By MARCELO FERRAZ, NELSON MARTINELLI FILHO & WILBERTH WILLOW
Excerpt selected by the organizers of the “Presentation” of the recently published book
Poetry to melt lead
Between 1964 and 1985, Brazil was under a military regime marked by brutal repression of its opponents, suppression of fundamental rights and suffocation of public life in the country. As is typical of authoritarian governments, the dictatorship adopted several strategies of political and social control that resulted in serious violations of human rights, including widespread censorship, arbitrary arrests, torture, “disappearances” and murder. The regime’s brutality sought to silence voices critical of the economic model of progress at all costs, responsible for a dramatic increase in social inequalities, and persecuted those who called for the return of democratic freedoms.
A few decades after the official end of the dictatorship, its impacts are still present in various areas of Brazilian reality. With increasing and frightening clarity over the last few years, we have observed the shadows of the lead years marked by the ineffective and violent public security policy, the military's claim to protect other institutions and powers, the normalization of torture, the demonization and criminalization of social movements, and the belligerent logic of political debate, when divergent views are seen as threats to an imperative and unquestionable national “order.” It is clear that Brazilian society has not been able to deal adequately, whether in cultural, political, historical, or legal terms, with this “unhappy page in our history,” as the poet warned.
Artistic production was undoubtedly one of the main symbolic spaces for elaborating this past, insisting on questioning the dangerous comfort of silence. Popular music, theater, fictional narratives, poetry, and testimonial literature produced, and continue to produce, vigorous readings of times of exception, configuring a space of resistance, traversed by melancholy, fear, and mourning, but also taking on the task of shouting, denouncing, and bearing witness to life in the country during the dictatorship.
In its diversity of forms, styles and manifestations, Brazilian art, without sacrificing its aesthetic dimension (and even more so because of it), constitutes an invaluable historical and cultural heritage that helps us understand and activate the memories of the years of lead, fighting against denial and oblivion, an essential action for the consolidation of a democratic society in which we can glimpse a more dignified, fair and egalitarian future.
Within this context, poetic production assumes a relevant and still insufficiently recognized role as a symbolic elaboration of horror, that is, as an active memory of the authoritarianism of military governments. This production encompasses a heterogeneous, broad and, in many cases, difficult-to-access repertoire, given the limitations of the publishing market at the time, the lack of interest in publishing poetry and the impact of censorship, which, when it did not prohibit or withdraw published works, aroused in authors and publishers the fear of publishing works of contestation under the risk of suffering future losses and persecution.
Understanding the poetic repertoire of the lead years as a disturbing historical, cultural and artistic heritage, the project Poetic memorial of the years of lead (CNPq/FAPES) began its activities in January 2023, with the aim of mapping, gathering, preserving, analyzing, discussing and disseminating this poetic repertoire, both for its role as an eloquent historical document and for the expressive dimension that updates this message in the present, communicating directly with current readers – largely perplexed by the persistence of modus operandi of the dictatorship and the inevitable parallels with the politics in force in the country in recent years.
Poetry probably constitutes the most abundant and the most vulnerable symbolic space for the mnemonic elaboration of the dictatorship. Abundant because – despite the commonplace that associates poetic creation with patient purification and verbal craftsmanship – poetry has proven itself over time to be a highly effective language for the urgent expression of anguish, of a threat, and, due to its recurring brevity, it is the preferred form (often the only materially viable one) for literary elaboration in extreme situations, such as clandestinity or imprisonment. In these cases, without a doubt the need to denounce, to record a threatened existence or to elaborate a limiting state undermines (or makes impossible) aesthetic care and undermines any pretension of creating an autonomous object. However, this does not mean that this urgency cannot, in many cases, trigger surprising aesthetic forms, capable of artistically integrating trauma into its composition.
Their brevity also reflects the relative ease with which these poems circulated, especially in a context of censorship against insurgent voices. Several poems had significant clandestine print runs and managed to break through the barrier of silence imposed by the regime, becoming popular among opposition political groups – from the student movement to the armed struggle –, participating in the formation of a militant identity and extolling the meaning of political struggle. Likewise, they circulated in mimeographed editions, closely associated with the so-called marginal generation, seeking, with simplicity and good humor, to find a way to break through the feeling of suffocation prevailing in the country.
With a team of more than twenty researchers from all regions of Brazil, we undertook a systematic survey of poems written between 1964 and 1985 that address the Brazilian military dictatorship. Initially, our main source of research was the poetry books published during that period, which were mapped and selected until we reached a set of 160 authors and almost 400 books. We then began to examine these works in order to record poems that highlighted different aspects of life in the country under the military regime.
In a second stage, still ongoing, the survey began to prioritize documentary research in archives, private and public collections, memorials, estates, magazines and newspapers of the time, aiming to incorporate poems not published in books, but which circulated in other formats or even never made public. As stated, a considerable part of the poetic memory of the dictatorship was disseminated clandestinely, in pamphlets, amateur publications with very low circulation, mimeographed copies distributed among friends or, due to fear or modesty of the authors, remained in unpublished manuscripts, sometimes recorded only in letters, diaries and other personal documents.
The selection, as can be seen, only took into account written poems, that is, it did not encompass the vast and important songbook of the period, a repertoire that, in our view, also constitutes what we call the poetic memorial of the lead years, but which would require another type of documentary survey, other critical operators and other means of disseminating the works, which we consider unfeasible at the present time.
At the time the anthology presented here reaches the public, the repository available on the Poetic memorial of the years of lead (mpac.ufes.br) has already catalogued and made available for free reading and research around 1500 poems about the dictatorship. In addition to reliable transcriptions of these texts and well-designed layouts, the page offers bibliographical information and comments that help in understanding the context alluded to in the poems. There is also a search tool for themes, forms, words or specific data from the texts. And the work of expanding this repository will continue until at least the end of 2025, with the expectation of considerably expanding this digital archive.
The book Poetic memorial of the lead years: an anthology is, therefore, a selection made from this larger survey. The selection established for the poems was developed through collective discussions held by the team over the last two years. During this research period, even though we had been working with the theme for some time, we were able to find new names, surprising and practically unknown works, which reinforce the relevance of this collection and its availability to new generations of readers.
In this sense, this anthology continues the invaluable efforts developed by other scholars and interpreters of poetry from the lead years, which we could not fail to mention with admiration, such as the pioneering work of Neila Tavares[I] or the most recent collections organized by Raul Ellwanger[ii] and Alberto Pucheu.[iii] By expanding the scope defined by these precursors, by bringing together a broader sample of poems about the dictatorship, we believe we are contributing to overcoming an important gap in our poetic field, as the final result sheds new light on the understanding of poetry from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s and instigates new perspectives, from the poetic sphere, on the country's recent history, as well as its present.
While the repository was created using the broadest and most exhaustive survey possible, the anthology's selection of poems used criteria other than those already presented. From the approximately 1500 poems about the dictatorship currently available on our website – which, as we know, despite the significant number, is also a partial sample, resulting from our interests and limitations – we initially selected approximately 220 poems to compose the anthology, of which 200 were authorized to be included in the book.
In this process, without ignoring the importance of the organizers' personal preferences, we sought to carry out a demanding curation, ensuring a collection with high aesthetic quality, an intriguing read for different audiences interested in Brazilian poetry and history. In addition to the documentary importance and the work of preserving and systematizing a threatened cultural heritage – which inspired the creation of the repository –, in the anthology we were concerned with creating a good book of poetry, with texts of great expressive power, capable of moving and awakening reflection in its potential readers.
But obviously the aesthetic criterion was not exclusive – and could not be, given the particularities of the project. We never considered the anthology to be a selection of the “best” poems of the Poetic memorial of the years of lead or even, less ambitiously, that it was a list of the poems that the organizers liked most in the repository. It was important that the book do justice to the plurality of poetry from the lead years, hence the care taken in selecting texts that represent the main trends of the time, both those that would be consecrated by later literary historiography – constituting a canon (in constant construction) of contemporary Brazilian poetry – and those of people who did not want to or could not develop a literary trajectory later, but who, at an extreme moment in their lives, used poetry acutely as a way of expressing anguish or revolt.
The broader survey in the repository also confirmed traces of social inequality that are projected into the literary field. The quantitative examination of the texts found during the research reveals, as was predictable, poetry written mostly by white men, almost always published by publishers or media outlets located in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and rarely produced by writers born in the North and Central-West regions.
Without the intention of artificially erasing these disparities, which reveal a lot about the literature of the period, we believe it is important to mitigate them in the final selection of the anthology. In any case, the imbalances continue to be glaring and were amplified in the stage of seeking authorization to publish the poems. The difficulty of finding poems representative of groups historically excluded from the spaces of production and legitimization of literary work was followed by the difficulty of finding someone to respond to them after reaching their texts and selecting them to compose the anthology, which, in several cases, was an obstacle that we were unable to overcome.
We decided to organize the anthology into seven sections. The first, entitled “I- Appearances Reveal,” a title taken from a poem by Cacaso, brings together poems of an ironic and/or satirical nature that point out aspects of life under an exceptional regime, mock the vices of power, and expose the hypocrisy of the regime. Humor, in this section, is a weapon often used by poets to undermine the jingoism and promises of conservative modernization encouraged by the dictatorship.
Likewise, the body and sexuality are highlighted in poems that expose the narrow-minded moralism of the military. Next, in “II- Here we go out and don’t know if we’ll come back”, a title that evokes a poem by Francisco Alvim, we have poems focused on the feeling of suffocation. The marks of the panopticon, fear as a daily partner, freedom restricted in favor of an inflexible “national security” are elements that come to life in the artistic creation of the time and are well represented in what is perhaps the most widely disseminated facet of the poetry of the time: suffocation.
In “III- Sobre a luta nossa visão se construção” (On the struggle our vision is built), which uses a beautiful verse by Orides Fontela, we present poems that address civic acts and announce the hope of overcoming the ills of the period. This political struggle refers first to the demonstrations, which were very important as an expression of popular indignation immediately after the coup and, years later, in the fight for amnesty. But it is also represented by the armed struggle, a moment of radicalization that asserted itself as an alternative as the repression of street protests became increasingly bloody. These poems exalt the struggle – which opens up to various strategies of action, from mystical-religious to countercultural – as well as the doubts, hesitations, frustrations and defeats that mark these acts of resistance.
The following sections, entitled “IV- The body between bars, life in parentheses” (adapted from an interview with Alex Polari) and “V- I come to speak through the mouths of my dead” (excerpt from a famous poem by Pedro Tierra), address, respectively, the denunciation of the violations of human dignity perpetrated in the dungeons of the dictatorship, with torture and kidnappings occupying a central role in the repressive apparatus, and the murders committed by the regime, including in this generational song the issue of the “disappeared” and moving tributes to some of the many who died fighting for the country’s freedom.
In turn, section “VI- A poem, a flag”, named after verses by Ferreira Gullar, contains poems of a metalinguistic nature, with a strong emphasis on the silencing imposed, whether by censorship or political persecution of writers, as well as on reflections on the meanings of poetry – its limits and potential, its autonomy and its commitments – in a context of exception. Finally, section “VII- In the shallow grave of history” – whose title was taken from a poem by Affonso Romano de Sant'Anna – includes poems that formulate, in various ways, a critical assessment of the years of lead, sometimes demanding an active memory of the horrors, sometimes looking to a future of overcoming all the authoritarian debris left by the dictatorship.
Such works bring to the fore the powerful link between history, memory and poetry that underlies the entire anthology, featuring, at the heart of artistic expression, this ability of the poem to evoke the past in the present, contributing to the awareness of new generations.
The historian José Luiz Werneck da Silva, in The deformation of history or So as not to forget (1985), did an exemplary job of recovering memories, based on the production of testimonies. According to him, “many collective memories were forced to be forgotten, such as that of left-wing militants, of the revolutionary war. Many human lives were also forgotten or even definitively silenced by the dictatorship, among those who ‘made living’ the memories of resistance”[iv]. The greatest contribution of this anthology – Poetic memorial of the years of lead – is precisely to bring together in one volume a significant number of poems that, with all their diversity, make us “not forget” a regime that censored, persecuted, exiled, kidnapped and murdered people who opposed it.
All the authors featured in the book were, to some degree, victims of this state violence and were generous enough to share with us, in their poems, part of these experiences, offering us a lesson and a task: never again a dictatorship! We dedicate the book to them.
*Marcelo Ferraz is a professor of literary theory at the Federal University of Goiás (UFG).
*Nelson Martinelli Jr. is a professor of literature at the Federal Institute of Espírito Santo (IFES).
*Wilberth Willow is a full professor of Brazilian literature at the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES).
Reference
Marcelo Ferraz, Nelson Martinelli Filho & Wilberth Salgueiro (orgs.). Poetic memorial of the lead years: an anthology. Porto Alegre, Editora Zouk, 2024, 414 pages. [https://shre.ink/grfZ]
Notes
[I] Tavares, Neila (org.). Poetry in prison. Porto Alegre: Proletra, 1980.
[ii] Ellwanger, Raul (ed.). Poets of the hard night. Porto Alegre: Carlos de Ré Committee, 2019.
[iii] Pucheu, Alberto (org.). Poems to exhume living history. New York: Routledge, 2021.
[iv] SILVA, Jose Luiz Werneck da. The deformation of history or not to forget. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 1985. p. 11 (Brazil Collection: the years of authoritarianism).
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