By EDUARDO SINKEVISQUE*
Commentary on Deise Abreu Pacheco's debut novel
Starting Albertina: Our Closeted Life in the 90s It is a thought-provoking novel. There is more than one narrative focus, more than one narrator in more than one temporality.
I will now discuss narrators and temporalities. I will suspend this for now as an emulation of the writing style of Deise Abreu Pacheco's text, which, in addition to what I have said, does not establish a linear sequence in her debut novel.
Anyone who ventures into reading Starting Albertina: Our Closeted Life in the 90s, book hereinafter called Starting, you will find a protagonist full of life, full of life's drive, full of ideas and perspectives. You will listen to music from the 80s/90s on cassette tapes, mainly on LPs; you will watch movies from the 7s/80s on film and VHS, as recorded on the cover, back cover and blurbs of the graphic design; you will read comic books (HQS), graphic novels; you will dance, kiss on the mouth, flirt, be flirted with in nightclubs, dance halls, nightclubs; you will travel around Brazil and abroad, “Oropa, França e Bahia”, as the poet Ascenso Ferreira would say; you will fall in love, be disappointed; you will break up, start another romantic relationship; you will make new and different friends, keep the old ones; you will study, grow; as a girl you will invent yourself and become a woman; you will be able to identify yourself.
We need to talk about Marina.
We need to talk about Albertina.
When speaking about Albertina, I pull on the announced thread about narrators and temporalities.
When I talk about Marina, I am referring to Marina Lima, the Brazilian pop-rock singer and songwriter from the 80s/90s. She is not exclusive to this scene in the novel, but I think it is emblematic and is in the book's epigraph.
Her figure does not condense the musicality of an era, nor is the book a period novel. Marina Lima, in my opinion, condenses, as a kind of reduction, issues of sexuality and gender contained in the plot of Starting.
Chiasma aside, Deise Abreu Pacheco's book takes the reader to places of autofiction, of “egodocuments”, of self-writing.
Do we need to talk about this?
Although I announce this, denounce it as something evidenced through the story told, this is not what I want to invest in, this is not what I want to face. In a few words I explain: to the extent that there are diaristic aspects in the writing of Starting, the author weaves a writing in which she records an “I”, in a text about the subject, in a subject in itself, an introspection.
Contemporary personal writing, the book is closer in performance with the lifestyles of the persona Deise-Albertina-Bert-Tina. In the novel, Deise records journeys, impressions, sensations, descriptions; above all, her subjective life experience.
I take here “egodocument” in the sense attributed to it by Jacques Presser (1955), that is, as a collective term that designates “every text in which the author’s personal life and point of view play a central role: personal diary, autobiography, memoirs, travel diary, narrative of religious conversion”, for example. (http://www.egodocument.net/egodocument/).
The so-called “egodocuments”, manuscripts and/or printed documents, allow studies on the autobiographical beyond and outside the literary canon. One of the points that these studies raise is that these “egodocuments” do not always have a trace of intimate or introspective writing, but often focus on the account of historical factual events and less on the “self” or more intimate thoughts of their author. In the case of Starting, I think there are both things, with a balance between them, or if the reader prefers, with an emphasis on intimate writing, sometimes confessional, very fictional.
To talk about Albertina, we need to talk about Tina, Bert. We need to talk about the temporality of the novel, in its comings and goings, in its comings and goings. It was 1992, it had been 1972. It was in 1986. It was 1990, it was in 1972, it was in 1992. It was 2020, it was in 2001. It was 1993, it was in 1987, 1990, 2001, 1994. It was in 1995, in 1997. It went back to 2001, going back to 2000, 1994, 1999, 1996. It was written in the 2020s, printed in 2023.
I return to the question of the narrative focus, of the at least three narrators, considering that the voice of the novel is feminine. There is in Starting a first-person narrator, a third-person narrator, with the first-person narrator being Bert, Tina, and Albertina. Three women in one in their process of growth, maturation, etc. An example of this is school stages up to university, and adult professional life. Who narrates? The adult woman, maturing, coming out of the closet in the 2020s, Deise Abreu Pacheco in 2023.
Marina Lima appears from the beginning, as I said, in an epigraph together with Antônio Cícero, a poet, her brother and songwriting partner. But it doesn't stop there. Marina Lima is present at various moments in Deise Abreu Pacheco's debut novel. She is the soundtrack alongside a lot of good national and international music, she is kind of germinal in the sense that gender and sexual identity are in line with the identities of the person Albertine.
Here, I ask the reader's permission and patience, because at the same time as Deise Abreu Pacheco's novel, I published my debut novel in which I address gender and sexual issues, that is, identity issues, based on three openly lesbian female characters. I do not think of mine as The girl's ass or the girl's ass – Clarice's Diary (Patuá) similar to Starting. I see common ground in the issues of bisexuality and homosexuality. And perhaps, because we are from almost the same generation, Deise and I have Marina Lima as a common reference. In both novels, Marina Lima is the soundtrack, the driving force of affection.
Em Starting, just to illustrate what I mean, Marina Lima and Antônio Cícero say in the epigraph: “On the edge of the abyss / Whether we like it or not / We are about to fly”. It is an announcement of something to come. It is the very desire to come out of the closet. It is the possibility of breaking out of the cocoon.
No girl's ass, chapter XCV is entitled I left my love cried, whose reference to Marina Lima in the song Hummingbird recorded by her is also explicit. Another reference to the singer and composer in common in both novels is in this same chapter of The girl's ass the quote of a small excerpt from the lyrics of I don't know how to dance: “I live in solitude with a view of the sea”. The same song that says she wants too much, not knowing if she deserves it. And that says that sometimes she wants to cry, but the day dawns and she forgets.
Neither Deise nor I forget in our debut novels. Both have a memoirist feel, both have to do with diary writing. Ultimately, both novels are Queer writings.
I don't know Deise Abreu Pacheco, certainly not your Albertina, nor your Tina, nor your Bert; but, I see the tide rising, the tide filling, without drowning in solitude.
We need to talk about Deise Abreu Pacheco's novelistic prose.
I think I have spoken a little about it here.
*Eduardo Sinkevisque is a postdoctoral fellow in literary theory at the Institute of Language Studies (IEL) at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp).
Reference
Deise Abreu Pacheco; Starting Albertina: Our Closeted Life in the 90s. São Paulo, Editacuja, 2023, 392 pages. [https://amzn.to/47DHzbJ]
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