Brazil, Lyric, and the Americas

7. (In-)Conclusion: Intersection Interaction Interlocution

7 (In-)Conclusion Intersection Interaction Interlocution After a journey through diverse territories and decades of Brazilian lyric in the series of chapters above, questions naturally arise from the examination of repertories that so exceed the traditional bounds of poetry, questions that interrogate the premises of interface, of peoples and styles, of invention -discovery and invention-creation, and of insularity and its geocultural conceptual cousin deterritorialization. In the wake of his exported tropicalization , for instance, one might ask if Chico Science, an innovative and internationally sought-after singer whose life was cut tragically short, actually made an impact beyond the domain of popular music. Was he heard in the esoteric realm of poets and poetry? The best testimony is a test case, a textual experiment:1 mangue )cabeça de science se expande( imensidão [mangrove / )head / of / science / expands / itself( / immensity] TheyoungpoetFranciscoKaqseeksinfracturedversereminiscentofthelate Haroldo de Campos to accomplish what the object of attention in the poem had done in paradigm-busting end-of-the-century popular music: a lyric disassociation with the past and sure association with the present+future in which the biogeographically defined native locale is projected, broadly and Brazil, Lyric, and the Americas 180 universally cast, onto a cerebral dimension of performance. The “island” of the indigent urban mangrove habitat in northern Brazil is transcended; pop and inquiry form a new interface. The inter-American quality of such musico-literary encounters is appreciable in another passage of this Eu versus, with its compact title that can suggest a contrary writerly self (= I versus/verses) and even the Colossus of the North (EU = Estados Unidos, United States), land of origin of the feted and electrifying rock artist of a poem dubbed “Hendrix”: “asa / desquieta / de hendrix / roça // o blues / inflama-se / elétrons / seguem-no” [wing / disquieted / of Hendrix / rubs // the blues / inflaming itself / electrons / follow him]. The second part of the unfolding minimalist poem goes back to the late Romantic Sousândrade, whose transamerican epic was unraveled in chapter 4, and forward, again to the Afro-American cybernetics felt in chapter 6: exu no eixo do mundo hino desatina: sousêndrix farrapos estelares afrociber délica emerge do inferno harpa farpada * você já experimantou? [Eshu in the / axis / of the world / hymn // goes crazy: / Sousêndrix // stellar / tatters // Afro-cyber / -delic / emerges / from the inferno // “barbed / harp” // * // have you / tried it (experimanted)?] 181 (In-)Conclusion This is an interarts-friendly poem about the meeting of minds and epochs. Eshu in West African–derived spirit-possession religions of the New World is the trickster at the crossroads, sometimes portrayed (not so appropriately) as devilish. The delirious act here is to mix the names of the peregrinating poet Sousândrade—author of “The Inferno of Wall Street” and Harpas selvagens (Savage harps)—and the internationally revered master of invention on the electric guitar, Afro-American Jimi Hendrix (d. 1970). One of his most notable moments was a distortion-driven instrumental version of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” whose text was translated by Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil, a fact to which Sousândrade alluded in his most celebrated long passage. Harpa farpada, poetic image of the electric guitar, was borrowed from music critic José Miguel Wisnik in a “Hendrixian context.”2 The poematic portmanteau gesture connects with the final line, where changing a single vowel of the normal experimentou? (tried it?) implicates a Joycean word blending that carries over into the very aesthetics in play. There is further allusion to the epoch-making LP by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Are You Experienced? (1967). The forged name Sousêndrix sounds somewhat like Science, and the component of ethnic cybernetics also suggests Chico Science. Thus the underlined barbed harp, also implying a title or other reason for italicization, may encompass the antinormative verse of the nineteenth-century bard, lines of the translated hymn of the USA, the sharp-edged popular music of the star Hendrix, musico-literary criticism, and the fusion of mangue beat. The currency of such hybridity is central in a technologically tinged twenty-first-century lyric of two dozen lines titled “Brazilian Frame” that serves to summarize much of the foregoing. This other young voice, Paula Valéria Andrade, ponders mixtures and melting pots, ending with jabs that refer back to the mythology of the epoch of discovery (invention), the formation of images in the Western imaginary (islands, utopia), and the age of planetary mass media (interfaces...