Geni Guimaraes
- Geni Guimarães
You live in the interior, not in São Paulo. Will you talk about rural life as an influence on your work?
I realized that my literary work is different because it portrays the Afro-Brazilian in his essence. I create literary works out of my way of life, and my way of life, in general, is the same as that of most black people in Brazil. Our beginning—the origin of the Afro-Brazilians—is always the same. Concerning the issue of being from a rural area: my living in a rural area, where a few people speak the dialect, is what made my writing take shape. Reality is extensive and I, too, do what I can to learn a little from people from different places; I need to live together with these people, but I preserve and I want to preserve. The moment I lose interior culture, I lose my roots, I lose my individual root—not only my Afro-Brazilian roots but the roots of my very family. The closer I stay with the culture of the interior, the more different my work appears. I dwell very much on the day-to-day life of the people I know in the interior, the people I live around. I am a writer who does not do assigned work; I don’t accept assignments from publishers. I do the work that springs from me. So it is true work, a purework. I am like this; I do like this, I write like this. And I think that the publishers have been realizing that there’s no camouflage, no desire to put a spin on things. There is no intention of elitizing my work.
I became very aware of this the first time I came to São Paulo to give a lecture. I was so scared I almost died, and soon I began to tremble in front of everybody, on television and other media formats, and to top it all off I was at a table among men. I was the only woman at the table and the only one from the interior. I was the minority there. I became desperate and confessed, in front of the public, that I didn’t know how to talk about those writers everyone was talking about, those difficult names; that I only knew how to talk about my life and the place where I lived—if that was the way it was going to be, then I could do my work. And I read a story called “O Enterro da Barata” [“The Burial of the Cockroach”] which is a beautiful story, and I insist on saying that because you will agree when you read it. Well, when I finished reading, I was given a standing ovation; I thought it was for someone else, and within the hour three publishers appeared who wanted to publish my work. In that way, I managed to see what the difference was between my works and those of the others—even in my day-to-day attitude my way of living is reflected, isn’t it? The life I live with my children, with my brothers and sisters. We are a very large family, and my mother planted within me all, everything, all in her that is sensitive, poetic and pre-literate. She brought all of this to life in me, so I think the most engaged literature is that which bears the influence of my literature. And with this difference of mine I am aware of our problems, the problems of the black community, and of our duty of resistance. [End Page 810]
Have you received awards for your work? What about A cor da Ternura [The Color of Tenderness]?
That book was awarded two important prizes. I only found out about their importance afterwards. You can see how naive I am—because, in truth, I didn’t write the book to win awards; I wrote it because I needed to chronicle the lifestyle of a black family. This book is autobiographical. I needed to speak about my traumas, my...
