In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Four Vignettes by Marcelo D'Salete
  • Nohora Arrieta Fernández (bio)

This text is for João Pedro, who was playing at home with his cousins when he was killed by the Military Police of Rio de Janeiro.

It was May 19, 2020. João Pedro was a black, beautiful teenager of 14 years old and nothing prevents us from imagining that he loved to read comic books.

1991. One afternoon in mid-July, the coldest month in São Paulo. A man waits on the platform of a subway station. Line five to Capão Redondo, south zone. The man puts on his headphones to pass the time. He is listening to Consciência Black vol. 1 [Black Consciousness vol. 1], the first album by the rap group, Racionais MC. He fast-forwards to the last song, "Hard Times": "…some hands of influence hold the power. They don't care, pigs. But they want all of us dead." The woman looks at him from the opposite platform and takes a picture.

It is a plausible story. Or the beginning of a probable story. The reader could imagine any other story, any other beginning, looking at the four-vignette sequence by Brazilian cartoonist Marcelo D'Salete (São Paulo, 1977). The vignettes could also be reorganized in a different way than the one we have chosen here; in which case, the number of possibilities multiplies. D'Salete abandons us at a crossroads and lets us choose our own adventure. His graphic style is characterized by a deep contrast between shadows and lights, between black and white—which some critics have called "ambiguous." Something inside the squares is ethereal, and we cannot name it. This ambiguity is most pronounced in Cumbe, the graphic novel that takes place on sugar plantations—for which D'Salete won the Eisner Prize (the most esteemed international prize for comic books) in 2017. But it has been present since his early work, Noite Luz (2008) and Encruzilhada (2011), both of them set in the black peripheries of São Paulo. In the series of vignettes here, the only thing we recognize is the [End Page 190] city. That city is São Paulo, which peeks out through the pichação on the wall behind the woman or on the billboards behind the man.

D'Salete's São Paulo is not the modernist city of Tarsila do Amaral or Oswald de Andrade. It is not the tropicalist city of Caetano and Gil, so much beloved by foreigners and Brazilianists. D'Salete's São Paulo is the second largest metropolis in Latin America. It is the city that contains the peripheries of São Matheus and Capão Redondo. The city of Brazilian Rap from the late eighties and early nineties, a densely populated city, in which the houses of immigrant black families from the Northeast region perch together with no air between them. It is the city of Mano Brown, the lead singer of Racionais MC and one of the writers of Negro drama [Black Drama], a song that could be recited by any black Brazilian teenager who grew up during the nineties: "The crowd is a monster without face and heart / Hey, São Paulo / land of the skyscrapers / a drizzle of rain tears the flesh / It's the Tower of Babel / Brazilian family / two against the world / single mother of a promising bum."

In this São Paulo, boys and girls from Capão Redondo cross the city at midnight to write calligraphy on the buildings of downtown Avenida Paulista. In the vertical and forbidden language of the pichação—which unlike graffiti is still considered a crime in Brazil—these street writers condemn a city that is used to bury them. At times, one of them climbs high and falls, her body blown up on the street.

The anguish, the dryness, the nonstop rhythm, the suffocation of São Paulo is a dense black stain, deep as cooked pitch, in the vignettes of Marcelo D'Salete. This black stain threatens to swallow the character and the reader who, as often happens in D'Salete, is included in the narrative through an...

pdf

Share