Jonatas da Silva
- Jonatas Conceição da Silva
How would you describe contemporary Afro-Brazilian poetry?
In the late 1970s and in the 1980s in Brazil we had different experiences as far as collective works by black writers. It was principally in the 1980s that we Afro-Brazilian writers were able to plan and coordinate three important national conferences for Afro-Brazilian writers—two conferences in São Paulo and one in Rio de Janeiro. From these conferences, we have the annals, the theses that were proposed and debated. The attempt to organize a collective work by black writers here in Brazil is already a tradition, in the sense that there have been diverse attempts in various states—Rio Grande do Sul, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and, perhaps, Pernambuco—to organize this kind of collective work. Those conferences were productive efforts—experiences that helped very much the process of writing literature, and even the issue of the mass production of the literature we write. It’s evident that beginning in the mid-1980s, with Brazil’s economic crisis, it became impossible to realize this kind of collective reunion for the valuation of literature. And, not only the reunions became impossible, but even collective literary production became difficult, very difficult. The only experience that has survived today, with respect to the collective effort, is Quilombhoje in São Paulo, and even so it is work carried out with many difficulties. The difficulties that we black writers have in our country are basically of two types: first, the difficulty of the perfection of the instrument, the literary object. The great majority of our writers come from the lower economic class, without literary tradition in the family, without literary studies. We are, the great majority of us, self-taught. So, good will, literary motivations, lyrical emotions are not enough to make or create a good literary or poetic object. Our Afro-Brazilian literature suffers very much from this lack of technique. A second point that is allied to this is the issue of financial difficulty. If the Afro-Brazilian population were to have the minimum conditions for survival, our literature would have greater glory, a better technique, a better distribution in Brazilian society.
What does it mean to you as a writer, as a creator, as an artist, to have to write for a specific public?
Personally, I don’t limit my literary creation. When I write (principally poetry), I am not writing for black people. I make poetic literature with the objective of its being as universal as possible. If the themes, if the object of my literary output tries to portray or to capture the everyday essence of the Afro-Brazilian universe, that does not mean that my work should be exclusively for black people’s consumption. [End Page 774] That would limit the creation very much. I want my literature to be read by different peoples all over the world; I want it to be read here in Brazil, especially by the Afro-Brazilian population. But I also want it to be read by non-blacks in Brazil. I mean, this is an issue of literary composition in and of itself, that it is not possible to produce a directed literature. On the other hand, the non-poetic literature that I produce is almost 100% directed at the black population. It is a more pamphletary type of literature, more educational, more direct. That literature is directed, and it has an active perspective, an effect that is perhaps not immediate, but at least short to mid-term. It is very different from poetic literature, from poetry; today, we should have the objective of reaching a growing, more universal public, even with local themes.
You have said that the reading public for poetry and prose written by Afro-Brazilian writers would be essentially the white and mestiço middle class, and that few blacks have university degrees. Will you say more about these problems?
The question of our literature’s consuming public is an issue that is intrinsically linked to the political development...
