Pensativities: Selected Essays

The Brazilian Sertão* in the Mozambican Savannah

I shall begin with a story. A true story. At the turn of the nineteenth century, a Mozambican woman by the name of Juliana lived in the peace and quiet of her little island, and in the serene contemplation of the waters of the Indian Ocean. Her life’s limited world would be changed one afternoon when her father, a prosperous merchant called Sousa Mascarenhas, brought home a sick man. The guest was burning with fever and in order to ensure his treatment, he was accommodated in a room in their large townhouse. Juliana became his nurse, responsible for the intruder’s gradual recovery.

During his convalescence, Juliana and the man fell in love. Juliana’s tender care was returned by means of verses scrawled on loose sheets of paper. Not long afterwards, the two were married. In the long soirées held in the colonial mansion, the educated people of the island would come together and the man would recite his poetry. These soirées witnessed the birth of the first nucleus of poets and writers on Mozambique Island, the first capital of colonial Mozambique. That man was a Brazilian, and his name was António Gonzaga. Years later, he and his beloved Juliana died and were buried in the island’s little cemetery.

The birth of Mozambican poetry was heralded by an encounter, or more appropriately, a marriage, between two people. What happened was a premonition of the wider union of minds that would later prevail.

More than a century later, an intellectual trend was born concerned with defining Mozambican identity. By this time, there was a clear need to break with Portugal and European models. Writers such as Rui de Noronha, Noémia de Sousa, Orlando Mendes and Rui Nogar, practised a form of writing that was linked more closely to the land and to the people of Mozambique.

What they needed was a literature that might help them to discover and reveal their native land. Once again, Brazilian poetry came to the assistance of Mozambicans. Manuel Bandeira was possibly the most important figure on this second journey. But Manuel Bandeira wasn’t the only one. Along with him came others such as Mário de Andrade, sharing their homeless homeland together, but what they all had in common was a desire to seek out what they called “the Brazilianization of their language.” The Mozambicans discovered, in the work of these poets and writers, the possibility of writing in another way, closer to the speech patterns of their homeland, without falling into the temptation of exoticism.

What these writers from Brazil were doing wasn’t just a stylistic exercise. Their writing was a result of their willingness to be possessed by and to take possession of Brazilian culture. It was a question of writing being conquered by speech, and of territories, formerly the preserve of so-called high culture, being flooded by popular culture.

Mário de Andrade wrote, “I care little whether I am writing just as the Portuguese do; what I write is the Brazilian language: for the simple fact that it is my language, the language of my country, Brazil.”

Bandeira didn’t react against Portugal. He just wanted to forget it. The Brazilians were now yielding to the luxury of forgetfulness. But this detachment from memory wasn’t possible in the Mozambican case. Mozambique was still a colony. It was necessary to be “against.” How, then, to find in the art of writing, a weapon that promised a fertile future? The question asks for some new encounter, some nourishment with which to gain strength and hope in order to move History forward.

For this, authors such as Graciliano Ramos, Jorge Amado, Rachel de Queiroz and poets like Carlos Drummond de Andrade and João Cabral de Melo Neto, served as sources of inspiration. Mozambique drank from the spirit of another continent. Two oceans couldn’t separate what culture and History had made neighbours. Jorge Amado was banned in Portugal, but the Portuguese colonial authorities didn’t believe that anyone read in Mozambique. For them, the book was a seed with no soil. They were mistaken in their calculation; the seed germinated and bore fruit. José Craveirinha (our greatest poet, who died recently), Rui Knopfli, Luís Carlos Patraquim and so many others, all confessed to being influenced by him and the distinct way in which Brazil helped us to find our own way forward.

Apart from these writers and their skills, other much more far-reaching, telluric phenomena were occurring. The Mozambican and Brazilian peoples didn’t just share the same language but also shared that which developed out of the language, distinguishing it from the Portuguese of Portugal. In both cases, the development of the language was influenced by those of Bantu origin, which introduced affinities between our variant and that of Brazil.

At a deeper level, however, cultural and religious influences were at work. The Brazilian cultural matrix is profoundly influenced by the contribution of African slaves. We tend only to acknowledge isolated aspects of this influence. But its origin is deeper: it embraces the realm of religious thought. Our relationship with the divine is the bedrock of our spirituality, both as individuals and as a collectivity. Although there are clear differences between East and West Africa (from where Brazil received most of its influences), the truth is that we share gods and the same religious logic, far more than we do language and culture.

I shall leave it for others to talk about my own case. My trajectory has been one marked by poetry and I must pay homage to poets such as João Cabral de Melo Neto, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and above all, Adélia Prado. But my most important influence is essentially João Guimarães Rosa.

João Guimarães Rosa and I

My country contains within it various countries, profoundly divided among a wide variety of social and cultural universes. I am Mozambican, the son of Portuguese immigrants, I lived under the colonial system, I fought for Independence, I lived through radical social change from socialism to capitalism, from the revolution to civil war. I was born in a pivotal period, between a world that was being born and another that was dying: between a country that never was and another that is still being born. This situation of living on a frontier left its mark on me. The two sides of me require a medium, a translator. Poetry came to my rescue to bridge these distant worlds.

And it was poetry that gave me the prose writer, João Guimarães Rosa. When I read him for the first time, I experienced a sensation I had already felt when listening to the storytellers of my childhood. I didn’t just read his text, but I also heard the voices of my childhood. Rosa’s books drew me out of the written word as if I had suddenly become selectively illiterate. To enter into those texts, I had to undertake an act beyond reading, requiring a verb that as yet has no name.

More than just his invention of words, what struck me was the emergence of a poetry that withdrew me from the world, that made me unexist. It was language in a state of trance, language that fell into a trance like the mediums in magical and religious ceremonies. It was as if there were some deep intoxication that was allowing other languages to take possession of it, just as a dancer does in my country, when he doesn’t limit himself to dancing. He prepares for possession by the spirits. The dancer only dances in order to create that divine moment when he can migrate from his own body.

To achieve that relationship with writing, one needs to be a writer. However, at the same time it is crucial to be a non-writer, to submerge oneself in the realm of orality and escape the rationality of the laws of writing, which present writing as the only system of thought. This is the challenge facing the practitioner of an unbalancing act: to have one foot in each world, that of the text and that of the word. It’s not just a matter of visiting the world of orality. One needs to allow oneself to be invaded by and fused with the universe of speech, legends, and proverbs. João Guimarães Rosa delayed his entry into the world of writing, and for much of his life, remained a non-writer. As a doctor and a diplomat, he was someone who visited literature but didn’t take up permanent residency there.

The storytellers of my country have to follow a ritual when they finish their narration. They have to “close” the story. In “Closing” the story, happens when the narrator speaks to the story itself. It is thought that historical accounts are taken out of a box left behind by Guambe and Dzavane, the first man and first woman. At the end of the ceremony, the narrator turns to the story — as if the story were a protagonist — and tells it: “Go back to the house of Guambe and Dzavane.” In this way, the story is shut away back inside the primordial trunk.

What happens when the story isn’t “closed”? The crowd of listeners falls ill, struck down by a malady known as dreaming sickness. João Guimarães Rosa is a narrator who didn’t close the story. We who listened to him, fell ill. What’s more, we fell in love with this illness, this magic, this gift for fantasy.

We are, in fact, in the presence not just of a creator of words, but of a poet who reinvents prose. It’s as if there were an earthquake in the heart of writing, a language in a state of trance, just like the African dancer preparing to be possessed. We catch this act at the precise moment when it has ceased being a dance and is becoming the vehicle for exchange between body and soul. A language creating disorder, capable of converting language into the state of initial chaos, is the bearer of the most fundamental upheaval because it is the founder of a new beginning. João Guimarães Rosa is a master: an educator in the unfamiliarities so necessary to us if we are to understand a world that is only legible beyond the borderline of the laws of writing.

Between the Sertão and the Savannah:

The Reinvention of Landscape

The sertão is an almost untranslatable word. Dominated by the arid plains and barren lands of the interior, it gives its name to one of the poorest regions of Brazil. Embracing more than a third of the country’s territory (larger than many European countries), the sertão is not, however, a geographical term. “The sertão,” Guimarães Rosa said, “is within us.”

The sertão is therefore a world in the process of being invented. All this can be said about the savannah, the space where the African landscape is not only constructed but also defined. The sertão and the savannah are thus worlds constructed in language. Within these territories the reader is both the journey and the traveller. However, although these territories invite us to walk within them, they are not spaces that one crosses. For Rosa, the sertão is, itself, the crossing (“crossing” in fact being the word that closes his novel, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands).

What grips us when we read Rosa is what he pursued in his writing, “that moving, intractable, disturbing thing that rebels against any logic,” that thing that declares itself in the silence of the sertão, in the portent of the path ahead, in the poetry that is a journey from the desert to the oasis.

It is important to place João Guimarães Rosa’s work in its historical context. Books such as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands were written as Brazilians witnessed the birth of a capital city, where previously there was nothing, right in the middle of the sertão (Brasília had just been built); this completed a process of centralized control over that multiple and elusive reality. In truth, the sertão was mythologized in order to counter certain aspirations toward homogeneity and modernization in the emergent Brazil. Rosa doesn’t write about the sertão. He writes as if he were the sertão. A sertão full of stories to counter the course of History.

One needs to abandon reason in order to look at this Brazil which Guimarães Rosa shows us, as if in order to touch reality, a certain hallucinatory gift were necessary, a madness capable of redeeming the invisible. Writing isn’t a vehicle for arriving at an essence. Writing is the journey, the discovery of other dimensions and mysteries that lie beyond appearances. “When nothing happens, there is a miracle that we cannot see.”

The Devil to Pay in the Backlands reveals a political positioning, not because it is constructed on the basis of an ideology, but because, in its very language, João Guimarães Rosa suggests a utopia, a future beyond what he denounces as an attempt at an “improved form of destitution.” His language, which mediates between that of the educated classes and that of the backlands country folk, didn’t exist in Brazil. Through his collective form of writing, João Guimarães Rosa presents a Brazil in which the marginalized might take part in the invention of its History.

And here, we reach a way forward that will enable us to share one of the few certainties that Rosa left us: what a writer gives us isn’t books. What he gives us through his writing is a world. We were unaware of that world, and yet it existed within us as a silent memory of some lost enchantment. The light and shadow of the page already lay dormant within us. In a sense, reading reawakens that enchantment for us. That is the sensation felt when we discover the written work of João Guimarães Rosa.

One Work Against the Whole Oeuvre

Guimarães Rosa turned his back on an oeuvre. He refused to make a career out of literature. What interested him without a doubt was the intensity of an experience that bordered on the religious. Three of his books were published posthumously. The important thing for Rosa wasn’t the books but the act of writing itself.

In his Poetics of Music, Stravinsky wrote: “We have a duty toward music, namely, to invent it.” The writer’s duty towards language is to recreate it, rescuing it from the process of trivialization established by common usage. For Guimarães Rosa, language needed to “flee from the inflexibility of commonplace expression, escape from viscosity, from somnolence.” It wasn’t simply a matter of aesthetics, but, as far as he was concerned, it had to do with the very meaning of writing. He wanted to explore the potential of language, by challenging conventional narrative processes, and allowing the written word to be penetrated by myth and by orality.

In this way, Rosa carried out a project to free writing from the weight of its own rules. To achieve this, he made use of everything: neologisms, disrupted catchphrases, reinvented proverbs, and reclaimed material from oral culture placing all of it not merely in footnotes, but at the heart of the text.

Word magic and the narration magic are not two separate processes. Guimarães Rosa works outside common sense (he creates an uncommon sense), he evokes the deep mystery in simple things, he gives us the pure quality behind everyday concerns.

This fascination with the creative power that a reinvented language can exert over us was expressed by Rosa when he wrote about Hungarian: “From his earliest understanding of it, every Hungarian writer aspires to create his own ‘language,’ with its own vocabulary and syntax, its written personality. More than this: it is almost impossible for every Hungarian writer not to have his own, personal idiom. Its range is magical.” Perhaps it is no coincidence that Chico Buarque makes himself an apprentice and a writer in Hungarian in his 2003 novel, Budapest.

A narration’s territory isn’t a place, but consists of the journey itself. Its discourse is in constant mutation and the different characters are different voices in dialogue. Narration isn’t the privilege of one sole entity, invested with the responsibility of organizing the wisdom and knowledge of others. Riobaldo isn’t just the protagonist-narrator of The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, but a kind of smuggler between literature, urban culture, and the oral culture of the inhabitants of the sertão. In his writing, João Guimarães Rosa undertakes a fusion of feelings and meanings, a bridge between modernity and rural tradition, between the modern epic form and the logic of the traditional story. This, at heart, is Brazil itself.

This is the challenge behind the unceasing search for a pluralistic identity that still faces Brazil. Mozambique faces the same challenge. More than a turning point, what we need today is a medium, someone who uses powers that don’t come from science or technology, in order to connect these different universes. What we need is to be connected with those whom Rosa called “the folk on the far side.” That side is within each and every one of us.

Address to the Brazilian Academy of Letters,

Rio de Janeiro, August 2004.