By
Vivian Schelling*
Chico
Buarque is known, loved and in a sense revered as
a singer and composer whose lyrics have, since the
1960s, chronicled the predicament of Brazilian society
and the life of the Brazilian people, resonating
through the very heart of Brazilian popular culture.
The
1960s, before Brazilian society was subjected to
the full repressive force of the right-wing military
government which came to power in 1964, were exceedingly
optimistic and full of promise. Economic development,
the growing political mobilisation of the peasantry,
the urban working-class, of sectors of the middle-class
and above all the explosive proliferation of Popular
Culture Movements seemed to be propelling Brazilian
society ineluctably forward towards an exciting
future full of possibilities in which economic backwardness
and the political and cultural oppression left by
Brazil's colonial legacy would be overcome. Chico
Buarque's emergence as a national icon is intimately
linked to the flourishing of national culture in
this period. This blossoming was manifested in adult
literacy campaigns linked to political education,
in new forms of film, theatre and music in which
the suffering and aspirations, the symbols, cultural
practices and world vision of workers, peasants,
Blacks, Indians and rural migrants were used to
explore new themes, to create a new aesthetic language
expressive of Brazilian reality. Chico Buarque's
first resounding success came in the early 1960s
with 'A Banda' (The Band), a song which in tender,
poetic images depict the transcendent moment in
which the music and festive celebration of the village
band creates an evanescent and utopian experience
of joy and communion in which suffering is momentarily
forgotten. Played on every transistor, in every
corner bar, taxi, bus and record player, this song
echoed in the 1960s throughout Brazil encapsulating
the anticipatory spirit of the times.
Chico
Buarque's engagement with the vicissitudes of Brazil's
turbulent social and political life and above all
with popular culture is expressed through the musical
genre of the 'samba', the music of the poor inhabitants
of the 'morro', the hilltops of Rio de Janeiro,
rooted in the tradition of Afro-Brazilian culture.
His 'sambas' recreate and refine central themes
of the world of 'samba': Carnival as the interplay
of illusion and disillusion, which in its temporary
transgression of social norms and in its orphic
celebration of music and pleasure, frees the imagination
to enact alternative realities; the melancholic-ironic
eulogy of life on the margins of society embodied
in the popular trickster figure of the bohemian
underworld of Rio, the 'malandro'. Oppositional
in content and transforming the playful, ironic
ethos of the 'world of samba' into an element of
musical form, Chico Buarque's lyrics depict the
daily life of the people while commenting through
an irreverent and duplicious use of language on
Brazilian politics in ways which brought him into
collision with the military government, forcing
him into exile for an extended period.
In
addition to his prolific musical output, Chico Buarque
has written a number of plays including a Brazilian
'Three Penny Opera' centering on the figure of the
'malandro'.
'Turbulence'
is his first novel containing a different and altogether
darker vision than his music, which for all its
critical edge seemed always to retain an element
of hope. What strikes the reader of 'Turbulence'
is its thoroughly dystopian character portraying
in nightmarish, persecutory images of contemporary
Brazil a degraded and loveless world without values.
The narrative centers around a drop-out belonging
to the traditional upper class journeying incessantly
from a real/imagined persecutor. The juxtaposition
of the city and the country which forms the central
axis of the narrative, frequently used as literary
symbols of corruption and innocence, collapses in
this novel for the farm in which the hapless hero
seeks refuge has been taken over by characters from
the criminal underworld, confronting him with an
absurd and God-forsaken universe without redemption.
The
plot is in a sense irrelevant; it is merely a device
to convey through a series of condensed and highly
perceptive images an intuition of the profound disturbance
at the core of Brazilian society and if we extrapolate
from the Brazilian context to other cities, of the
urban human condition in the late 20 th Century.
One image in particular strikes one as a microcosm
of Brazilian society. On one of several occasions,
the central character visits his sister's home -
a stunning, elegant, modern yet phantasmagoric house
of steel and glass with tennis courts, swimming-pool
and servant quarters, guarded against the possible
invasion of the poor by forbidding gates and faceless
security guards. A large party is being held to
which he has not been invited. Figures from the
moneyed elite, holding whiskies and sporting tanned
faces, float in cinematic fashion in and out of
his field of vision. Suddenly he lands in the kitchen
where in the form of the haunting image of sad and
sickly looking waiters, who seem to belong more
to the sphere of death than of life, we encounter
that 'other' Brazil, poor, malnourished and beyond
the boundaries of the gate. (It is estimated that
64% of the Brazilian population live below the poverty
line). Similarly, on the farm, now transformed into
a marihuana plantation partly, one is led to believe
due to the hero's own negligence, the rural poor
appear as disfigured invalids picking marihuana
leaves, while on the bus journey back to the city
urchins riding on the roof splatter onto the highway
in a manner both comical and horrifying. At the
same time the media are present everywhere: in the
walkmans and video games of the strange new inhabitants
on the farm while back in the city streets TV cameras,
in their predatory hunger for images, film yet another
murder. Through grotesque magnification, these images
heighten an existing state of affairs in contemporary
Brazil : a world governed by a dominant class, cosmopolitan,
wealthy and superficial with North American consumption
patterns, which deploying the discourse of modernity
and development has failed miserably to construct
a viable society. Simultaneously the superficial
emblems of modernity, in particular a powerful media
apparatus, offering an illusion of progress and
development, functions as a defensive screen, eliminating
the presence of the dispossessed masses which, like
an increasingly uncomfortable and monstrous ghost
haunts the nation reminding us that we ignore this
disturbance in the fabric of society at our own
peril.
'Turbulence'
clearly addresses a different historical moment
to 'A Banda', offering little consolation and no
solution - for even the hero, beaten down, weak
and amoral lacks any virtues with which the reader
can identify. But perhaps it is through this very
uncompromising and fearless exposure of reality
that the novel moves us to think about the world
in which we live and possibly to go beyond unconsciousness,
anxiety and despair.
*
Vivian Schelling is senior lecturer in Third World
Development at the University of East London
E-mail:
pituti@nildram.co.uk
