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Outstanding Brazilian WritingWritten by Terence Roberts
Sunday, 16 May 2010 00:00
-by Miguel Nenevé and Rose Siepamann
THE FIRST notable quality about ‘Have You Heard the Owl Hooting? (Você Já Ouviu A Coruja Piar?)’, a collection of seven short-stories by Miguel Nenevé, a Brazilian professor of Literature at The University Of Guyana, and Rose Siepamann, a Brazilian creative writer and naturalistic painter at present in the USA, is the appropriate design of their book by Editora Baruana of Sao Paulo, Brazil. I mention this point because in the context of important developments which are at present taking place between Brazil and Guyana on economic and technical fronts, an obscure but vitally important area of Brazil’s progress like its book publishing industry, has much to teach present-day Guyana.
One of the huge differences between Guyana and its Latin American neighbours is whereas European colonials in Latin America firmly transplanted a cultural industry like book publishing, in Guyana, such a colonial industry fell to the wayside and withered away without similar professional guidance and technical know-how in the anti-colonial era.
Nenevé and Siepamann’s slim volume, by the Baraúna publishing house in Sao Paulo, is beautifully designed with a firm glossy cardboard cover bent inward front and back, with the writers’ photos, etc. This is a style of design used by leading creative writers’ publishing houses in Portugal, Spain, Italy, and France.
Nenevé and Siepamann are not ‘big-city’ writers; they come from Santa Catarina in Brazil’s backlands, and all seven stories -- the title story is written by both writers -- are based on the lives of people from this rural area still steeped in the lore of its wild tropical landscape, magic, or superstition, and a rudimentary class-consciousness; Brazil being a huge and very nationalistic country, with many people closely supportive and sensitively aligned with their specific region or state.
Four or five decades ago, many Brazilians in rural areas knew very little about anywhere else other than Brazil. Nenevé and Siepamann are concerned about the lifestyle of their countrymen and women from the backlands. Their stories are generally written from an involved perspective, using the first person, third person, or retelling an original oral tale.
Basic theme
However, the basic theme which drives these stories is the division that occurs between individuals, or groups, or ‘classes’ in societies like Brazil, where intellectual and economic progress can define those who appear stagnant socially, and where those who tend to regard their successful involvement in a modern way of life (ie. formal education, civic or governmental power, ‘big-city’ lifestyles etc) as a sort of inevitable vantage point from which rural or ‘undeveloped’ lifestyles are observed and judged.
Nenevé and Siepamann’s characters are often self-conscious and sensitive about their relationship to ‘modern’ ways of life. The theme of the entire book of stories concerns the dichotomy which Claude Levi-Strauss, the brilliant French structural anthropologist, had observed emerging in Brazil (and South America) since the 1930s when he lived among some of Brazil’s native tribes and later wrote ‘Tristes Tropiques’, one of the 20th Century’s major books about the erosion, or absorption, of the ‘primitive’ by the ‘modern’.
In many ways, ‘Have You Heard The Owl Hooting?’ displays the same ironic reaction and concern for often misunderstood and belittled lifestyles that Levi-Strauss expressed in ‘Tristes Tropiques’, and other writings on Brazil.
From the value point of good writing, or, in other words, that point where the style or how something written summarizes the quality and effect of a story, Nenevé’s ‘Better Days’, the first story in the book, is also its best writing.
Rose Siepamann is good at presenting her stories on the level of content, or straightforward telling. This approach serves her interest in spiritual enigmas seemingly unexplained by language or ‘writing’, as in her story, ‘The River Keeper’, where a hunter in the story ends up facing a supernatural mystery, conveyed in writing which pretends that the story we are reading has nothing to tell because it has met a power, or force, greater than itself, or greater than creative literature.
Nenevé, on the other hand, achieves multiple values of open-mindedness, social optimism, and spiritual humility in the brilliant short-story, ‘Better Days’ because of the story’s detached yet involved first-person viewpoint.
It is a story of a young man, Ivo, who overcomes all the negative judgments and condemnations based on his ostracized family history in his native small-town. Nenevé is able to convey both the unfair plight of Ivo, and a human response to it via the writer’s, or teller’s, presence in the story, first as part of a group of villagers denoted by the use of ‘we’, then later by the sudden emergence of the first-person singular. The reader then becomes the writer, sharing a sense of involvement and wonder at the social success of what at first was considered a fate of misfortune.
Siepamann’s ‘His Excellency, Mr. Felizbino Gomes’, the book’s second story, relies more on the conventional third-person narrative style to convey the story of a small-town mayor who uses his authority to detain and rape a gentle and simple-minded, but also vivacious and desirable wandering female vagrant named Ambling.
She produces a son, who grows up to be as “insane, bizarre, and wild” as His Excellency, the Mayor. Though the story is told under the shelter of a folktale related orally by elders of the community, it hardly conceals the obvious emotional revulsion and pity of the female psyche writing it. Though the falsely objective third-person narrative does not permit a deeper involved perspective into the two characters of Ambling and Gomes, the story throws up enormous historical implications about the intimate relations between master and slave, serf and overlord, the powerful and the powerless.
Human evocations
Her story evokes human implications which, in the history of all the Americas, as well as today, involves relations between dissimilar beings in race, culture, education and power, whose intimate involvement can lead to negative or positive results. One of the profoundly interesting common situations that emerged from European colonization of the entire Americas was the intimate and physical attraction which occurred between European men (and surely by European women, but to a more secretive extent) with traditional habits of sexual or physical attraction, and females of another colour and mental attributes.
Suddenly, the isolated new continental situation and its crude reins of power in the hands of conquerors became blurred and eroded by the physical and often lustful attraction for others who did not exercise the same skills, attitudes, and physical standards of beauty, yet in their own way were very physically and even mentally attractive.
How those powers responded to such attraction for the ‘other’ determined the positive or negative results of such unions. Siepamann’s story, ‘His Excellency…’ reveals by its singular focus a strong emotional exposure of wrongdoing , which, however, does not defile other countless examples of successful intimate and romantic unions between those of different physical and mental attributes across the Americas.
In another Siepamann story, ‘The Girl Who Worked Miracles’, the girl’s powers of healing, from the start, are suggested to emerge from her internal biological state of puberty, which corresponds in a binary fashion to the sanguine makeup of the humans and animals she cures.
This biological gift of hers is later suppressed by a new parish priest, who uses literacy and written religious explanations to condemn miracles as a Creole power from slaves, Africans, native Indian shamans, sorcerers, etc. The story exposes orthodox religious hypocrisy and jealousy towards ‘commoners’ who are apparently gifted with the same miraculous powers of Christ.
At the core of Nenevé and Siepamann’s convoluted stories is the struggle or conflict between the liberating powers of creative writing and an oral preliterate belief in lifestyles which did not need such writing. Their writing exhibits a binary need to subject written literature to oral expression.
Yet, whenever the need for creative writing is explored, a brilliant piece of writing emerges. This is proven by Nenevé’s ‘The Dying Embers’, in which a simple peasant girl with a love for reading poetry and writing loses her ability to express her innermost being when marriage and motherhood take precedence over her happiness possible by such interests.
It was Levi-Strauss who, in an interview with Charles Charbonnier, mentioned that the invention of writing by Eastern Mediterranean cultures in three or four thousand BC also heralded hierarchical societies where writing first existed as inventories, catalogues, censuses, laws and instructions; in other words, purely a servile companion to the administration of social power.
Creative literature, particularly developed by Western Europe, changed all that by permitting the individual creative writer to develop a written language of personal insight, which serves to inject mundane reality with a renewed, refreshed identity. This is the reason why the great creative writers of the world: Joyce, Proust, Pound, Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, Simon, Cortazar, Paz, Walcott, etc, produce complex or difficult sentences which reveal their deep clarity and pleasure only by quiet contemplation and respect for the freedom of creative literature.
Nenevé and Siepamann’s stories, like the title tale ‘Have You Heard the Owl Hooting?’, are simple, on the level of writing, but complex, on the level of meaning, because, like the title story, they want to use the skill of creative writing to communicate the values of lifestyles and communities which do not thrive on books, reading, or metropolitan sophistication.
However, their writing participates in the Modernist/Post Modernist exploration which spans past, present, even future, presenting the peculiarities of a diverse Brazil on the new level of inclusive culture which modern creative writing represents.
In South America, this exploration is a cultural tradition which began way back in 1922 with Brazil’s indelible Modern Art Week in Sao Paulo, when a new ongoing manifestation in creative writing, painting, sculpture, cinema, and music took firm continental root.
Nenevé and Siepamann are young Brazilian writers now beginning to approach their place in such a socially innovative South American creative tradition.
