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Representing as it does the ideology of an
essentially agrarian country, and associated with the colonial
system of mercantile capitalism as being a colony for
exploration/exploitation, verdeamarelismo does not
disappear with modernism and its attendant processes of
industrialisation and urbanisation, as Chauí effectively
delineates. It will remain throughout cultural developments
and will represent the bridge between the ideology of national
character and that of national identity: 'If in the past the
culture of ‘verdeamarelismo' corresponded to the
celebratory self-image of the dominant classes, now it
operates as imaginary compensation for the peripheral and
subordinate condition of the country' (36), in regard to the
Brazilian people. Racial democracy is maintained on the basis
of a new image of the 'people' who are 'overall, on one hand,
the bandeirante [6] or taming sertanista
[7] of
the territory and, on the other hand, the poor, that is, ‘the
hard workers of Brazil'.' (38).
Durcan poetically represents
these differences among the people, as in for example, the
nine-year-old shoeshine boy, at Congonhas airport, wearing a
t-shirt that reads 'Pacific Waves', or the popular wisdom of
the native of São Paulo who says that: 'Life is a game of the
hips' ('A vida é um jogo de cintura').
[8] The poet deconstructs the bridge between the 'national
character' and the identity of the Brazilian people and
questions the image that still lasts in relation to the
devoted, honest, orderly and gentle family, where there are
opportunities for all, as in the soccer myth.
In 'Recife Children's Project, 10 June 1995',
the poet shows the determination of the governing social
system that does not allow changes in the condition of
marginalised people, when he mentions that the day care centre
managed by Irish priest Frank Murphy was meant for children
whose mothers worked on the streets as prostitutes because
they had no other choice. Durcan ironically describes how the
Irish priest from Wexford reproduced the Brazilian sign of
'everything's OK' with a thumbs-up gesture when he finished
reciting the verses 'Rage for Order' by his fellow poet, Derek
Mahon, and stated: 'This is what we do in Brazil.' The
aesthetic power of the poetic discourse is completed when it
crosses boundaries and associates religious work in the
streets of Recife with Che Guevara:
Father
Frank Murphy, Founder of the Recife Children's Project,
Thirty
years working in the streets of Recife,
For whom
poetry is reality, reality poetry,
Who does
not carry a gun,
Who does
not prattle about politics or religion,
Whose sign
is the thumbs-up sign of Brazil,
Who puts
his hand on your shoulder saying
'This is
what we do in Brazil.'
Che?
Frank!
No icon he
–
Revolutionary hero of the twentieth century. (16)
Racism and discrimination continue to be erased
in the present system as an effect of the founding myth; and
due to this, Marilena Chauí finishes her book, at a time when
the country is to commemorate its 500 years of existence, with
the question 'Celebrate?, is there in fact anything to
celebrate?' She affirms that Brazilian society still retains
the marks left by the era of the colonial slave society with
its highly hierarchical structure, where 'social and
inter-subjective relations always occur in relation to a
superior person, who commands, and an inferior person, who
obeys' (89). In the poem 'Fernando's Wheelbarrows,
Copacabana', Durcan recovers the asymmetries of invisibility
and rearranges them using the aesthetic power of irony:
Fernando's
forebears were slaves from Senegal.
Fernando
is a free man, proudest of the proud.
I have
requested that Fernando
Be my
guide in Copacabana:
My guide,
my governor, my master. (20)
Nevertheless, such inverted hierarchy is just
an illusion.
...
I rejoice
in the remote way Fernando shakes my hand.
I rejoice
in the comotose stars of Fernando's eyes.
I rejoice
in the reticence of Fernando's laughter. (20)
All the
naturalised portrayals of people as generous, happy and
sensual, even in times of suffering, are nullified by the
climax of the poem when the
major 'silenced' differences
feed a utopian desire to emigrate, to
escape from misery, 'to make it in America', but the destiny
is North America: Phoenix, Arizona.
The only
time Fernando breaks his silence
Is at the
midpoint of our giro;
Fernando
reveals to me his dream
Of
emigrating to Phoenix, Arizona.
Fernando
has a young wife and children.
He
explains by means of his hands
And by two
words – Phoenix, Arizona.
His hands
with rhetorical ebullience exhort:
Phoenix, Arizona is the good life! (21)
Sport, the third element of the verdeamarelismo
cultural tripod, is deconstructed
in the poem after which the book is named, 'Greetings to Our
Friends in Brazil'. Durcan describes a certain Sunday that
could be any ordinary Sunday were it not for an invitation
received from his friend Father Patrick O'Brien to watch the
Irish football finals between counties Mayo and Kerry. The
iconic nature of sport as a symbol for the Brazilian people,
unleashed a process of superimposition of two or more cultures
when Durcan transcribes in a poetic way the comments made by
the [Irish] reporter during the final minutes of the game, 'We
haven't had time to send greetings to our friends in Brazil /
Proinnsias O Murchu and Rugierio da Costa e Silva'. This
greeting bears the hallmark of the popular Brazilian sport,
here identified with the Gaelic football finals. The
translational effect (Bhabha) of the greeting unites both
sports transforming them into a global myth. Durcan, however, in the process of appropriating the
myth, debases its intrinsic value and, ironically,
the
national sport that saves a subservient people from anonymity,
is transformed into the last resource of someone in a state of
psychological depression who confronts the meaning of life
through the smile of an indigent woman, to whom he gives a
lift on his way back home:
For the
remaining nine miles I held on to the driving wheel
As if it
were the microphone on the bridge of a ship going down;
Going over
the tops of the crests of the blanket bogs;
Navigating
Bunnacurry, Gowlawaum, Bogach Bawn;
Muttering
as if my life depended on it:
Greetings to our friends in Brazil.(10)
The local routes taken on that
Sunday intersect the paths of memory that give life to
'others' - to strangeness or the uncanny - throughout the
poem; for example, the German soldier who used to live in a
house on Achill Island, now his own home; or, George Steiner's
autobiography read by the friend who lent him his book
Jerome. The references to deserted places such as the
Sahara, Siberia and Gobi appear side-by-side with the same
landscapes of the West Coast of Ireland (Bunnacurry, Gowlawaum,
Bogach Bawn), that open up other paths
for his interior journey, evoking genocides,
ethnic cleansings, improvidences, and exegesis of the word
mercy that leads him to pray at the end of the poem 'Greetings
to our friends in Brazil': ('Let me pray/Greetings to our
friends in Brazil').
Boland analyses this poem and concludes that Durcan proposes a
global human experience instead of an insular one when he
writes about different cultures. He believes that this
overlapping of experiences is the global vision of the poet
that brings together diverse experiences 'through a shared
history of conflict, suffering, and, potentially, friendship'
(126). However, I suggest that Durcan in fact transcends this
polarity of the local and the global by means of an aesthetics
of simultaneity of space and time, disrupting the paradigms of
linearity and logical processes of thought. The centrifugal
and centripetal movements of his creative mind reflect a
process of expansion of the poetic consciousness, of a vision
that goes beyond the global experience and promotes a surreal
experience of the quotidian, of the daily life of the
universe, of a journey through unknown geographic spaces that
provoke the `transcendence' of experiences of the place of
origin, and the realisation of distant roots. |
