A Dispatch From Brazil
I borrowed the title of this post from my CRC colleague, Maureen Moore, whose blog title is Dispatches from Brazil. She is on sabbatical to study the cultures of Brazil, and she posts updates of her experiences on the blog. My post is also a dispatch from Brazil by way of poetry: I just finished reading a poetry collection entitled Cage, by the Brazilian poet Astrid Cabral. The bilingual book, originally available only in Portuguese, was was published in English in July 2008, translated by Alexis Levitin.
The poems in Cage take us into the cage of the natural world, showing it as both liberating and imprisoning. The poems are either about animals in the jungle, or they make references to the beast inside and outside us.
In "Let us Call the Oxen", the poet reminds us to call creatures by "their rightful name", which I take to mean that the barest minimum we could do, if we insist on not doing much else, is to acknowledge the existence of these creatures. Remember the question: What's in a name? An ox is an ox because he is an ox, the poem seems to say. And nature has an abundance of all these others creatures, which should be identified and respected as part of something big, the cycle of life which we all belong. We still have time "to do things right/to distinguish among snakes/and carefully name them/corals, rattlers, anacondas".
Perhaps our naming of these creatures has been too arbitrary, so that just as an ox has been known by that name, it might actually be a wolf? And what if we are the cattle and the cattle are something else? The poet encourages to “call our dictionaries/dumb and asinine" because they have contributed to the misnomer. We must see the organic alphabet of nature signified through its diverse creatures, acknowledging the value of the smallest creature.
In "Two-faced Dog" the phallic is presented through the image of a dog: "You bark and are your fangs/and bury deep in me.../your ivory daggers/so I'll remember who you are." The seeming violence of the dog is seen as endearment. When we move on to "The Beast", we discover that a beast has taken over a husband and has left the wife solitary. The beast celebrates its triumph by mocking the once-patient wife, who now remembers that from the wedding day, husband and wife have "been battling forever." So there are those beasts in nature, which should be called by their rightful names, and those beasts that enter us, which should also be called by their rightful names.
"Cave Canem" introduces the dogs within the persona, which "howl in times of madness/against cages of courtesy". In "Naked Jaguar", the persona won't look the naked jaguar in the face because it is "hidden within", but it continues to suck the blood of its carrier "with an insatiable thirst". The beast within forms the character of the persona, but feeds on the persona as if to guarantee the temporality life whose ugly face we see in “Dead Bird” where we lament the death of a bird and console ourselves by imagining him flying in a different world. In another poem life is presented as the seven-headed beast which we learn not to fear as we grow older:
The more I age
the more heads I snip from the seven-
headed beast. And the I recognize him,
my intimate, my neighbor.
The persona takes us to another level in her treatment of the natural world, observing the smaller creatures like cicadas, which "burn away the hours" with their noise. This is necessary noise, because it helps them "call for rain that still delays."
Because we are human (and beastly), we dream. Dreams become horses in never-ending galloping, just like the billions of dreams that represent the purpose of each life that has passed through our planet.
If these poems capture the beauty and ugliness of nature, they also function as guides to how humans should relate to all creatures; they label fish as kin, and jaguars as beasts within, bringing attention to cicadas singing for rain for the good of every creature. But until we learn to relate more closely to the beasts without, the poet seems to argue, we are the ones who are caged by our ignorance of how life (as argued by nature) works.
Send books for review (in any genre) to:
Emmanuel Sigauke
Sacramento Poetry Center
1719 25th St
Sacramento, CA 95816
The poems in Cage take us into the cage of the natural world, showing it as both liberating and imprisoning. The poems are either about animals in the jungle, or they make references to the beast inside and outside us.
In "Let us Call the Oxen", the poet reminds us to call creatures by "their rightful name", which I take to mean that the barest minimum we could do, if we insist on not doing much else, is to acknowledge the existence of these creatures. Remember the question: What's in a name? An ox is an ox because he is an ox, the poem seems to say. And nature has an abundance of all these others creatures, which should be identified and respected as part of something big, the cycle of life which we all belong. We still have time "to do things right/to distinguish among snakes/and carefully name them/corals, rattlers, anacondas".
Perhaps our naming of these creatures has been too arbitrary, so that just as an ox has been known by that name, it might actually be a wolf? And what if we are the cattle and the cattle are something else? The poet encourages to “call our dictionaries/dumb and asinine" because they have contributed to the misnomer. We must see the organic alphabet of nature signified through its diverse creatures, acknowledging the value of the smallest creature.
In "Two-faced Dog" the phallic is presented through the image of a dog: "You bark and are your fangs/and bury deep in me.../your ivory daggers/so I'll remember who you are." The seeming violence of the dog is seen as endearment. When we move on to "The Beast", we discover that a beast has taken over a husband and has left the wife solitary. The beast celebrates its triumph by mocking the once-patient wife, who now remembers that from the wedding day, husband and wife have "been battling forever." So there are those beasts in nature, which should be called by their rightful names, and those beasts that enter us, which should also be called by their rightful names.
"Cave Canem" introduces the dogs within the persona, which "howl in times of madness/against cages of courtesy". In "Naked Jaguar", the persona won't look the naked jaguar in the face because it is "hidden within", but it continues to suck the blood of its carrier "with an insatiable thirst". The beast within forms the character of the persona, but feeds on the persona as if to guarantee the temporality life whose ugly face we see in “Dead Bird” where we lament the death of a bird and console ourselves by imagining him flying in a different world. In another poem life is presented as the seven-headed beast which we learn not to fear as we grow older:
The more I age
the more heads I snip from the seven-
headed beast. And the I recognize him,
my intimate, my neighbor.
The persona takes us to another level in her treatment of the natural world, observing the smaller creatures like cicadas, which "burn away the hours" with their noise. This is necessary noise, because it helps them "call for rain that still delays."
Because we are human (and beastly), we dream. Dreams become horses in never-ending galloping, just like the billions of dreams that represent the purpose of each life that has passed through our planet.
If these poems capture the beauty and ugliness of nature, they also function as guides to how humans should relate to all creatures; they label fish as kin, and jaguars as beasts within, bringing attention to cicadas singing for rain for the good of every creature. But until we learn to relate more closely to the beasts without, the poet seems to argue, we are the ones who are caged by our ignorance of how life (as argued by nature) works.
Send books for review (in any genre) to:
Emmanuel Sigauke
Sacramento Poetry Center
1719 25th St
Sacramento, CA 95816
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