of the twentieth century, present in the
mouths of Bruce Nauman or Francis Bacon, the huge eyes, pieces of
legs, hands and several dismemberments employed by Louise Bourgeois,
the photographs of corpse fragments by Andres Serrano, or the corporeal
suppressions in the work of Beckett.
However, there may be other sources, not exclusively plastic, for
this trace of the guignol. And some of them might be suggested,
as in the theatre of "Grand Guignol" itself, by a mere
reference to the country's journalism at the end of the 1990s, for
instance: the succession of photographs of bones and corpses, file
images of old portraits of leftist militants killed by the military
police; and of the Brazilian politicians gone missing during military
authoritarianism, which invaded the newspapers at the end of the
1990s thanks to new information having been brought to light; to
the discovery of bones, and to the lawsuits filed by families involved
in the identification of their dead. However, alongside this political
picture file from the period of military dictatorship in the country,
it is not difficult to notice a near-exacerbation of everyday life
that is marked by the banalization of violence, by brutalization
exposed daily on the crime pages of the Brazilian press and exposed
with intensified repercussions. Such is the case of slaughters perpetrated
by the police force, like the eleven youths killed in Acari, Baixada
Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro, in 1990; the ten adolescents murdered
in Morro de São Carlos in 1992; the massacre of 111 inmates
of the Carandiru prison, São Paulo, in the same year; the
executions of 21 people in Vigário Geral and eight homeless
boys at Candelária Church, Rio de Janeiro, both in 1993,
and of nineteen landless workers in the municipality of Eldorado
dos Carajás, Pará, in 1996; or the murder of eleven
people in Ponto de Encontro, a bar in Francisco Morato, São
Paulo, in 1998. These events standardize, via photojournalism, a
peculiar type of painful corporeal iconography, highlighting the
dissemination of violence, the bloody aspect of contemporary Brazilian
history.
In this refiguration in pieces, in agony, of characters, portraits,
and narrators in recent Brazilian cultural production, there seems
to be a combination of dialog with the corporeal fragmentation characteristic
of modern art and one of its pastiches, the Guignol; with the tortures,
executions, banishments, and political experience of the 1970s;
and the increase of violent crime, including that committed by public
security forces in Brazil during the 80s and 90s. However, attention
must be paid to the fact that, in these attempts at bloody identification
of fictional subjects, the exposure of these subjects is not anchored
to subjective idealizations or to cohesive corporeal images, and
that the very process of figuration and subjectivization involves
a kind of non-disposable awareness of instability, an obligatory
concomitant impulse for disfiguration, for the Guignol.
It is, however, an ambivalent disfiguration. Sometimes it points
at victimization, but other times it masks of the agents of violence
are superimposed on characters, narrators, and subjects, often maintaining
equally a kind of hybrid register where a combination of victim
and persecutor is what moves the literary subjectivization process.
Hence, also, the proliferation of hybrid types, aberrations, figures
which are self-defined as monsters in recent Brazilian literature.
And which, in direct dialog with a particularly bloody context,
by way of monstrous form, point to an epistemological gap, a classificatory
destabilization, a confrontation in the cultural practice itself,
with its limits of expressiveness and identification mechanisms,
tried out before the affirmation of new forms of organizing social
differences in cities based simultaneously on a globalizing homogeneity
of space and an exacerbation of the panic of social heterogeneity,
in the emergence of autonomous fortified citadels, in the expansion
of violent criminality and the continuous violation of citizenship
rights-precisely within the context of the political redemocratization
process which is in motion in the country. In the midst of this
motion, it is by means of victimization and protean aberrant forms
that it seems possible to engender fictional portraits, literary
subjectivity, shapeless representations of differences, hybrid cultural
bodies closely related to an historical process of redefinition
of identities and of ways of managing the social aspect.
This does not mean that the monstrous forms and animalizations
of contemporary fiction are univocal. We must note, in this sense,
the differences between the hybrid adolescent on one hand-arms too
long, ostrich legs, hair all wrong-in the short story "Pequeno
Monstro"("Little Monster") by Caio Fernando Abreu,
where two liminals are superimposed on this "small, small monster
nobody wants"-puberty and the discovery of homosexuality; and,
on the other hand, the self-cannibalizing ritual performed by a
woman in "Canibal" ("Cannibal"),
a short story by Moacyr Scliar in which we see the character forced
into the ritual because her rich "foster sister" refuses
to share her big food container, in a particularly cruel figuration
of the social divisions in the midst of apparent economic prosperity.
What seems to be at stake, however, in these recent fictional anomalies
and zoologies is a disquieting closeness, not in the least exotic,
of those animals and monstrosities. Such is the case in the purposely
invisible "aberrations" of Bernardo Carvalho; or in the
short story "Mandril" ("Mandrill") by
Zulmira Ribeiro Tavares, the proximity of the zoo housing the animal
to a Sunday in a room with the television tuned in to a talent show;
or, in a seemingly inverse motion, as in Decálogo da Classe
Média (The Decalogue of the Middle Class) by Sebastião
Nunes, with the horrendous symbolizations of the middle class ("unlikely
cross between cicadas and ants"), the proliferation of genital
organs, lizards, diverse insects, skulls full of mice, chameleons,
dogs, pigs, tricephalic bodies, but always in the midst of the most
habitual activities, like weddings, business meetings, parties,
sports; or, in Nelson de Oliveira's short stories, full of "animals
from the strangest places," "imprisoned creatures,"
haunted figures, people "moving against their own feet,"
sleepwalkers, cannibals, "primitive-mannered and malformed"
people, "more beast than man," monsters at times hideous
which, however, devote themselves to the most trivial of things-telephone
calls, checks, accounting, everyday things. These are sorts of a
particularly perverse hybridization between everyday life and the
bestial, between perversity and victimization, paralysis and annihilation.
Hence the figure of the invincible dragon, which is able to turn
into whomever, dissolving any possibility of self-identification,
of differentiation, in the short story "Não sei bem
o quê, aqui" ("I Don't Really Know What, Here").
Hence the impossibility of self-recognition for the "little
girl Victor" in the beautiful short story "A Visão
Vermelha" ("The Red Vision"), from the book Naquela
época tínhamos um gato (We had a cat in those
times). Hence the disappearance, piece by piece, of Mr. McPiffs's
body, another of Nélson de Oliveira's characters, similar
to Angelina, the "slender and dark" creature "with
big scared eyes" who devours herself in the short story "Canibal"
("Cannibal") by Moacyr Scliar. The actual boundary of
the monstrous is destabilized for the laconic refiguration of G.H's
"We are not human" in Clarice's Lispector's novel A
Paixão Segundo G.H. (The Passion According to GH).
III. Sebastião Uchoa Leite, the Indetermination of Identity
and the Noises of the Polis
From the point of view of contemporary Brazilian poetic production,
animalized, hybrid, anti-physical refigurations of the self, ambivalent
or negative unfoldings of the subject, would function as a reinforcement
of the anti-lyrical perspectives, as dramatizations of identity,
as broken conciliation between voice and figure, and would play
a particularly crucial role in works such as Sebastião Uchoa
Leite's, for example. Here the subjective alter-representations,
"entanglements of the self," "bifid tongues,"
fictions of the self, are composed of nuclear aspects of methodical
negativity. Negativity that, above all in his most recent books
and in an evident dialog with biographical circumstances, involves
an agonizing, reiterated exposure of the subject, often found in
a hospital environment, such as the section "Animal Máquina"("Machine
Animal") in A Uma Incógnita (The Incognito
One), or the ten texts that form the section "Uncertainties"
in Fiction Life, and poems such as "Agulha"
("The Needle") or "Uma Voz de Subsolo"
("A Voice from the Underground"), from A Espreita
(Lookout). But also a negativity that has in this agonizing
subject only one of the many "fictions of the self"-"Here
am I: all-the-selves/ self-scatological/ self-cryptic/ self-end"-on
which Sebastião Uchoa Leite worked. These "fictions
of the self" range from serpents, "monster/ wound around
syllepsis," to vampires-Dracula, Nosferatu-from detective heroes
to replicants and various murderers, from "Mr. Leite"
to "a cornered joão cabral/ or a laughable valéry,"
from Bogart, Robert Walker, Yves Montand, Delon, Montgomery Clift,
to "cockroach without feelers," "bat from the bar,"
from "doubly metamorphosed monsters" to "residue
from sweeping/ that is collected/ with a dustpan." Disguises,
concealment, and exchanged identities frequently convert poems into
police micro-narratives where the central element is here a climate
of general suspicion and there a kind of persecution of identity-of
the subject, of the poetic element "on the edge of a cliff."
In this sense, it is no coincidence that in Jogos e Enganos
(Games and Mistakes), one of Uchoa Leite's collections of
essays, the poet has devoted himself to the study of the "metaphor
of persecution," of the structure and fundamental repertoire
of variations on the persecution theme in modern and contemporary
cinematography. This functions as an exercise in self-reflection,
bringing to mind the scenes in shadow, the preference for slants
and sinuosity, the disguises and inversion of roles that are the
types of persecution dominant in his poetry.
At times, it is the perspective of the "fleeing persecuted"
that dominates, as in "Vida é arte paranóica"
("Life is Paranoiac Art"): "simply run/ soul of replicant/
until they hit the plexus/ perplex target." At other times,
it is the voice of a persecutor, of a spy-poet or a vampire with
"spiky nails/ pointed teeth." Then again, it is the poetry
itself that is persecuted: "We need/ radar/ and sonar intelligence/
to pick up shapes." Still other times, in a third-person distanced
perspective, it is the subject of the poem himself that is sought:
"The non-hero searches for his negative:/ his inner jack-the-ripper/
that would not want/ only to kill. / But also much more:/ to see
the entrails hanging out." Frequently, however, as Sebastião
Uchoa Leite points out in "A Metáfora da Perseguição"
("The Metaphor of Persecution"), "what seems to be
perfectly marked territory-on the one side, the persecutor, and
on the other the persecuted; on the one side, reason and on the
other non-reason-is never so in an absolute way" [4],
is also represented in "Os Assassinos e as Vítimas"
("The Murderers and the Victims"), a poem where murderers,
detectives and persecutors of all types go through an inversion
of roles and are persecuted by their victims or by the objects they
chase.
Besides the exchange of roles, however, a poetic method is forged,
itself based on an ambivalent perspective-that of "lookout,"
which suggests as much the need for a hiding place as it does a
possible strike; as much the expectation of suffering an attack
as the perpetration of a condemnable action. "(... There am
I/ still as though I were another/ hired to commit a crime...),"
we read in "Another One" ("Um Outro").
"(He, in general/ prefers to slip/ into a corner/ static/ as
a viper/ before the strike/ he observes/ silently/ the passing of
time/ controlled by the clocks/ he leafs through the pages/ of the
half-open book/ the humid index of fear)," in another poem
from 1997. Notice that in both cases the texts are, not by chance,
limited by parentheses, in a mixture of concealment and suspension,
a kind of graphic characterization of the lookout. In both poems
we anticipate potential violence of which the subject could be the
agent as well as the victim.
In the poetry of Sebastião Uchoa Leite, however, the indeterminacy
of identity is not limited to those representations of the subject,
but equally spread over the relationship between the images of the
self and those of space. Not for nothing does he point to a mutual
aquatic dissolution of subject and landscape in the series of poems
on rain in the book A Espreita (The Lookout). "Andando
na Chuva: São José" ("Walking in the
Rain: São José") is a good example: "My
self-dissolving/ water-self/ hair/ body hair/ eyes/ all pores/ letting
go". Or it reveals-see "Numa incerta noite"
("On an Uncertain Night")-a two-way contemplation, "inverted
vertigo," between the passer-by, "looking at the canopies
of the trees," and the leaves and canopies, whose "cyclopic
vegetable eye" watches him while he crosses the streets. And
neither is it by chance that his poetry points out the loss of limits
between inside and outside, observer and urban landscape, as in
"Inside/outside: Rio de Janeiro," where the "stony
street/ with hurrying/ pedestrians" seen "there, outside,"
"through the glass," seems to slide "into the glass,"
to come "from the other side of the table." One of the
most characteristic masks of the poetic subject, that of the serpent,
is even attributed to the landscape of Rio. The serpent is transferred
to Guanabara Bay in "O grande brilho" ("The
Great Sheen"), a 1991 poem: "Infused in the sea of yellows/
The green/ red spots/ Of the serpent-bay."
And, as opposed to the ethnographic and classificatory territorialization
usually employed in the neo-documentary fiction of the 1990s, the
production of a transitional zone between inside and outside, poet
and landscape, in Sebastião Uchoa Leite's poetry, seems to
reduce hierarchic distances of observation between subject and urban
matter (particularly as the roles of observer and observed may always
be inverted in his work). There are no moves towards cataloguing
urban characters, the excluded, the homeless, criminals, as in "reporting"
literature, in the near-photographic prose of recent decades.
If Sebastião Uchoa Leite's urban portrayals are populated
with "un-beings," passers-by "under blue plastic
tents," specimens of "squatting mankind," "static/
homeless/ facing the vile crowd," the poetic perspective-always
marked by a deaf violence-is not hierarchic or systemic: it is oblique.
Or, as is explained in "Exibicionistas e Voyeurs"
("Exhibitionists and Voyeurs"), a poem from Fiction
Life, "Voyeurs look askance." In this case, we could
also add that they sometimes exchange roles. This happens in two
"jotted down" poems from Fiction Life. In one of
them, "O Sobrevivente" ("The Survivor"),
a subject watches "a mad woman" who "loudly debates
Hamlet/ with herself" and registers with personal pronouns
the overlapping of observer and observed: "That 'being over
there'/ amusing himself greatly/ With my sound mind." In the
other "jotting," "A Obra Lírica"
("The Lyrical Work"), poem and feces are literally superposed,
for the said "work" results from urban litter, from a
character in a squatting position defecating right in the middle
of Azevedo Coutinho street, in Rio de Janeiro.
Even though Sebastião Uchoa Leite regularly works with police
storylines and recognizable narrative plots, it is partly through
this constant possibility of crossing identity, social, and spatial
boundaries that an uneasy feeling is intensified in a reader exposed
to liminal, ambiguous, discontinuous zones which unfold even in
the most common, everyday environments and among immediately recognizable
signs of urban landscape. Such is the case of Rio de Janeiro, the
statue of Christ, the tunnel that links Botafogo to Copacabana,
and Presidente Vargas Avenue. It is a movement towards destabilization
and deterritorialization, uncomfortable from the point of view of
poetical acceptance, which-assuming its direct relationship with
the emergence of new urban practices, with the intensification of
the asymmetric segregation of social space and of the generalization
of violence and daily uncivil acts-does not limit itself to the
inventory of Brazilian urban experience. Rather, such experience
becomes a fundamental element of structural indeterminacy and negativity,
of a difficult process of literary formalization which, in Sebastião
Uchoa Leite's work, takes advantage of the clichés of criminalization
and destabilizes them into unusual acts of confrontation and solidarity
between the subject and the "noises of the polis," thus
converting the modern topos of walks around the city, and
their implicit plots, into real antilyrical figures with a self-corroding
narrative based on a construction made from syntactic and imagined
cuts, from "non-localities," and from a "hyper-realistic
game/ between the self and the margin."
If, in the poetry of Sebastião Uchoa Leite, deterritorialization
of the urban landscape overlaps a series of identity exchanges and
disfigurations, one would have distinct poetic results, the expedient
in a similar procedure by Ítalo Moriconi, in whose book Quase
Sertão [5] (Almost Sertão),
a hybrid spatial figuration is formed-a city-desert; or by Angela
Melim, whose poetry is marked by the recurrent problematization
of the horizon; or by Duda Machado, in whose poems space is depicted
as drifting, as an escape from formalization. This is to name but
three significant examples of a movement of indeterminacy in urban
figuration in contemporary Brazilian poetry. We could also add to
this movement the window that is closed to the sight of the seascape
"in such a way as to banish, to veil the unfurled/ seafaring
afternoon," from the poem "Proscrição"
("Proscription") by Lu Menezes, the mist in which the
bay is portrayed in "Enseada" ("Bay")
by the same author; what is almost a sidewalk inscribed on the body-"imperceptible/
trail of gadfly"-in one of the poems from Fábrica
(Factory) by Fabiano Calixto, the horizon "out of all
perspective," the recurrence of the desert image, and a self-figuration
of the subject as a cactus in Solo by Ronald Polito.
If, strictly speaking, what stands out is mostly spatial destabilization,
these deterritorializations are not lacking in bloody components:
the "party suffering" referred to in one of Lu Menezes's
poems, the "armored" body of Ronald Polito, the "sensation
of heavy lead," the "stainless foot" of the factory
worker, and the "fallen body" and "coagulated landscape"
in Fabiano Calixto's book. In Sebastião Uchoa Leite's work
we find the mass thefts/ megalopic slaughters/ infanticides,"
the "man shot dead," or the "Dantesque hell of the
poor." Other examples are the "breath of hard mortality"
in Almost Sertão, the "clothes line traversing
the throat/ the comfort/ blunt dagger blade cutting the sky/ privation/
in the wire of the hanger" in the poem "Crente"
("Believer") by Angela Melim; the "wish to escape"
in "Giro" ("Whirl") by Duda Machado,
or the "battle/ fought/ somewhere," and the "I don't
know late at night/ if I'm hurt/ if my body/ is streaked/ with bruises"
in the poem "Mau Despertar" ("Bad Awakening")
by Ferreira Gullar; and finally "I am poor, poor, poor,"
"it differs and hurts, hurts"[6] from
"Vers de circonstance" by Carlito Azevedo.
The signs of violence in these figurations of the urban make reference,
of course, to the increase in violent crime and the equally violent
responses to it, to the generalization of a feeling of risk and
potential conflict and to the loss of collective feeling in everyday
big city life in Brazil. These issues have stimulated an equally
increasing number of studies in the field of social science in the
country. At times, they have the advantage of tension between political
redemocratization and expansion of bloody crimes, which doubled,
according to Angelina Peralva, "between 1980 and 1997."
In her point of view, these signs are the result of insecurity amplified
by the "interpenetration of the universe of the slums and that
of the middle class," by "authoritarian continuity,"
and by the restructuring of the relationships which were dominant
until the end of the military dictatorship "between State,
political system, nation and society" [7].
On the other hand, in City of Walls, Teresa Pires do Rio
Caldeira points out that this contradiction "between the expansion
of the political citizenship and the delegitimization of civil citizenship"
and the "disjunctive character of Brazilian democracy"
are nuclear elements of a segregationist urban experience, relating
violent criminality not only to the transformation of the "traditional
configurations of power" but also to the "delegitimization
of the judiciary system as mediator of conflicts," to the "privatization
of the processes of revenge," and to the "legalization
of forms of abuse and violation of rights" [8].
Or they can be related, as Luiz Eduardo Soares emphasizes, to the
constitutive duplicity of Brazilian social organization-a society
guided by elements of a "hierarchic cultural model" and
"socialized according to a cultural model which is characteristic
of liberal, egalitarian individualism." The duplicity of a
"liberal-democratic process" in the context of a "strong
national tradition both authoritarian and excluding" [9].
For when "the patterns of political exclusion are intense and
most of the population does not acknowledge itself as participant
of a collective journey," as Maria Alice Rezende de Carvalho
puts it, "the city becomes the object of private appropriation,
of predatory practices and of rapine, a place where social resentment
and distrust prosper" [10].
Thus, the perception of the city and of its literary figurations
as defined spatial units, as common spaces of socialization, becomes
problematic. Sometimes this perception expands into "sudden
spaces," as in "Neste fio" ("In this
wire") by Régis Bonvicino; at other times it undergoes
intense understanding, as in the "four close walls," in
the "compact, null/ cocoon," in the "sparse space"
suggested in the book Solo by Ronald Polito. Sometimes the
urban unfolds into desert, as is the case in Ítalo Moriconi's
"almost sertão," or in the "desert
city" mentioned in Duda Machado's "Whirl." Sometimes
this perception takes advantage of the "in-between spaces,"
the transition zones, as in Angela Melim's work. Nevertheless, in
the case of this literary deterritorialization, it is not only the
urban form that is the order of the day (pauta) but also an internal
process of formalization set in motion by contradictory guidance.
Thus, the spatial indetermination, the formless geography, points
in the direction of the exposure of a formal experience marked by
the exacerbation of the tensions between horizon and drift, figuration
and destabilization, persistence, and dissipation.
IV. Ítalo Moriconi and the City as Sertão
The mere superposition of the title Almost Sertão
with the photograph of a clearly urban landscape on the jacket of
the 1996 compilation of poems by Ítalo Moriconi already indicates,
through nomination, the dominance of an urban visual, albeit exposed
from one of its potential opposites. However, the protean movement,
the real condensation of the two images, does not come into effect-thus
the adverb "almost," which is responsible for the persistence
of the two geographical references and the disparity evoked by them,
and for this conjugation of city and sertão, accumulation
and desert. The structural images of the book then point simultaneously
to a common environment and to the impossibility of metaphoric conciliation.
The difference and latent conflict between them thus suggests a
methodical amorphia, a deliberate limit-"word that is missing,"
"half-words"-within this reversed figuration of the urban.
It is evident that, in this case, the images of the desert -the
silence, the rough, the "odd vegetation, full of splinters"
in the midst of the drift, the streets, "carnivals," a
"faceless crowd," a "rain of shapes," "arms,"
"hips," "delayed cars," "unlit buildings,"
"sidewalks," and a succession of anonymous love chases,
"scratching in the asphalt"-lend the evocation of the
"sertão" the possibility of exposing the
homoerotic paths of the city (the other city inserted into the regular
city, into Rio Branco Avenue, into Copacabana, into the beach, into
the everyday street corners), as well as the possibility of recurrent
tension between the most intimate and the most public, the sertão
"further inside" and the "excessively urban."
There is a tension between the ganglions imploding in the neck and
the McDonald's restaurant in (Notícias da AIDS) (News
of AIDS), "between a street corner and old anguishes"
in "Noturno" ("Nocturnal"), between "my
space," "my insoluble look," subjectivity, and a
series of transitory anonymous forms-"sharp curves," "surfaces,"
"cliffs," "vacant places"-or between the city
as described as the hollow of the night and the hollows of the male
bodies haunting the erotic imagination in "Noturno"
("Nocturnal"). This is also accompanied by class tension
between "the mature man and the street boy," between the
educated references spread throughout the poems and the object of
the love chase, defined as "simple people." There is also
tension between a spatiality marked by the accumulation of "so
many bodies," of streets, buildings, corners, and the reiteration
of images of a "rural scheme," of the desert, "imaginary
plantain tree," "a limitless void."
The reference to the sertão in the poems of Ítalo
Moriconi is not limited, however, to the trace of a homoerotic urban
experience. It also seems to indicate dualities that persist in
Brazilian literary life, oppositions and mediations between cosmopolitanism
and the local datum element, between universalization and themes
of regional, coastal, and interior character. This duality is latent,
in a somewhat ironic way, in the city that is read as rural, and
in the sertão, entangled with urban forms; the sertão,
a paradigmatic image of "brazility," of a geography of
open skies, with inclement light and usually peopled by cangaceiros
and survivors, but which is converted into the emptiness of the
night, the privileged landscape of the solitary love drift in Almost
Sertão. Spatial duality serves as a structuring principle
to, for example, "Brinde" ("Toast"),
a poem in the form of a dialog with the "Dead Ox" by Manuel
Bandeira where images of the sertão-desert ("there
is no Nile, plain or desert, only/ extension as a trace of the silence
that flows") and a possibly defined spatial configuration are
opposed, while an enumerative drift ("dragging in the dark/
chains, martyrdom, rotten logs, / mirrors and broken glass and the
rest") contrasts with a "blind nostalgia/ on the open
sea, unknown, abandoned sea of the corners."
If the sertão is already seen simultaneously as vastness,
desert, wide horizon, and as marked by sudden vegetable entanglements
(rough, rare, intricate shapes, cacti, scrub, thus suggesting a
certain potential figurative conflict), then it is not strange that
it has served as reference, in the poetry of Ítalo Moriconi,
to the exposure of opposed, conflicting images, not only of the
urban landscape but also of the poetic form and the very process
of writing. For it is by means of a split image ("All is conflict
of figure in the garden of powers of the sarcastic street")
which is, on the one hand, an abstract figure-desire of "pure,
undivided form," "the form, the form of the forms, the
desert"-and, on the other, "dislocated by fits, stars,"
"rain of figures," city. These spatial figurations are
defined in Almost Sertão as an internal disjunction,
both of the urban experience and of the poetic form.
This image conflict, related to the historical experience and the
conditions of literary production in contemporary Brazil, involves,
in the poetry of Angela Melim, both the unfolding and disfiguration
of the horizon and a methodical emphasis on the indetermination
of the figured space above all. In Duda Machado's work, such image
conflict also overlaps drift and form, constructive desire and dissipation.
V. Angela Melim and the Dramatization of the Horizon
The reproduction of the covers of all of Angela Machado’s previous
books in the collection Mais Dia Menos Dia (Sooner or
Later) functions as a dividing mark, as a way of dating and
singularizing the different sections of the volume. On the same
token, the illustrations on the covers, if carefully observed, highlight
one of the privileged images of her poetry—that of the horizon.
An irregular horizontal line crosses the bottom of the cover of
O Vidro O Nome (The Glass The Name) (1974); a straight
cut separates in two the title Das Tripas Coração
Taking Heart / Displaying Guts (1978); the female body lying
down seems to duplicate the outline of the background mountains
in the illustration on the cover of As Mulheres Gostan Muito
(Women love it) (1979); the title in miniscule, almost imperceptible
letters is displayed horizontally on a deliberate emptiness of representation
in Vale o Escrito (What Counts Is What Is Written Down)
(1981); the boats loose on the water merely suggest a possible limit
that can almost be mistaken for the top cut of the thicker paper
of the cover in Os Caminhos do Conhecer (The Paths of
Knowledge) (1981); the empty space, further on, at which a female
figure seems to point, in Poemas (Poems) (1987); finally,
Nelson Augusto’s illustration in Mais Dia Menos
Dia (Sooner or Later) (1996), where two lines and
a little dark spot evoke the relationship between subject and landscape,
poetical experience and thematization of the horizon and, through
a limit line, delimit in space the duration and image of a time
to come, which is suggested in the potential, almost near future
of the title.
“I’m looking for the right word/ for the superposed parts of two
spheres/ Intersection?/ And loneliness:” the quest expressed in
“Rabo de Galo” (“Cock’s Tail”) in the 1996 book underlines
Angela Melim’s concern with the limiting, transitional spaces, the
“rare clamps,” the in-between spaces, the half-way, the horizons.
And there is indeed a vast succession of seas and skies in her poetry.
The water that “shines tranquilly at midday,” “deep blues versus
high seas,” “torn blues/ huge/ clear landscapes,” “an occasional
purple coconut tree against the pink sky,” “the lines of shimmering
water and the blue, somewhat foggy mountains.” In the case of Angela
Melim, this succession of atmospheric and maritime horizons which,
with a tendency to the unlimited, to mirroring the “states of the
soul,” and seeming to reproduce a romantic-picturesque version of
the landscape of Rio de Janeiro, point in another direction.
They function, at once, as a way of cutting out the presence of
the world—even when, at times, they function as a backdrop (“green/
mined/ field,” “mountain of cadaver,” “violated ear, ruptured tympanum/
arms cut off/ heads”)—while they also function as a constitutive
element of the poetic experience. Thus, there is a tension, via
landscape, of the self-referent, expressive model dominant in Brazilian
poetic production of the 1970s, of which Angela Melim’s first books
are coetaneous. And, as is suggested in the text of “Minha Terra”
(“My Land”), marked by an image in negative of the land –“roots
in the air”–and of the “going back home” theme, of taking root –“Nothing
is natal”–it is about a landscape in direct contrast to descriptiveness
in the romantic mold, a descriptiveness which would leave traces
in subsequent Brazilian literature. In the poetry of Angela Melim,
the fixedness of the target point is frequently eliminated so that
diverse forms for objectifying and lyrical distancing are exercised,
as in “Assim uma Linha Verde da
Janela - Um dia” (“Thus a Green Line of the
Window - One Day”): “Thus a green line of the window–one day/ instant,
sudden/ running/ parallel to what is fast/ hill/ plain/ thin metal
stiletto/ in the background.” The “thin stiletto” is discreet, almost
imperceptible, serving a similar function to the “mined/ field”
of the poem “Fogos Juninos” (“Fireworks of June”), in terms
of the bloody unfolding of something similar to a mere descriptive
picture.
Likewise, contrastive unfoldings of the poetic voice are also attempted.
For example, in the casualness of the subject that gives information
to the traveler in “Roteiro” (“Travel Plan”) and the systematic
interruption of his speech by descriptive, impersonal, and greatly
detailed parentheses—where duplicity also attains the figurations
of space. Hence the transformations—from diaphanousness, gauze,
cloud, to the silly cheap pink—that the very idea of a pink sky
should go through in “No Céu Cor-de-Rosa” (“In the Pink Sky”),
or the mobile, suspended definition of the landscape contained in
“A Duna vira Nuvem, se quiser” (“The Dune Becomes Cloud,
if It Likes”).
It is not, then, as extension, infinity open to the gaze, or as
fixed, outlined limit that the image of the horizon seems to guide
Angela Melim’s poetic writing. Rather, it is, above all, as in-between
space, as dislocation zone, as “exploration of blind spots, of the
margins of indetermination in language and in landscape,” [11]
as Michel Collot puts it in L’Horizon Fabuleux,
which she thematizes and transports to the poetic space, the notion
of the horizon. This, from the point of view of the graphic-syntactic
organization of the poem, explains the number of structural blanks,
intervals, parentheses, and dashes in her texts. It also explains
the marked taste for the isolated, loose verse that goes through
the page, cutting or closing some of the poems like a divider, like
an internal line of the horizon, and many times intensifying the
unfolding or liminal conflict. For example, the long sentence in
“O Mar não Existe” (“The Sea Doesn’t Exist”) that, after
five short verses, internalizes a sea of absence and impossibility
in a sort of organic horizon in a state of corrosion: “Acidity is
a fire that eats the dark pipe that runs throughout the body.” Also,
the verse in “Ronca um motor” (“An Engine Roars”) from Sooner
or Later, that says, “It is summer opening up.” Separated from
the other verses by two blank spaces, this verse seems to synthesize,
by means of graphic highlight, the previous images of the boat,
the sea, and the heat. At the same time, it also appears to represent
a temporal-landscape extension “in open skies.” Yet, another horizon
accompanies it, one which is conflicting and inverts not only its
amplifying movement but also the temporal reference to a period
that is beginning—the genesis of summer transforming itself into
the image of a past that is close to dissolution: “Afternoon, ice-cream,
love/ balcony/ in bowls of the past/ melting.”
Instead of being a spatial/temporal foundation or point of guidance
from the subjective perspective, the awareness of the horizon in
the poetry of Angela Melim points, therefore, to a systematic motion
of mutual re-dimensioning of subject and landscape, of which the
reflection on death in “Lemon Brother” is a good example. That
reflection is, in fact, the mere register of a fruit that falls
and rolls on the ground “which now engulfs/ the open/ desperate
flesh/ of the lemon.” Another good example is her preference for
intervals, for the lines that figure and disfigure the space and
the writing, for a kind of dramatization of the horizon, unfolded
into diverse, albeit obligatory, forms of conflict and indetermination.
“And she would like,” we read in “Os Caminhos do Conhecer”
(“The Paths of Knowledge”), “to paint her nails red. While she
wrote the words in the notebook she would notice the fingers with
shiny tips holding the ballpoint pen and feel conflicting pleasures.”
A similar movement occurs between a “there, inside” and a “jasmine
tree” in “Mulheres” (“Women”), between an “on the surface”
and a “deep pit” in “Faca na água” (“Knife in the water”),
between “suspended crests/ stones of salt/ threads of sea” and “its
faraway bottom/ anchor/ the sand beds and their spotlessly clean
sheets” in “A Ship”—“windows,” “lakes on the chest,” “ship”—where
borderline images, types of “non-places,” are figured. To those
images we could add the sheath, the clothesline, the sea front,
the gaps, the edges, the empty space, the bars and the margin from
so many others of her poems where these conflicting directions are
tensioned and live with each other. These images, amidst a succession
of seascapes and landscapes which at first sight are sparsely populated
and almost “story less,” activate a sort of deaf, almost imperceptible
conflict between the natural picture and the historical horizon.
Among a lyrical exercise around the sun, flowers, and loss in “Corajoso
como a Beleza” (“Brave as Beauty”), with its succession of warlike
images: shots, bullet, pain, roars, combat; among “the tiles/ the
green dull chlorine/ the swimming pool” and the “wire” that preserves,
in “Álbum,” (“Album”), the “smell of jasmine” and “live blood/
held with difficulty;” the “clear blue sky” and “grenades,” “fire,
smoke,” in “Fireworks of June.” And in “Trilha” (“Trail”),
between the horizon of the city and that of the writing process,
a third, warlike zone of “siege, casualties, barricade, weapons,”
mediates the other two and seems to set new dimensions, historically,
to those horizons.
VI. Duda Machado and the Methodical Drift
Duda Machado’s poems, on the other hand, though equally marked
by a conflictive exposure of space, seem to be moved by a counter-organizational
principle, by a methodical indetermination of a more varied sort
which unfolds and re-invents from within, indicating a purposely
unstable poetic form—one of escape. This poetic form is, not by
chance, figured repeatedly by images that are marked precisely
by movement, transparency, and the tendency toward the formless,
toward deterritorialization. The images of the wind and the wave
are fundamental elements for the self-explicitness of poetic narrative
that is based on modulation (“who reigns?/ a modulation/ capable
of tuning/ understanding”), based on the tension between going off
course and condensation, between drifting and a wish for settling
down (“breeze/ just formed/ the confluence/ between passing-by and
dwelling”). These elements dominate Margem de uma onda (Edge
of a Wave) (1997), his latest book.
There is, however, since Zil, a recurrence of those aerial,
aquatic, mobile images. The association of the book to the river
is present in the initial text of this 1977 volume, in the “sea/
on the edge of the hulls” in “Verão” (“Summer”), in the “liquid,
cascading, filling” vowels, in the images of cereus jamacaru [12]
flying in “Ária” (“Aria”), or in the poem/question about
what would make a louder sound, “the flight or the singing of a
bird.” These images in motion also dominate his second book, Um
Outro (Another One) (1990): several routes, targets in
motion, the crowd defined as “windmills of arms,” the rain that
follows the young lady, a cyclist that passes by and the setting
on wheels of even “fixed ideas” (an almost paradoxical example of
the Aeolian, unstable poetic narrative of Duda Machado).
However, in Another One, winds, flights, and perpetual motion
are contrasted with an exploration, also recurrent, of the margin,
the horizon, the limit, the happening, the language. These elements
also show a contrast between “contemplator, sky and sea,” “sea and
asphalt,” “garden and evening,” “death-life.” Between a wish for
contour, outline, formalization, and a sort of hesitation of forms,
of inevitable dematerialization. “Life,/ without measure/ that meaning
/ severity,” we read in the second poem in Another One. “The
horizon,” the first stanza of “Juntos” (“Together”), goes,
“is the light/ that in such unanimous color/ extinguishes the surfaces/
which it lives on.” Just as in “Tanto Ser” (“So Much Being”)
where, in the cloudy internal mirror, “acts are disfigured” and
the body is shown as “impalpable, carcass/ that the spirit cannot
find.”
In Edge of a Wave, this tension between formalization and
dissipation, figuration and imminent disfiguration, thematized differently
throughout the whole the book, gives way to the singular poetic
narrative as exposed in “Fable of the Wind and the Form,” “Swimming
Pool Morning” and “Edge of a wave”—which is partly connected to
“Imitation of Water” by João Cabral de Melo Neto. An analogy is
established, through denial at first, between the wind and the form,
incompatible elements in a state of undiminishing disagreement because,
on the one hand, of the desire for persistence which is characteristic
of the form and, on the other hand, of the fleeting aspect which
is characteristic of the wind. In both cases, however, the diverse
routes signal a correspondence, in reverse, between these differences,
which lead to mutual self-denial (with the form, through the activation
of a process of multiple unfolding in metamorphosis, and with the
wind, due to the possibility that it can suddenly take a form, supposing
its movement strikes, for example, “an Aeolian harp/ or Calder’s
mobiles,” as the poem’s two last verses emphasize).
In the case of this fable, the curious fact lies not only in the
“unison disagreement” on which it is based, but also on the very
fact that the two images necessarily lead towards their own demise,
as is the case with the voice that “withdraws” in “Interferência”
(“Interference”), with the color that “falls on itself” in “Aventura
da Cor” (“Adventure of the Color”), with the details that are
“shaped by desegregation” in “Poética do Desastre” (“Poetry
of Disaster”), with the “fatigue” that “to each thing/ unfolds and
dissipates” in “Dentro do Espelho” (“Inside the Mirror”),
or with the bedroom that “after condensing/ time and space” focuses
on the window and finds the emptiness and “the limits of the sidewalk/
below” in “Resumo Quasi Abstrato” (“Almost Abstract Summary”).
In the midst of this succession of dissolution and the threat of
self-annihilation which is built into the images that dominate so
many of these poems, it is not strange that some of them are converted,
on the contrary, into genealogies of form, such as “Traço e Movimento”
(“Line and Movement”), “Fragmentos para Novalis”
(“Fragments for Novalis”), “Condição” (“Condition”), or “À
Noite na Estrada” (“On the Road at Night”). Neither is it strange
that form and drift are presented in an explicitly geminated way
in the poem “Trevo” (“Clover”): “an image in drift/ so dense/
in its self-absorption/ that it excites/ the desire for form/ until
it dies away/ and its drift is reaffirmed/ eight octaves higher.”
A fundamental element of Duda Machado’s poetic method, it is not
merely a reflection on indetermination, but rather a composition
process which is in itself—and not only in its images—internally
tensioned by structural negativity and resistance to formal unification.
Internal tensioning is manifested both by means of an expedient
that is recurrent in enumeration—exemplified by his two “Almanaques”
(“Almanacs”), in contradictory images (“and at 40oC
a wintry unhappiness”), and by means of sudden cuts in the poem:
another voice (as in the third stanza of “Fala” (“Speech”)
or in the middle of “Corte e Costura” (“Sewing”); dots (as
in “Album”); an interval as in “Psiu” (“Hey”), and the rest
of “Fantasma Camarada” (“Friendly Ghost”); an exchange of
register (as in the impersonality of the first six stanzas and the
intimacy of the last two verses of “Oração com Objetos”
(“Sentence with Objects”); a question (as in the verses in brackets
of “Edge of a wave”).
Tensioning is equally manifested, in the poetry of Duda Machado,
through the irruption of extremely concrete, almost brutal images
among aerial figures and formal dissipations: the beggar in “Flores
de Flamboyant” (“Flamboyant Flowers”); the scenes showing persecution,
searching and execution in “Fim de Semana”
(“Weekend”); the bus passengers converted into indistinct hybrid
beings in “Carapicuíba,” the egg-laying and the carrion children
in “Urubu-Abaixo”(“Vulture Below”). This spatial figuration
is represented by the poet himself in “Devoração da
Paisagem” (“Devouring the Landscape”). In this poem, an appropriately
tranquilizing first stanza, with a simple description of a view—houses,
hills, trees, road, and brook—is followed by three deterritorializations:
the first in the sense of an expansion—“colors that surpass distances,”
“the look that wanders and remains/ in search of its home;” the
second in the sense of an unfolding of the target, a contraction
in the landscape—“from somewhere,/ away from the retinas/ the beast
bursts forth;” the third showing the imprisoned landscape, relating
its devouring. At the same time there is the suggestion of a sort
of historical and formal impossibility of the landscape and of bloodless
spatial figurations. Hence the frayed superposition–“almost”–of
sertão and city in the poetry of Ítalo Moriconi, the conflicting
unfolding of horizons in Sooner or Later by Angela Melim,
Sebastião Uchoa Leite’s indeterminations of identity, and the counter-formalization
converted into active principle of composition in Duda Machado’s
work. These are distinct exercises of deterritorialization and spatial
non-representability which, through denial and conflict, seem to
contribute, on the contrary, to the intensification of the perception
of the present moment, as they amplify formal investigation itself
when poetic practice intersects with the recent historical unfolding
of an urban experience as violent, segregating, and authoritarian,
such as that of Brazil.
Notes
1 Xavier, Ismail. “O cinema brasileiro dos anos
90” (entrevista). IN: Praga. Estudos Marxistas no. 9. São
Paulo, Hucitec, 2000, p. 110-111; p. 116-117. See also Mário Sérgio
Conti. “Encontros Inesperados” (Entrevista com Ismail Xavier). IN:
Mais!. Folha de S. Paulo Dec. 3, 2000. p. 8-9.
2 Caldeira, Teresa Pires do Rio. Cidade de Muros.
Crime, Segregação e Cidadania em São Paulo. São Paulo, Editora
34/ EDUSP, 2000. p. 9.
3 Id. Ibid. p. 11.
4 Leite, Sebastião Uchoa. Jogos e enganos.
Rio de Janeiro, Editora UFRJ; São Paulo: Editora 34, 1995. p. 140.
5 Sertão is a region of dry hills and scrub
in Brazil’s drought-ridden northeast.
6 In Portuguese this is a play on words “difere”
= differs/ “fere” = hurts: “difere, fere, fere”.
7 Peralva, Angelina. Violência e Democracia:
o paradoxo brasileiro. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2000. p. 22,
p. 59, p. 84, p. 89.
8 Caldeira, Teresa, op. cit. p. 343.
9 Soares, Luiz Eduardo. “Uma Interpretação do Brasil
para contextualizar a violência”. IN: Pereira, C. Alberto Messeder;
Rondelli, Elizabeth; Shollhammer, Karl-Erik e Herschmann, Michael
(org.). Linguagens da Violência. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2000.
p. 34-36.
10 Carvalho, Maria Alice Rezende de. “Violência
no Rio de Janeiro: uma reflexão política”. IN: Pereira et alii (org.).
Linguagens da Violência. p. 56.
11 Collot, Michel. L’ Horizon Fabuleux
II. XX e Siècle. Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1988. p. 17.
12 In Portuguese, mandacaru, a characteristic
plant of the sertão.
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