Ele Semog
- Éle Semog
Have Afro-Brazilian writers, past or present, had any influence on your writing?
It is a relationship of identity, because of the historical nature of the relationship. There is a kinship with black writers. Someone I think is fantastic—and with a great ability to address the problems of the people—is Lima Barreto, who made a big splash exactly at the same time that Machado de Assis was ascending as a great luminary of Brazilian literature. And, for a writer, reading Machado de Assis is fundamental; it is a journey, a state of being, an idyllic place within literature. Because it is a competent literature, a profoundly ironic literature, a literature impregnated with racial issues, by means of the irony and subtlety of Machado de Assis. In Lima Barreto we find a more head-on, objective approach, but also a very important ironic content. They are writers who, if they did not influence my way of writing, at the very least are quite significant references, just like Cruz e Souza, Luís Gama and, more recently, Solano Trinidade, and the one-and-only Abdias do Nascimento are black authors that, in one way or another—and with the capacity that we have to reinterpret certain historical circumstances—have much to do with literature.
I searched in the works of my contemporary authors in order to create our language, because what was assigned to this generation, the first generation of black writers—of which I am a part—was to establish a common language that derived from the issues or problems the black community faced at the time. We had to inaugurate a new way of speaking, we had to break away from a discourse, we had to break away from the educated norm, we had to create an ontological other within literature. It was as if we had to recodify all Brazilian letters. And it was the role of that generation. We began to articulate ourselves. It wasn’t just one writer writing alone and being celebrated, but rather we all were committed to creating a black literature that opposed the educated norm, that opposed white Brazilians’ representations of black people in literature, that opposed, fundamentally, the capacity to institute an outside literature among our people. Although we have illiteracy problems, although the habit of reading, and access to reading material, are problems in black communities, we promoted books and held readings at public schools, in slum areas, at clubs, at Carnaval groups, at associations, at confederations. In fact, poetry went wherever the black community went during the 1980s. There was a commitment of militancy. It was not a Black Movement; it was the writers of the Black Movement going to the community, just like the Black Movement itself would go to the community. But we had serious problems. It was a movement that had, on the one hand, a source of liberation in Africa and, on the other hand, a source of ascension in African Americans in the United States. The Black Movement in Brazil rebuilt itself during the dictatorship because it was excluded by class oriented white thought which said that there is [End Page 756] a racial democracy in Brazil. That liberal white thinking still says today that the resolution of class differences will resolve the racial issue. The Black Movement had one more annoying problem: it searched classic European literature for the issue of its political thought. It’s a contradiction for you to construct a discourse of liberation based on the discourse of the actual oppressor. And we, the black writers, began to perceive that there exists no social movement without literary expression, and there was no room for the political discussion of the issue of black literature within the Black Movement. So we started the black writers movement, which surges from the Black Movement as a whole. Our aim was to address specifically the issue of black literature, but we also wanted to fight alongside the community, upholding its poetry, its stories, its theatrical works.
How does your work address the issues of race and class in Brazilian society? How do other...
