Beyond Discontent:

Abstract

In 1990, Carolyn Richardson Durham, an American scholar researching the portrayal of Afro-Brazilian women in literature, traveled to São Paulo where she met Miriam Alves, a poet and an activist. At that time, Alves had been compiling an anthology of black women writers that, because of a lack of funds, she was unable to complete. Soon after, they decided to turn this project into a collaborative endeavor and, as a result, published the first anthology of black Brazilian women writers as a bilingual edition in 1994 (all the poems were translated by Richardson Durham). The anthology, entitled Enfim … Nós: Escritoras negras brasileiras contemporâneas/Finally … Us: Contemporary Black Brazilian Women Writers, presents seventeen women poets, most of whom belong to the Quilhomboje literary movement (Alves decided to distance herself from the movement in 1994). With its monthly publication, Cadernos Negros, Quilhomboje inscribes itself into the tradition of Afro-Brazilian cultural production and political resistance, alongside movements such as the Frente negra brasileira and the Movimento negro unificado.1 Alves felt that the movement was heavily inflected by male voices and that female voices needed additional platforms for expression.The collection deals with a great variety of topics, from representations of the black female body and the monotony of everyday life to the Brazilian myth of racial democracy and the imagining of a transnational African diasporic consciousness. In the introduction to the anthology, Alves expresses the generative idea behind the project: Enfim … Nós expõe, sem falsos pudores, intimidades nuas e de sentimentos aguçados em curvas agéis, lânguidas e sensuais. Revolta-se na ação poética, retomando para si a propriedade do corpo, passando a ser sujeito do desejo e prazer, descoisificando-se. A escrita femininina negra com esta atitude, avilta a noção corrente da passividade da mulher negra, chamada de mulata, que é sempre retratada como objeto de prazer, numa prostituição constante e sem outras perspectivas.(Finally … Us exposes naked intimacies and sharp sentiments with agile, languid, and sensual curves, without false modesty. It rebels with its poetic action, reclaiming the ownership of the body, going on to being the subject of desire and pleasure, de-objectifying itself. Black women's writing with this attitude rejects the common notion of the Black woman's passivity, of the so-called “mulata” who always is pictured as the object of pleasure in constant prostitution and without any other perspectives.)2 The poems, she tells us, are straining against a long literary tradition of exoticism whereby the mulata is relegated to a static image underscoring her passivity and sexual availability. As a way of response, in Finally … Us, the categories “black” and “woman” are transformed from vestibular objects into discursive sites open to constant reinterpretation as the poems perform an act of autopoiesis, a writing into being of the “always negated category of the black female citizen.”3Yet, as much as the poems are inevitably concerned with the double bind of invisibility that affects Afro-Brazilian women, they do not limit themselves to the understanding and criticism of a national history and national present but are rather trying to imagine a political consciousness that exceeds national identity and ethnic particularity. In this article, I would like to delineate the ways in which the authors of Finally … Us are constructing a gendered African diasporic consciousness, all the while grounding themselves in the micropolitics of everyday life in Brazil. I argue that in its attempt to transcend national identity, Afro-Brazilian women's writing can be analyzed within the framework of the black Atlantic, as it falls in line with Paul Gilroy's rejection of nationalist perspectives as “an adequate means to understand the forms of resistance and accommodation intrinsic to modern black political culture.”4 Yet, by reaffirming the importance of the local context in the construction of political consciousness, Finally … Us warns us against simply dismissing the significance of national belonging. In Finally … Us, categories of race and gender are reinscribed as constitutive of national identity while simultaneously being opened to an intercultural and transnational framing. The transnational is always imagined from a national vantage point.On numerous occasions, Alves has criticized the tendency of white critics to reduce Afro-Brazilian cultural production to its descriptive aspect and its local context by reading it merely as a condemnation of Brazilian racism: “The white critics, when they talk about black literature, almost always do so by reducing it to content and theme. What I know about it is its universality in its specificity. I know only that this literature that we produce is rich; we are a universe of words that should be analyzed, starting with its own manifestations.”5 This remark introduces the conceptual coupling of specificity/universality that operates under different theoretical assumptions from the national/transnational pairing that I have been using so far, thus requiring some clarification. While the concept of universality, often associated with Western modernity and the elevation of the Western value system to the level of the universal, is a highly contested term, I would argue that Alves here is underscoring Afro-Brazilian literature's capacity to serve as a platform for the expression of a very specific experience, the experience of black men and women in Brazil, while also participating in what Paul Gilroy terms the “politics of transfiguration.” For Gilroy, the politics of transfiguration, which exists outside the framework of the nation-state, leads to “the emergence of qualitatively new desires, social relations and modes of association.”6 In Finally … Us the movement from the specific to the transfigurative passes through an imagining of a diasporic collective history and political consciousness.Reflecting on Afro-Brazilian women's poetry from the perspective of the black Atlantic enables us to both question and expand Gilroy's predominantly Anglophone focus while also underscoring certain limitations of Gilroy's argument. In this regard, my article is indebted to both canonical and more recent critics who have written from the Luso-Atlantic perspective. Brazilian anthropologist and sociologist Gilberto Freyre coined the term “Lusotropicalism” to indicate a coherence of the Luso-Atlantic World, unified by the distinctive ideology of Portuguese colonialism. In his frequently cited work Casa-grande e senzala, Freyre assigns a special status to Portuguese colonization and argues that its benign aspects and the adaptability of Portuguese colonizers, stemming primarily from their willingness to appropriate African and indigenous women, facilitated intermixing between the European, the African, and the indigenous populations.7 While influential, Freyre's work has also been greatly criticized for its fallacies and inconsistencies. Recently, critics have used the idea of the Lusophone black Atlantic to put pressure on the Luso-Atlantic framework Freyre provides. Cultures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic, a collection of essays edited by Nancy Priscilla Naro, Roger Sansi-Roca, and David H. Treece, adopts a historical perspective as it traces both links and discontinuities among local cultures within the Portuguese colonial empire.8 Livio Sansone's Blackness Without Ethnicity focuses on the contemporary moment in Brazilian history and the participation of local Afro-Brazilian cultures (especially in Bahia and Rio) in “black globalization.”9 As such, the concept of the Lusophone black Atlantic has been mobilized to dismantle the Lusophone Atlantic and re-create a set of linkages that move through and beyond the Lusophone context.Finally … Us is an essential addition to this discussion, as it reconfigures notions of gender and translation within the black Atlantic. Gilroy ends his work with a strong critique of black political discourse and its understanding of tradition, in which “the integrity of race is made interchangeable with the integrity of black masculinity, which must be regenerated at all costs.”10 Reimagining tradition thus also entails reimagining gender relations. Nonetheless, whereas Gilroy reconceptualizes tradition within the culture of the black diaspora, he does not propose an alternative mode of thinking about the intersections of race and gender. Finally … Us, however, does. It rethinks gender not as a subset of race and colonial history but as a site from which the relation between the national and the transnational is imagined.In their attempt to consider gender from a national as well as a transnational standpoint, the anthology's poets find themselves in dialogue with other contemporary feminist thinkers. In her 1988 essay “For an Afro-Latin American Feminism,” Lélia González, an active member of the Brazilian black women's movement, insists on the importance of transnational organizing for black women in Latin America.11 Similarly, in 2007, black Brazilian feminist activist Sonia Beatriz dos Santos published an essay entitled “Feminismo negro diasporico” (“Black Diaspora Feminism”), which advocates a cross-border analysis and framing of black feminist thought.12 These concerns have also been echoed outside of the Brazilian and Latin American contexts. In Feminism Without Borders, Chandra Talpade Mohanty conceptualizes a transnational feminism that would be attentive to local differences. According to Mohanty, cross-cultural feminist work should pay attention to the “micro-politics of context, subjectivity and struggle, as well as to the macro-politics of global economic and political systems and processes.” Specifying differences, she continues, will in fact allow for a more successful theorization of universal concerns: “An analysis that pays attention to the everyday experiences of women and the micro-politics of their ultimately anticapitalist struggles illuminates the macro-politics of global restructuring. It suggests the thorough embeddedness of the local and particular with the global and universal, and it suggests the need to conceptualize questions of justice and equity in trans-border terms.”13 Although Mohanty a little too hastily conflates the two pairings of local/global and particular/universal, her understanding of cross-cultural feminism is analogous to Alves's understanding of Afro-Brazilian literature's desire to reach universality through specificity, its attempt to reflect on the intersections of race and gender on a global scale while always using as the point of departure the particular experiences of Afro-Brazilian women.Transnationalism in Finally … Us, however, needs to be considered on another level. Aside from being at the core of many poems, it is embedded in the project itself, in its bilingualism, in the fact that the original and the translation exist side by side, every poem facing itself, or rather a different version of itself, bringing into play the question of translation and translatability. Alves was not quite satisfied with the outcome of the project. As Carole Boyce Davies writes in her introduction to an interview she conducted with Alves: “She felt that, while she could communicate her poetry through her ashé—her body, emotion, intensity—to those who could not hear her words, she was unable, because of differences in language, to fully communicate the range of bitter sweet meanings which the book's publication generated.”14 In other words, certain meanings as well as affects contained within the Portuguese version of the poems could not withstand linguistic transposition. While highlighting the elements that have escaped translation, this article will also offer an alternate mode of thinking about the supposed failures of translation. It will maintain that, in its bilingualism, Finally … Us operates as what Stuart Hall terms a “complex structure: a structure in which things are related, as much through their differences as through their similarities.”15In his groundbreaking study, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, Brent Hayes Edwards relies on Hall's notion of a “complex structure” as a way to rethink black diaspora, not simply through the notion of identity but also through that of difference. The discourse of diaspora, according to Edwards, emerges out of a continual process of translation: If a discourse of diaspora articulates difference, then one must consider the status of that difference—not just linguistic difference but, more broadly, the trace of the residue, perhaps, of what resists or escapes translation. Whenever the African diaspora is articulated (just as when black transnational projects are deferred, aborted, or declined), these social forces leave subtle but indelible effects. Such an unevenness or differentiation marks the constitutive décalage in the very weave of the culture, one that cannot be either dismissed or pulled out.16 Whereas, in order to corroborate his argument, Edwards traces the development of transnational black print culture of the 1920s and 1930s, the bilingualism of Finally … Us invites us to assess décalage in the very structure of the anthology. The poems emerge out of, and constantly return to, the various conjunctures and disjunctures between the national and the transnational, as the supposed failures of translation mark critical linkages and articulate a new understanding of the black Atlantic.Alzira Rufino's poems open the anthology. The poetic voice, at the center of most of her poems, suffers a metamorphosis in each one of them. “Eu … cigana diferente” (“I … a different gypsy”), “Sou negra ponto final” (34) (“I am a black woman period”), “Eu sou crioula decente” (“I am a decent Creole woman”), “Sou nó na madeira” (“I am the knot on wood”) are four lines from four different poems, raising the question of the relationship between these different embodiments and the changes the “I” undergoes as it moves from one form to another.17 Let us focus for a moment on one of these embodiments in Rufino's poem “Resgate” (“Ransom”): Sou negra ponto finaldevolva-me a identidaderasgue minha certidãosou negra sem reticênciassem vírgulas e sem ausênciasnão quero mais meio-termosou negra balacobacosou negra noite cansaçosou negra ponto final (34)(I am a black woman periodreturn my identity to metear up my birth certificateI am a black woman without ellipseswithout commas, and without anything missingI no longer want in-betweensI am a black woman “cannon-ball”I am a black night wearinessI am a black woman period [35]) Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the first stanza ends with the word “final.” “Final” singularly connotes “end.” Here, together with the word that precedes it, “ponto,” it signifies “period.” So, once again, “end.” There is a slight, yet perhaps not so insignificant, difference between “um ponto” and “um ponto final.” The former is used at the end of a sentence, as a matter of fact at the end of every sentence, whereas the latter is used at the end of a very specific sentence, the last one. A final period is used to mark completion, to indicate that there is nothing coming afterward. It marks the end of a text, a story, a thought; it is that final touch that turns everything preceding it into a coherent whole. Once we arrive at that final period, we are not supposed to ask any more questions because everything has already been said. But then what is this “ponto final” doing at the very beginning of Rufino's poem? Only two words precede it: “sou” (“am”) and “negra” (“black”). From the very beginning we are told that we are at the very end. There is nothing more to say because “sou negra” is all that there is to it; it is self-evident and self-sufficient. Yet it is this “ponto final” that generates the entire poem only in order to return to itself, since the first and the last stanza echo each other. The entire poem is, in fact, staged between this first “ponto final” and the second “ponto final” which really should be one and the same, since there can only be one “ponto final” in a poem. So what is the trajectory traced between the beginning and the end? Is the “ponto final” a definitive avowal of racial meaning or does its double assertion redefine a blackness that exists beyond racial essentialism?If the first stanza is an affirmation, the second is an interpellation, a request or maybe even an order. The poetic voice is asking/ordering someone to give her back her identity. Who that someone is, we do not know. The reader remains further perplexed because if there is nothing more to say except that she is black, and if this is merely an indisputable fact, then what is the identity that she wants returned? The recognition of her blackness, one might answer.18 Interestingly enough, this identity can only be returned if her birth certificate, the most basic form of identification, is torn. While often a moniker of national identity, for Afro-descendants this document also marks the erasure of their uprooted African identity. By tearing the birth certificate, the poetic voice is questioning the Brazilian myth of a racial democracy, the ways the state “names” its citizens while offering Afro-Brazilian women and men second-class citizenship. In opposition, she delineates a (gendered) African diaspora.This reading is further confirmed when Rufino writes, “Não quero mais meio-termo.” Distancing herself from the literal translation, “I no longer want a half term,” Richardson translates this line as, “I no longer want in-betweens.” A “half term” is however a more explicit critique of Latin American notions of mestizaje/mestiçagem and Brazil's concept of a racial democracy, associated with Gilberto Freyre's “Lusotropicalism” and his myth of the peaceful coexistence between master and slaves. Freyre posited widespread miscegenation as the distinctive characteristic of the Portuguese colonial empire. In his later writings, he also argued that owing to this specific colonial history, Brazil was on its way to becoming a metaracial society, one in which “instead of sociological preoccupation with minute characterizations of multiracial intermediates or nuanced types, between white and black, white and red, etc.,” the tendency will be, for the majority of the population, “to be described, and to consider themselves almost without discrimination, as morenos.”19 “Moreno,” according to Freyre, was beginning to replace “Negro” and “mulatto,” terms too often considered synonyms of slave. This argument was for a long time at the forefront of Brazilian political discourse, glorifying racial intermixing as the foundation of a racial democracy and the mestizo as the embodiment of Brazilian citizenship. Finally … Us aligns itself with the revisionist critical discourse that questions the concept of a racial democracy. According to Lourdes Martinez-Echazábal, “The racial and cultural paradigms elaborating on the ideology of mestizaje have replaced the racial binarism with a third entity resulting from the racial transmutation (read synthesis) of the binarism. The result … is a new form of racialized discourse, of racialism, that culturalizes mulatez while continuing to glorify it in racialized terms.”20In Rufino's poem, the poetic voice rejects “half terms” connoting interracial mixing in order to return to a more clearly defined racial identity: “negra.” The term “negra” (“black”) functions somewhat differently in the original and the translation, producing discrepancies worth considering. Rufino writes that she is “negra sem reticências/sem vírgulas e sem ausências.” Richardson decides to translate “reticências” as “ellipses,” which carries slightly different connotations from the term “reticence.” To be reticent is to be disposed to be silent, reserved, restrained. Being black without reticence implies being black without being afraid to claim this blackness, to reappropriate it, to speak it. By also refusing commas and absences, Rufino is asserting the continuity of her African heritage and history, which hasn't dissolved in the centuries long biological and cultural mestizaje. But even if Rufino claims here a specific racial identity, her blackness should not be taken for a confining category; rather, it is subject to constant deconstruction and reinterpretation.Thus, the poem begins with an assertion of her raced and gendered identity as if the category “negra” was self-explanatory and self-sufficient, as if there was nothing else to say, no explanation needed. Yet, in fact, the rest of the poem seems to develop in such a way as to precisely deny this supposition, as “negra” becomes a wandering signifier that can be defined only in relation to other signifiers. In the following line Rufino writes, “sou negra balacobaco/sou negra noite cansaço.” The limitations of translation become visible here. In Portuguese, “negra” is the feminine form of the adjective “negro,” and so the word embodies its gendered aspect. Unfortunately, in English this is not the case, which is why in her translation, Richardson decides to add the word “woman”: “I am a black woman ‘cannon ball’/I am a black night weariness.” At first, this might not seem to be a very significant addition; however, I would like to suggest that there is a reason why Rufino decides to use “negra” as an adjective rather than as a noun (“uma negra”) and why she never explicitly writes that she is a “mulher negra” (“a black woman”).Whereas a noun can exist on its own, an adjective cannot. An adjective is there to modify the noun; it exists in relation to and in conjunction with the noun that it modifies. By choosing to speak about “blackness” as an adjective and not as a noun, Rufino is distancing herself from blackness as a fixed and static category. She is “negra,” she is black, and she is a woman, but she is not only that; she is also “balacobaco” (“cannon ball”), “a noite cansaço” (“night weariness”), and multiple other things. In other words, while written as an affirmation, “sou negra” remains in suspense, waiting for a noun to modify, a noun by which it in turn will be modified. Rufino's race and her gender are constant (the race and gender of the poetic voice), but they exist in relation to all of the shifting realities that she also inhabits.This attempt to open the category of “blackness” to constant deconstruction and reinterpretation is also visible in the format of the poem. Whereas in the first stanza there is no white space between “negra” and “ponto,” a white space appears in the last two stanzas. It is almost unnoticeable yet quite important. I would even suggest that the entire poem embodies this shift from “no space” to the final blank space. In the first line she is “negra,” and there is nothing else to say. The last line, on the other hand, opens up the poem. She is still “negra” and will always be so, but the blank space could be filled with any noun that the adjective could modify, with any set of realities that could be imagined. Her gender and race will always be present, but they will always exist in relation to other ever-changing and uncertain realities. Richardson reproduces the same blank space in the first and the last line of the poem and thus creates an exact repetition between the beginning and the end. This is unfortunate, because in the original we have a repetition with a difference, the entire poem leading us precisely toward this difference. The poetic voice is embracing her raced and gendered identity while also refusing to be tied down to a univocal meaning of that identity.This twofold gesture is also contained within the very title. The English version of the poem is entitled “Ransom,” which while accurate is not the sole option, since in Portuguese “resgate” can also signify “rescue.” A ransom is given to obtain the release of something that was taken away by force; the right to claim her blackness, in this case. Yet, at the same time, the poem stages a rescue, distancing itself from a simple recuperation of a preexisting identity, and moving toward an imaginative, transnational, reframing of blackness.“Resgate,” however, does not exist on its own but rather in relation to other poems in the anthology. I would like to demonstrate how the national and the transnational intersect in the her other poems in the same way that in “Resgate” racial identity is something that overrides national identity yet always exists in relation to the specific history of racial mixing in Brazil.In “Sinais” (“Signs”), the “I” is not identified as “negra” (“black”) but as “cigana” (“gypsy”): Rumos esconde segredoseu dentro desta fusãocigana diferenteleio rostosmelancolíao latifúndio resistea vida abortaeu produto desta argilae tudo se multiplica. (32)(Rumor hides secretsI within this fusiona different gypsyI read facesmelancholylatifundum resistslife abortsI, a product from this clayand everything multiplies itself. [33]) Rufino is reclaiming the figure of the gypsy and its association with a diasporic identity. Although the Romani people, originally from the Indian subcontinent, live primarily in Europe, over the past few centuries an important Romani minority has established itself in Latin America. In Brazil, their presence dates back to the sixteenth century and is the result of forceful deportations from Portugal.21 Notions of uprootedness and unbelonging thus constitute the link between gypsy and Afro-Brazilian communities. If the poetic voice can embody the figure of the gypsy, it is due to alike violent pasts, which have brought the two groups, unwillingly, to the New World. The introduction of the gypsy could also be read as a rejection of Afrocentrism and an attempt to rethink the question of belonging. Rather than embrace the myth of the return to Africa, the poetic voice considers herself a gypsy, a constant traveler, living at the margins of almost every national identity. The poem thus expands the identification to the African diaspora to include other marginalized groups and diasporic identities. For gypsies, as for Afro-Brazilians, “home” cannot be located within a single nation, but only within the space of the diaspora.In the poem, the gypsy is characterized by an ability to read the future, represented here as the capacity to read faces. Of course, it could be said that this is a very stereotypical portrayal. Yet “cigana” is immediately followed by the adjective “diferente.” She is not just any gypsy, she is a “different gypsy.” But different in what way? The figurative gypsy is different because she is immediately placed within a specific geographical, historical, and economic context. This situating is achieved with the introduction of just one word, “latifúndio” (“latifundum”), which allows Rufino to recontextualize the entire poem and enter the world of plantations and African slaves. I would pose a further question. Why does Rufino choose “latifúndio” instead of “fazenda,” a term more commonly used in Brazil to refer to its slave plantations? This choice helps put the poem in a broader geographical context because “latifúndio” refers not only to Brazilian “fazendas” but also to Spanish “haciendas,” as well as to estates in other parts of the world, such as Italy. The reader is not solely in Brazil; she has embarked on a voyage throughout Latin America, a voyage that opens up a space for the imagining of a (black) diasporic identity that follows the routes of global capitalism.A similar set of preoccupations is found in Rufino's “Luíza Mahin,” a poem about a former slave who was actively involved in slave revolts in Bahia in the nineteenth century. The nation of Ewe, to which Luíza Mahin belonged before being captured as a slave, is mentioned twice in the poem. At the beginning Rufino writes that Luíza is “filha de gêge” (36) (“daughter of Ewe” [37]) and later names her “Luíza de gêge” (36) (“Luíza of the Ewe nation” [37]).The poem aims to recover the African heritage obscured by the glorification of racial and cultural miscegenation and to locate the history of Brazil within the larger history of the African diaspora and slavery. Even in Brazil, Luíza continues to belong to the Ewe Nation, underscoring the persistence and influence of African cultures on Brazilian soil. Commonly remembered as the mother of the famous abolitionist Luis Gama, Luíza is revitalized here as revolutionary in her own right. The reference to the Malê Revolt undermines Freyre's myth of the harmonious coexistence between masters and slaves, positioning slavery as constitutive of Bahian history and culture, while Luíza's presence problematizes the revolt's association with the figure of the male revolutionary. The poem thus strains against the erasure of the revolutionary role of black women, not only from national history but also from Afro-Brazilian collective memory.22At the same time, the poem is not about unconditional Afrocentrism and the return to the origins since, at the end of the poem, Rufino gestures back toward Brazil: “Luíza revolta a noite/vermelho o chão de Bahia” (36) (“Luíza revolts at night/red is the ground of Bahia” [37]). The opening and movement toward Africa are thus followed by a return to Brazil and, even more specifically, a return to Bahia, the site of the Malê Revolt. Once again, at the same time that there is an attempt to think about the African diaspora in a more transnational context, there is also a return to the local context, to the specific situation of black women in Brazil.The entanglement of the local and the global is further pursued in “Apartheid.” Although the title gestures toward local conditions of racial segregation and marginalization, there is no direct mention of Brazil in the poem, enabling us to establish links with other historica