Journey of Resistance and Literary Tactics in the Works of Conceição Evaristo
The second day of the Brazilian Days, 30th September 2016,
seminar featured a lecture by Sara Brandelleiro from the University of Leiden,
on Brazilian writer and poet Conceição
Evaristo.
Born and raised in one of the poorest favelas in Belo Horizonte in 1946,
Evaristo nevertheless managed to graduate from high school and move to Rio de
Janeiro, where she became a teacher. At the end of the 1970s she became an
undergraduate student of language and literature, going on to a master’s degree
in Literature and finally finishing a PhD in Compared Literature three years
ago*. In November this year, Evaristo will be celebrating her 70th
birthday and although she has been writing since the 90s, it is only in the
last 10 years or so that she has gained national and international recognition.
There are many angles from which one can understand and interpret the
content and the recurrent themes in Evaristo’s
authorship. To begin with, the author’s childhood experience of growing
up in a poor, black community, where the women of the family, i.e. Evaristo’s
own mother and her aunts kept the oral tradition of ‘storytelling’, inherited
through generations. Evaristo and her siblings learned to listen and tell and
would go on to create their own stories based on pictures they would find in
old magazines or books, before they themselves could read or write. This same
childhood experience was also one that centered around the low-scale, underpaid
jobs that the women in the family managed to get as nannies or maids, working
for the well-to-do white families, a fact reminiscent of the earlier
generations’ lives as house slaves, taking
care of the white slave masters’ children and doing their cooking and laundry.
This collective and individual experience and memory of black ancestry,
black women, poverty, diaspora and slavery has been expressed by Evaristo
herself as the act of “Escrevivência”,
expressing the many layers and influences that Evaristo considers make up her
writings. In addition to short stories, articles
and two novels, Evaristo recently published a poetry collection called “Poemas
de Recordação” – Poems of Remembrance/recollection. Although it would be impossible here to faithfully
reproduce the elaborate interpretation of the poems that Sara Brandelleiro undertook
during her lecture, we nevertheless bring you one of them below as an example of
Evaristo’s powerful and dense writing:
Recordar
é preciso.
O mar vagueia onduloso
sob os meus pensamentos
A memória bravia lança o leme:
Recordar é preciso.
O movimento vaivém nas águas-lembranças
dos meus marejados olhos transborda-me a vida,
salgando-me o rosto e o gosto.
Sou eternamente náufraga,
mas os fundos oceanos não me amedrontam
e nem me imobilizam.
Uma paixão profunda é a bóia que me emerge.
Sei que o mistério subsiste além das águas.
A memória bravia lança o leme:
Recordar é preciso.
O movimento vaivém nas águas-lembranças
dos meus marejados olhos transborda-me a vida,
salgando-me o rosto e o gosto.
Sou eternamente náufraga,
mas os fundos oceanos não me amedrontam
e nem me imobilizam.
Uma paixão profunda é a bóia que me emerge.
Sei que o mistério subsiste além das águas.
To remember is
necessary.
The sea wavers and flows unto my thoughts
Untamed Memory steers the rudder:
To remember is necessary.
The aqueous memories’ rocking movement
Cause my brimming eyes to overflow with life
Salting my face and my palate.
I am forever lost at sea
But the depths of the oceans do not intimidate
Nor do they constrain me.
A deep passion emerges as my buoy.
I know the mystery survives
beyond the seas.
(Translation by Sofie
Saboia)
Although some of Evaristo’s short stories have already been translated
into English and French, it is harder to come by any official translation of
her poetry collection. There are, however, academic papers and specific sites
on the internet, which include the translation of some of her poems:
Written by Maria Ulsig
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