Poesília de Braxília: Nicolas Behr and the Reinvention of Brasiliensidade
By Steven F. Butterman
Brazilian Studies Association 2010
Brasília, DF
Panel: “Fios e Planos Contemporâneos: Imaginação Urbana Expansiva”
Coordinator: Charles A. Perrone
Friday, July 23, 2010
9:00 – 10:45 a.m. (5.8)
If, as
Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda has argued in her seminal study 26 Poetas Hoje,
“poesia marginal” is defined, in large part, by the proximity between
poetry and life experiences as well as the abundance of colloquialism and the
unpretentious language of the “povão,” my visit to Brasília has already been at
least two-thirds representative. I decided to spend these days invading the
home and the hospitality of Nicolas Behr and family, who I am delighted to say
is here with us today. This so as to anthropophagically absorb as much vitality
as possible of the poet and his verses. The only missing characteristic is the
obsessive abuse of “metáforas de grande abstração,” as Heloísa posits, mas
vamos preenchendo essa lacuna já com esta minha comunicação.
My interest in the vast corpus of Behr’s poetic production began some
years ago, with an abundant feast or a Brazilian-style breakfast, devouring the
hilariously satiric pages of the 1977 bestseller Iogurte com Farinha,
which, while produced in mimeógrafo form, sold more than
8,000 copies. Behr has sustained this sometimes ludic, often poignant,
and always parodic banquet over the course of more than 30 volumes, arriving at
a nutritious and equally abundant dessert filled with citric and acidic
brasilidade: Laranja seleta: Poesia escolhida (1977-2007) and O
Bagaço da Laranja: pra ler com os dentes e mastigar bem (1977-2007),
published last year. The difference in the graphic design of the covers is
clear evidence of Behr´s increased disillusionment with his beloved city.
As a self-confessed non-Brazilianist who denies
both alternatives of the “s” and the “z” in the title and prefers to identify with
the noun “brasilófilo,” and as one who has studied and published extensively on
the (rather ironically) now canonical” of the poetas marginais, such as
Glauco Mattoso, Leila Míccolis, and Roberto Piva, among others, I wanted
to add a Behr to my plate to please my palate. Part of my intention is to
further my academic “mission,” if you will, to show how poesia marginal in
Brazil has managed to subvert “mainstream” “poesia culta” as
Almeida Pinto designates the term in his 2002 study Poesia de
Brasília: duas tendências, but also to work to incorporate within the canon
poetas marginais marginalized—ironically--from the excellent but highly
Rio-centric criticism of Hollanda and Carlos Alberto Messeder Pereira in the
early 1980s. My specific interest in Nicolas Behr is fueled by an aesthetic and
philosophical preoccupation of a number of irreconcilable contradictions that I
have found in the poet’s verses, only one or two of which I will have time to
discuss in my presentation today.
If, as the sparse criticism of Behr’s work suggests, there is an
overwhelming utilization of intertextuality in Behr’s verses, what makes his
poetic universe unique (Since postmodernism, I will of course not dare to use
terms like “original” or “authentic.”). In his poetry, nominated for the
prestigious Prêmio Jabuti and Portugal Telecom, Behr makes frequent allusions
to Carlos
Drummond de Andrade, but the careful reader will also find traces of the
work of Castro Alves, Caetano Veloso, Torquato Neto, Mário de Andrade, Manuel
Bandeira, Glauco Mattoso, Adélia Prado, among many others, as Wilberth
Salgueiro points out in “A intertextualidade como engenho: O Brasil de Drummond
na braxília de Nicolas Behr.” In fact, Glauco Mattoso furnishes us with a way
to begin to answer this question with his tongue-in-cheek conceptualization of “plágio
inteligente,” in one of his early and brilliant manifestos, The
“Manifestivo Vanguardada or the IV Manifesto da Vanguarda,” whereby the
poet reserves the right (and, in fact, shoulders the responsibility) of first
digesting and then, in a rather ludic, brincalhão spirit we may simultaneously call
“tough love,” critically reflects on influences within the canon of Brazilian
literature, even and perhaps especially if this canon finds itself in a cannon
(in the double “n” sense of the word) ready to spit transgressive fire
onto the “poesia culta” with which it constantly contends and attempts to
engage. While I do not have sufficient time to elaborate here on Mattoso’s
conception of “plagio inteligente,” suffice it to say for now that the poet
uses pastiche, parody, and bricolage to engage with his poetic antecedents much
like
Gregorio de Mattos was said to have “plagiarized” Baroque poets like
Quevedo, but with the noblest of intentions, to pay tribute to his verses. The
adjective “inteligente” comes into play when we observe the poet reworking the
original contributions with what I would like to call a
“creative mimicry” process, in which such an imitation is never a copy
of the original text but rather a postmodern reworking and consequent
renovation of the verses the poet borrows.
Put in another way, how does the reader cope with
the fact that, in Behr, we are witnessing the production of a poet who reaches
such a level of despair and consequent indignation when he returns to Drummond’s
“pedra no meio do caminho” only to find that, in the case of his beloved
Brasília, this pedrinha has become macunaimically transformed into a
prédio and the “caminho” has become a super-quadra? For me, the problem
can be summarized as follows: How does one manage to convincingly and
effectively “poetar” (without necessarily lapsing back into the elitist,
exclusivist concretismo or its variants, which would, I think, be totally
against Behr´s poetic principles?). How to describe the shapes, the signs, the
streets, the sights of an impersonal, exclusive, dry, OCD city whose
super-quadras are essentially identical, contradicting the “normal” cityscapes
of an urban space like Sampa, with its vast multitude of neighborhoods, its
disorganized chaos and unruly crowds? This pedra transformada em prédio, this
caminho sem calçada transformado em quadra is the “grande abstração” that
metaphorizes how I view the most recent poetry of Nicolas Behr dedicated to the
invention of his new
“braxília.”
How are we to interpret the neologism “braxília”? The new imaginary
space that the poet creates maintains the “X” that represents the original
cross over which the joining of the two axes was projected. This gesture does
not destroy but instead preserves the permanence of the space known as “Brasília”
while hoping to rebuild upon it. Indeed, we may also say that “X” marks the
spot. Brasília is Ground Zero for the construction of a new utopia that
potentially represents all of Brazil, one which would consist of a truly
communitarian space where there is no separation between the citizens who
inhabit its boundaries. This idealistic social democratization of a common
locus to be fully occupied by all is the primary dream on which the new “braxília”
with a lower-case “b” is founded. The transformation of the cross to the X may
also be a reference to subversion of religious hegemony of Christianism and
other potentially repressive institutions, much like Cacá Diegues’ “Quilombo,”
where the transformation of the cross to the X becomes an open act of
resistance to hegemonic oppression of any kind.
Interestingly, the trajectory of contemporary Brazilian poetry, whereby Ferreira
Gullar’s reinscription of the subjectivity of the “eu” in what would later be
called neo-concretismo, parallels Behr’s own process. As Furiati writes: “Ao
tratar de maneira informal os espaços
‘monumentais’ os versos abrem lugar para a reinclusão (no plano de
poesia) do sujeito ao projeto urbanístico da cidade de Brasília” (21). This
renovated imaginary space represents both a fertile literary workshop where the
creative process becomes the flourishing flora and fauna of artistic
expression. However, it also promotes the construction of a new Brasília,
decrying a present Brasília that never truly existed in reality yet lived in
theory in the books and the essays and the blueprints of Juscelino Kubitschek,
Lúcio Costa, and Oscar Niemeyer. In other words, I see “braxilia” as the ludic
yet socio-politically charged utopian dream of a dream that never came to be.
This alternative space emerges from a poetically re (constructed) underground
city which, much like the anti-traditional tradition of Brazilian literature of
transgression since colonial times, mixes utopian ufanismo with equal doses of irreverent sociopolitical critique and
denunciation. The creative process of Behr’s poetry, as we will see in an
excerpt of a video containing a brief interview with the poet at the end of
this presentation, is fueled by an obsessive investment in undoing the Plano-Piloto and reinscribing the urban
landscapes with subversive potential for social change. Hope for the future,
however, becomes increasingly lost in disillusionment about the present urban
reality that excludes the brasiliense who is not a
“funcionário público” from access to the (oops) “public” sector and
promotes further socioeconomic stratification and alienation of its citizens.
The parallel imaginary universe of
“braxilia”
Behr invents appropriates and anthrophagizes JK’s Porque Construí Brasília
(Behr’s
Porque
Construí braxília, written in lower-case “b”). Similarly, braxília
revisitada is meant to
satirize
Lúcio Costa’s “Brasília revisitada,” which he published upon his return to the
city in
1985.
In her excellent thesis defended three years ago here in town at the
UniB, Gilda Maria Queiroz Furiati convincingly divides Behr’s poetry into three
distinct phases: The first phase includes 19 mimeographed books, produced from
1977, three years after Behr moved to the D.F. from Cuiabá, until 1980, a
period which Furiati designates as the “imagem projetada do espaço de Brasília.”
In this initial phase, the poetic voice sings lyrically of his love and
enchantment for Brasília while simultaneously critiquing, in Oswaldian poema-piada fashion, the dehumanization brought about by the
implementation of Lúcio Costa’s Plano Piloto de Brasília. The second phase of
Behr’s poetic production, and the phase which interests me most in my current
research, begins 13 years later with the 1993 publication of Porque construí
braxília, a collection of 31 poems, 13 of which are dedicated to the
D.F. This phase, which
Furiati identifies as “Tempo social, história e utopia da cidade”
constitutes a five-year trajectory invested in transforming the cement of urban
reality into the creation of a utopian dream to compensate for the disjuncture
between official discourse of the intentions of the planned city and the depth
of alienation and corruption which typifies daily reality after its
concretization. Behr produces five books during this period. Furiati rightly
designates the third phase as “Crítica e desconstrução do discurso mítico,”
running from 2001 to 2004 (but, I would amend, to the present day with Behr’s
two most recently-published volumes, to which I alluded earlier). In this most
recent phase of profound yet somehow still playful disillusionment, Behr’s work
is influenced by the bleak visions of sociologists and anthropologists like
Luiz Sérgio Duarte da Silva, Brasilmar Ferreira Nunes and even the observations
made by Clarice Lispector about Brasília, published in her “Crônicas de
Brasília, 1925 – 1977” in her text Para Não Esquecer.
Furiati traces the evolution of the poet’s
disillusionment quite well, when she points out that the sensual verses
attributed to a city he once loved metaphorized by a “suzana eixosa,” a poem we
will hear in just a few minutes, to a city “sem seios / sem desejos” in the
latter part of Behr’s trajectory, when the embittered and indignant poetic
voice asks a number of not-so-rhetorical questions, always in lower-case
letters:
quando
será inaugurada em mim esta cidade?
as
mudanças no plano piloto
as
mudanças em mim?
bicos de
seios
apontam a
direção
do
monumento na
cidade
plana
sem seios
sem desejos
Returning
now to the question of balancing intertextuality with unique poetic production,
I find it quite fascinating how literary critics to date have attempted
to squeeze Behr’s work into a framework that not only finds its roots—but
rather the entirety of its identity—in the contributions of Brazilian modernist
poets. Early in his article, “As cidades de Nicolas Behr,”
Francisco Kaq writes: “Antes, é claro, havia Oswald. Se o retorno ao
coloquial e à dessolenização do poético praticados pela primeira geração
modernista era uma bandeira (no pun intended) hasteada por vários poetas
marginais…parece-nos que Nicolas foi o mais efetivamente oswaldiano.” The
specific characteristics of shared affinities between Oswald and Nicolas would
include colloquial, synthetic verses, the notion of “ready-made” poetry (a la
Décio Pignatari), the use of parody, the abuse of appropriation, and, how Kac
interestingly defines the mechanism of intertextuality in Behr’s poetry: “A
recontextualização e transformação de lugares comuns e de outros textos.” At a
later point in Kaq’s brief but contradictory analysis, the critic states that “Nicolas
cita e se apopria mais de Drummond que de Oswald—sua trajetória se inicia em
algum ponto entre esses dois campos de força.” And what of Mário de Andrade’s Pauliceia
Desvairada, which is nowhere to be found in Kaq’s essay? And of
Leminski? As if to throw his pen up in the air and to proclaim, “Olha, não tem
como enquadrar o cara,” Kaq ultimately concedes the unique qualities of Behr’s
poetic universe, failing to completely conceive this corpus as either (or
exclusively) drummondiano or oswaldiano in derivation or inspiration, writing: “A
singularidade poética de Nicolas Behr reside, enfim, em seu modo de expor e
explorar o esvaziamento subjetivo, em uma situação inédita.” Wilberth Salgueiro
asks the unanswered question, “Por que tantos poemas de Drummond (exatamente
ele, Drummond) são tomados, vampirizados por Nicolas Behr?” Quadros e quadras.
As Furiati points out, the “brand,” if you will, of
intertextuality that appears in Behr’s works is one that does not acknowledge
his own anthropophagy since it does not pause to give credit to works cited or
subverted that appear in his pages. This technique, also reminiscent of Glauco
Mattoso’s “plágio inteligente,” may be the only avenue to contest authoritative
(and authoritarian) discourses about the city of Brasília, for the “procedimento
de empréstimo do texto
alheio,” as Furiati conceives it, is, in Behr, a veritable banquet of
ecological recycling, mixing spoken words with written texts that Behr has
researched to uncover official discourses of the imaginary of “Brasília” as it
was theoretically conceived by its founders. Furiati quite convincingly writes:
“No caso de Nicolas Behr, a suposição é de que o uso de paródias, transcrições
e paráfrases de outros textos funciona como uma espécie de bricolagem cujo
objetivo é a desconstrução de textos que se tornaram inquestionáveis e serviram
para criar um ideário mítico da cidade. No caso [do poeta], a marca da
apropriação serve como uma reinvenção poética do cotidiano.” (17). Ultimately,
then, “braxília” subverts the artificiality of the official discourse of the
city and yearns to uncover, recover and ultimately rediscover “o cotidiano
perdido no projeto monumental.” (21). Monuments, then, are treated with such
humor and informality to enable the subject to “ficar à vontade” to return to
enjoy the space from where he has been excluded. The lack of pedestrian space
and the division of the city into two entities—the “plano piloto” (with its “tecnocracia”)
and the “cidades satellites” (or the periphery) becomes the primary spatial
target of Behr’s denunciation.
Ironically
and quite effectively, then, loaded terms of Brazilian bureaucracy and even
“legalês” and “juridiquês” return in Behr’s poetry as colloquial
expressions of everyday existence. Some of the most common words in his most
recent work include “protocolo,” “carimbo,” “monumento,” “palácio,” “agenda,”
and “crachá.” But much like Glauco Mattoso has used and abused the classical “culto”
Camonian sonnet form and structure as an edifice to house themes of
homoeroticism, fetishism, and sadomasochism, Behr has managed to subvert
bureaucratic processes by disempowering the terms and reducing them to the
(quite unfortunate) everyday reach of the brasiliense,
and by extension, the Brazilian citizen, thus symbolically subverting and
repositioning the power from the palácio to the people.
I will not take precious time to cite the vast abundance of poems which
demonstrate this ludic and critical process, for it is my understanding that
Nicolas Behr is scheduled to perform a reading of his work, along with other
Brasiliense poets, immediately following this panel, at 11:15 (Session 6.8, na Quadra
WSZ…just kidding)… Instead, I would like to take the few minutes remaining to
share with you a brief documentary excerpt from the “Minuto de Cultura” series,
a piece produced by the Espaço Cultural Zumbi dos Palmares in conjunction with
SESC-DF) and generously provided by Nicolas Behr…