Absinthe (ABS) 6850 absinthe.6850.pdf 10.3998/absinthe.6850 Selected poems from Fotos ruins muito boas (2022) Vilela Moema Parrine Raquel rparrine@umich.edu 13122024 300 Brazil with an S CC BY 4.0

Translator’s Preface

The works in this collection poetically explore the disorder of life in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. Moema Vilela’s poetry collection Fotos ruins muito boas (Very good bad pictures, 2022) pays witness to the disastrous public handling of the pandemic by Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency, with inconsistent policies and anti-vaccine disinformation. In face of this unfolding incomprehensible horror, poetry strives to rise above the level of the public debate. While Bolsonaro seemed to sink lower and lower in his disdain for human life, refusing vaccine offers from Pfizer, mocking asphyxiating people, and denying the public mourning for the deceased, the public debate had to descend to his level and explain basic concepts such as how a vaccine works, how viruses spread, and why human life is important. In this national context, Vilela offers a vulnerable, subtle approach to poetry that recenters human experience. Discourse on public matters operates within the superficial realm, compelled by conservative elements to defend previously matter-of-fact issues, such as human rights and science. This constraint effectively prevents the debate from transcending to a more substantive engagement with the underlying issues affecting the holistic realization of those very rights. Rising above this constraint, Vilela reclaims the power of the words to give shape to the inner subtleties otherwise neglected. As Vilela states,

The urgency to seek and find more capacities to live also came from this closeness to more deaths, to more losses, with the fact that we endured the pandemic in Brazil—so much more brutal and maddening due to the federal misgovernment, the violence, and the political and institutional negligence. Not only because of this but very sharply because of it, there was so much love, loves, expressions of joy.1

Reading Vilela’s poems reminds us of the small things lost and the loss that inhabits the small things. Reading becomes holding (onto) something delicate, precious, and alive: the preciousness and uniqueness of life. As such, the poem as form assumes its status as nourishing, life giving, contrasting generalizing language we grew accustomed to, such as of “excess deaths” or “herd immunity.”

Vilela was born in Campo Grande, the capital of the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, and now lives in Porto Alegre, the capital of the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Endless soybean fields currently dominate the landscape of Mato Grosso do Sul, a region that began urbanizing in the 1960s. This urbanization accelerated with the construction of Brasília, the new capital. With a culture relatively unknown to the rest of the country, the region received incentives from the military dictatorship (1964–1985) to displace the Indigenous population for highly mechanized monocultures in the 1970s. Vilela exchanged the low vegetation of the soybean fields and the native shrubs of her native region for the pine-like araucária trees of the Southern pampas. Porto Alegre has been fertile ground for new writers, such as Jabuti Award–winning authors Natália Borges Polesso and Jeferson Tenório.

Vilela’s work subtly incorporates themes of migration and displacement, just as these themes subtly infuse her entire writing approach. As such, a language that displaces crosses the text. In the original Portuguese, Vilela uses the second person singular “tu,” which is typical of the South Region of Brazil, and “você,” more commonly used across the rest of Brazil, interchangeably. Moreover, Vilela references some of the most recognizable Southern regionalisms, the word guri or guria (from the Guarani language, meaning boy or girl) and the mate beverage (served hot in the South as opposed to cold [tereré] in Mato Grosso do Sul), as well as those typical of her home state, such as the fruit guavira. Language displaces but also builds a unique form of living, in which these contrasts generate new insights, expanding the idea of home to a constant experimentation, a living-to-be. While some language specificity will be inevitably lost in translation, the instability and vulnerability of Vilela’s language will still be present through her attention to the minimal aspects of life.

The most notable characteristic of Vilela’s poetry is the strength of the domestic images combined with a deliberately prosaic language. As she argues, “In the end of the day, the bread and butter of thinking about poetry is considering its connection with astonishment, uncanniness, the capacity of seeing playfulness and smallness in everyday life.”2 This characteristic enlists Vilela in a genealogy of female Brazilian writers inspired by Ukrainian-Brazilian author Clarice Lispector (1920–1977), whose pioneer feminist approach to literature elevated the domestic to a space of ontological questioning. Famously, in her classic novel The Passion According to G.H. (1964), Lispector’s questions regarding being and existence start through the protagonist’s encounter with a cockroach. More than elevating the mundane and banal, Lispector also broke ground in thinking through social reproduction. By raising to literary status domestic work, care work, and the emotional above the rational, Lispector challenges the sexist division between the public and the private. As Nelly Richard argues in Masculino/femenino (1993), the feminine language developed by feminist authors sought to deterritorialize the hegemony of the masculine language and its relationship with power, seeking instead another form of articulation of knowledge.3 In that sense, Vilela, following Lispector’s footsteps, uses her poetic imagination to claim language back from the perversities of Bolsonaro’s public debate, thus carving a space of resistance in the minor and the poetic. The experience of the pandemic, the loss of loved ones and the threat of losing them, is a shared trauma no one wants to relive. Instead, Vilela reclaims the subtlety of this experience, such as in the opening poem, “in the air,” which reads, “It will be months / without / knowing the scent / of anybody’s / hair / Without touching the hands / of the ones who give us light.” Vilela uses sensorial images (the scent of the hair, the touching of the hands, the seeing of the light) to describe the isolation of the lockdown. The experience closes with hearing, “I hear your voice / getting older,” symbolizing the loss of time in the form of loss of life in isolation. The voice gets older, trapped inside, without air to allow for sonic reverberation, thus evoking the title of the poem. As such, the air both spreads the disease and the poet’s voice. But it is not just the voice of the poet that gets older. The stress and constrictions of the lockdown also erode the relationships inside the enclosure. Despite it all, the erotic grows like grass in the cracks of the concrete: “In the bite, it wants to find something / with another with the same nature” (“seek the bone”). No experience gets flattened. The complexity of the writing carries a sustained life through it all. Like the title of the collection and the poem that names it, Vilela finds meaning in the imperfect flashes of life we take for granted.

Vilela’s anthology closes with the question of the purpose of the literary. The ten parts of the last poem, “not writing,” show the agonizing experience of trying to find a space for creating in a morbid world: “i don’t write because of all the life that scares me / i don’t write because where is this going.” What kind of world is waiting for us outside if it is life, not death, which scares us? Procrastination appears as the sane response to the disintegration of life as we know it: “this abysmal disorientation / that distracts us from the obvious facts.”

I wish I could say that the themes of powerlessness and political dystopia have become a thing of the past since the publication of Fotos ruins muito boas. But in June 2024, Porto Alegre, along with most of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, was underwater for several days, displacing over half a million people and killing over 100. Mirroring the COVID-19 pandemic, the flood situation arose from a fatal combination of climate catastrophe and local neoliberal policies by the mayor of Porto Alegre, Sebastião Melo, and the governor of Rio Grande do Sul, Eduardo Leite. While literature cannot protect us from physical harm, Vilela’s work lifts the fate of words as subservient to power, shakes the stabilization of the normative, and refuses to reproduce institutional consensus, elevating the space of the minor, from the smallest grain of cassava flour.

 Selected poems from <italic>Fotos ruins muito boas</italic> by Moema Vilela in the air You catch it through the air It falls On us like a spell Avoid contact Revoke the step forward. Pay attention to everything Commands in the present that get extended It will be months without knowing the scent of anybody’s hair Without touching the hands of the ones who give us light I hear your voice getting older We talk about the days but not the after We must learn to wait Withstand To say months As to not to say More Say today. Believe Give it time For the body to integrate the new awareness: I had a nightmare last night I called my love On the phone The dreams I collect are only in my sleep We don’t dare plan what is to come We enumerate the imminent Be swift, don’t stay Try to go on foot Take your shoes off, take off your rings Don’t touch anything Don’t lose your mind Ask the elders what they want to do: how many conversations like this can you possibly have? I see your beard grow, my toenails The eyebrow growing whiter Through the screens We look like a rescued person who returned from the sea and it is good I prefer it this way I’d rather see Have this truth on my face It was enough to have had to sew shrouds in the air Revoking the future is not even close to what we need to do about the past two bedrooms In a bedroom cats nest together on your lap, that’s how I know that it’s warm there. You wear shorts and have been cycling. That’s what your thigh muscles would say on the video call if you hadn’t said it yourself in the inventory of the hours that we shared, meanwhile. In the other bedroom, the heater does its job, pinhão leftovers smudge a plate on the desk and on the floor there are so many books that no one is brave enough to try to read the ones below. Under your coats I would like you to come to the things that hide behind the most palpable facts, like the fact that my legs, which were born pretty and perfect like my mother’s, are now flabbier than ever. I talk about time. I talk about death. I ask what good are legs for, what drives them and where. But you know only what you see: I have been drinking too much mate and this must not be good for you. This is why I don’t sleep, you say. goma As the cassava flour falls from the strainer looking for its pair, it soon forms a trio and then an incorruptible world, like tapioca or beiju, it looks nothing like life, today. as a whole As the cassava flour falls from the strainer looking for its pair, it soon forms a trio and then an incorruptible world, like tapioca or beiju, it looks nothing like life, today. Dispersed over the same words, the problems don’t show themselves as a whole, they keep burning loose on the hot skillet, without revealing their meaning, their roundness. Like sand in the mouth. You can’t eat it. Let’s look at another image: Like the initially thin snow that accumulates against the garage door. With a full tank, the car grows old in waiting. It can’t leave. really good bad pictures i like these bad pictures, in the dark of the bar of someone really close really far moving a record that doesn’t capture. memory you cannot hold on your hand. the pulsing of a low note on a speaker someone who turns their back who takes the backpack moments of the most banal prodigies like a foot that holds the bottle that the new couple inadvertently knocks down and almost shatters a picture that if you auscultate, it breathes —we want to scream like in the accidents in the movies, in the ambulances so that everyone can hear and celebrate together the glory—it’s alive seek the bone Seek the bone under the flannel of the body. Hold the hips on your hands, gather the whole knee, with the kneecap, femur, tibia. Want that which resists behind the softness. The striking emotion of being with somebody, before we melt, calcium phosphate under the earth. It wants to taste through the collarbone, the zygomatic, magnetized by whatever thirst, whenever it could really touch somebody —was it this, then, the mania on the hands finding the metacarpus, the phalanx? I wanted: to arrive in what sustains the remainder of the landslide. It was enough to foresee the structure under the garments for the mouth to open in surprise and give space to teeth that, like that of vampires’, grow. They suppress the gentleness of the lips to reach for what they finally find in front of them—from the arms, the one that builds cities, cultivates food, enlivens clubs. The one that holds itself up in protest, an inflatable raft among whalers. In the bite, it wants to find something with another with the same nature. the best cassava, the best guavira i always say that this is the best sandwich anyone has ever made this is the best granola, the best rice and beans that someone has made in history, please isn’t it a little lousy to say, he says of such a true thing i say: this is the best fettuccine i ever had in my life which one would be the best fettuccine of a whole life and the universe if not the marvelous pasta of the present? the only one you have what would i say, then, guri tell me what you want me to say with your mouth full, always complaining about the exact words of the best woman that you ever heard saying words in your life not writing i to draw with a pen over what was written years ago. it was possible, but is it still? the pen tracing the old cursive, truths of ten notebooks ago ii i love to think about the house instead of writing tips to grow sage new curtains for 29.99 tricks to wash pillows in the washing machine i love to buy shoe racks instead of writing wash legumes, bags of beans worrying about baby’s temperatures iii in order not to write, i research a lot, every-single-thing, the minutia i google it all the way down, i call, i chase it from taxidermy to big data specialists. i take notes. i edit them i put together this big collage with maps, pictures, news on the wall i’m almost a detective on a crime show iv it was so hard for such a long time keeping up with this, that when something follows through i can’t go on it’s too much emotion. a sentence! complete, look stop it, turn up the music i can’t help myself i’m going to scream, throw myself on the floor v how do you write? the ones who work with it sometimes answer. they show their notebooks the day or the night. the mate. the trick apps. philip glass in the winter, paulinho da viola in the summer being stubborn and precise. bird by bird with a consolation wine after writing so many characters some sigh by the window when there are no characters how do you write? without saying anything that matters completely ruined-in-green-and-yellow, absolutely lost dot com with the voice of samba, the voice of goodbye, brazilian in medium height i write with body expressions: with the heart falling on my face, stomping my feet, in blood sweat and tears biting my tongue vi i frequently speak about how i’m not able to do what i used to, what i did what did i use to do? before what? what does it mean to not be able to? wallowing is a full-time job i hope that was clear vii because i think too much about romance because death doesn’t help it doesn’t pay the bills and nobody wants to read it’s difficult and i can’t create anything exciting there are a lot of things being made that contemplate and fulfill me i don’t write because i love writing because i have hope and there is so much at stake i don’t write because it doesn’t change things and if it changes, it’s awful for the people who write, individually i don’t write because crooked inside i don’t write because of all the life that scares me i don’t write because where is this going i don’t write because i say yes to the text i don’t write, you know how much it costs i don’t write because i’m here but maybe i went to saturn half an hour looking at pictures of lauren bacall when she was young, fruit being shaved et cetera viii the house is dirty we need to make choices ix it’s your birthday and we need to choose being present is a different art available, shining in the parties of being people its wakes, its fevers, depressions, christenings x what else can i count down as the experience of this not-writing trade i won’t talk about doubt about the benefit of meaning the value the pleasure the sacrifice the struggle to swim against the tide the planet going extinct, the worst presidents at the neighbor’s, in the family, in the well-spoken people this abysmal disorientation that distracts us from the obvious facts a fever of 100 degrees in the spring in the teeth—nothing, though, while the people sleep exhausted poets  experiment   one wrong word    after another

Quoted in Ricardo Romanoff, “As ‘Fotos ruins muito boas’ de Moema Vilela,” Matinal Jornalismo, August 25, 2022, https://www.matinaljornalismo.com.br/rogerlerina/literatura/fotos-ruins-muito-boas-moema-vilela/.

Quoted in Romanoff, “As ‘Fotos ruins muito boas’ de Moema Vilela.”

Nelly Richard, Masculino/femenino: prácticas de la diferencia y cultura democrática (Francisco Zegers, 1993).

Moema Vilela is a Brazilian author, poet, and professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS). She is the author of Ter saudade era bom (Dublinense, 2014), Guernica (Edições Udumbara, 2017), Quis dizer (Edições Udumbara, 2017), A dupla vida de Dadá (Penalux, 2019), and Fotos ruins muito boas (7Letras, 2022). Vilela has also published short stories, poems, and essays in several literary magazines and anthologies. She holds a doctorate in Literature-Creative Writing from PUCRS, an MA in Linguistics and Semiotics from the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul (UFMS), and an MA in Creative Writing from PUCRS. Born in Campo Grande, Mato Grosso do Sul, Vilela lives in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul.

Raquel Parrine holds a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan and an MA in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the University of São Paulo (USP), with a research focus on feminist and queer literature and visual art in Latin America from the 1980s to the present. She is also a translator, having participated in the feminist collective sycorax in the translation of Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch and Re-enchanting the World, published by Editora Elefante in 2017 and 2022, respectively. Her co-translation of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study was recently published by Ubu Editora (2024). Parrine lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan.