PREFACE
Wander here
Wander there
Work is done, get out of town
The city isn’t in me now
–Chico Buarque
_______________
The man is in the city
as a thing is in another city
and the city is in the man
who is in another city
–Ferreira Gullar
Ferreira Gullar wrote Poema Sujo, or Dirty Poem, in 1975 while in exile in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It is largely a meditation on growing up in a French-Portuguese colonial city on the northeastern Brazilian coast. It begins at a level of childish consciousness; moves on to explore his evolution of personal identity through a wide range of experiences that include sex, travel, and poetry; and concludes with a clearly defined revelation that social and political justice are unrealized. All of this he ponders poetically while living in political exile.
It is hard to appreciate the poem without knowing that the history of the Brazilian Northeast is marked by mass migrations from the semiarid and near-feudal lands and mostly impoverished towns to the industrialized cities of the South. A sense of migrant dislocation is evoked in the first epigraph above, taken from Chico Buarque’s song “Assentamento” (Settlement). Disillusioned and dejected, the immigrant pronounces that “The city isn’t in me now,” and longs to return to the land that had once driven him away. The second epigraph, from the concluding verses of Dirty Poem, expresses a similar but different relationship with the city when, unable to return home, he laments that “the city is in the man / who is in another city.” Like Buarque’s migrant persona, Gullar fled the endemically poor Northeast but retains a similar rootedness to the area.
Ferreira Gullar was born in 1930 in equatorial São Luís, the capital of the state of Maranhão. A primary subject of the poem, São Luís is a stunning, if decaying, island city of colonial architecture that lies in the estuary formed by several rivers that empty into the Atlantic. The city was a distant outpost in the seventeenth century when it was founded, and it remains relatively isolated even today.
The adolescent Gullar gained his formal education at a trade school, but he soon realized that art, literature, and philosophy attracted him more, and so educated himself with the relatively few books to which he had access. His early years impressed upon him the value of poetry’s utility, a theme that would mark some of the most significant points in his aesthetic trajectory. Growing up in São Luís, however, imposed irreconcilable limitations on Gullar’s aspirations as a writer.
He left the city to work as a journalist in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1950s, and his reputation as an experimental poet attracted the attention of the “Concrete” writers associated with the Noigandres group in São Paulo. Because this group had tired of traditional poetic forms, they explored verse characterized by extreme rationalized geometrics, influenced by other experimental poets such as e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound, and Dylan Thomas. Gullar initially found the group interesting but the Concrete poets were too socially and politically aloof for his taste, and he and a number of other writers and artists founded the polemical splinter Neo-Concrete arts movement. A primary goal of this group was to depart from the strictures of the Concretists and introduce a more human and less mechanistic dimension into the practice of poetry and the plastic arts.
Ultimately, Gullar’s dedication to the avant-garde abated, and in 1962 he joined one of the Peoples’ Culture Centers—leftist student organizations engaged in making the arts more accessible to the masses. He hoped that this environment would enable him to respond more directly to his persistent concern that art have a clear social meaning and utility. This experience did not last long, however, as in 1964 eroding political, economic, and social conditions led to a military coup that would hold repressive dictatorial power until 1985. Any art considered radical in form or content was suspect, and anyone with the hint of a Socialist or Communist affiliation became an immediate target. Gullar represented both camps.
During the military dictatorship Gullar endured harassment and arrest by the military police who had begun to detain, torture, and “disappear” political undesirables. He feared for his life, went into hiding, and in 1971 fled the country and traveled from Buenos Aires to Paris and Moscow and then to Santiago, Chile. He arrived in Santiago just in time to witness the bloody 1973 coup that overthrew the Socialist government of Salvador Allende. Gullar slipped through a lethal dragnet and fled the country, going first to Buenos Aires, then to Lima, and back to Buenos Aires.
Unfortunately Argentina was no friendlier to him than either Brazil or Chile. He was separated from his family, he feared Brazilian operatives in Argentina, his passport had expired, and leaving the country had become impossible. All he had left was his poetry and it was to his poetry that he would turn. Terrified that he would soon be apprehended, he decided to write “a last will and testament” that would recover a part of his past in a variety of poetic forms that shaped his aesthetic journey:
I felt that I could die at any moment and that I had to write a poem that would say it all, that would bring some resolution to my life, that would leave nothing unsaid, that would be my last will and testament. . . . And, at the same time, the poem would be my way of clinging to life and to joy and to create a new foundation I could stand on. I was devastated, and perhaps for this reason I chose to return to São Luís, to my childhood, to those happy days, which although not always so happy, were days that my memories clung to.
I had tried to write about my life in São Luís before, to write about its people and its universe and their relation to the problem of time, to the problem of the mortality of things, those things that end but remain within us. I wanted to recover a life long past to demonstrate that what had died was actually still alive. But it was more than just a return to the past, not an escape but a bringing forth of the past into the present. And so there is a mystery between time and space—a relationship that had bothered me from the very beginning—that is made manifest through Dirty Poem. I sought a non-metaphysical profundity, the essence of concrete reality.
Dirty Poem transcends itself through the relationships things have with one another. For instance, the pear connects with the living room, which in turn connects with certain individuals, who in turn connect with the city, which connects with the entire world beyond it. And the pear also works its chemical processes internally. It has sugars, alcohols; it has its own death processes, amid whose work emerges something new. This is what fascinates me—the complexity of the real, the reality of things and their concrete, non-metaphysical existence.
Gullar’s poem is about exile, as well as the city “in the man /who is in another city.” It is about the consolation and the power of memory, even if memory is “dirty.” Perhaps especially if it is dirty, because life is dirty. Dirty in this poem includes memories of sexual encounters, but also the outrage of social and physical decay, poverty, hopelessness, corruption, and oppression in all its guises. While these motifs may be unsettling, the facts of human interchange, organic decomposition, and even social injustices are, of course, real, as are the possibilities of birth and rebirth. Gullar’s profound optimism glimmers through the corruption in passages of glowing beauty, lyrical rhythms, and moments of great tenderness. The scholar and critic Otto Maria Carpeaux put it succinctly when he wrote, “Ferreira Gullar is one of the greatest men of our country [and] Dirty Poem should be called National Poem, as it embodies all of the experiences, victories, defeats, and hopes of Brazilian life.”
LELAND GUYER
SOURCES
Buarque, Chico, “Assentamento.” In Sebastião Salgado, Terra, introduction by José Saramago. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997.
Carpeaux, Otto Maria. In Ferreira Gullar, Poema Sujo, fifth edition. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Civilização Brasileira, 1983.
Gullar, Ferreira. Toda Poesia (1950–1999), ninth edition, preface by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda. São Paulo: José Olympio Editora, 2000.
Guyer, Leland. “Exile and the Sense of Place in Ferreira Gullar’s Dirty Poem.” Macalester International. Landscape, Culture, and Globalization: Views from Brazil, 5 (1997), 180–91.
——— “An Interview with Ferreira Gullar.” Discurso Literario 5 (1987), 26–41.