Brasileiro profundo ("Profoundly Brazilian") - 2022

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“My homeland is dead

they buried it

In the fire

 

I live

in the word

my homeland”

 

These verses were written byRose Ausländer (1901-1988). The German-speaking Jewish poet, who died the year I was born, is also the author of “Ninguém”, the poem that I set to music and ended up naming my previous album: “Rei Ninguém” (“King Nobody”) (2017).

 

Ausländer's life was marked by a period of persecution starting in 1941, when the Nazis invaded Czernowitz, in Bukowina, her hometown. She fortunately survived the Shoah and traveled to New York in 1946. The trauma made her seek exile not only from her homeland, but also from her mother tongue, leading her to write only in English for ten years.

 

I came into deeper contact with Rose Ausländer's work because of my friend, the poet Erick Monteiro Moraes, who dedicated himself to the work of translating it. In fact, the Portuguese versions of the verses with which I opened this text, as well as the lyrics of the song “Ninguém”, are the result of his work. In his studies, Erick explains that the Jewish element in Ausländer's work, in addition to an inherited identity, is also a “permanent construction, the refusal of all fixed identity, the eternal search for the non-identical”. Just as the cultural history of the Jewish people has been marked, since the Babylonian exile, by survival despite dispersion, Ausländer's work is characterized by a perpetual “Unterwegssein” (be-on-the-way).

 

Just like Paul Celan, Jewish poet and her contemporary, Rose Ausländer crossed the deserts with poetry as her north. More than her return to the devastated land, the return to the German language preserved despite barbarism was the most important aspect of her work.“I am King Nobody / I carry my no man’s land / in my pocket”, says the poem I set to music. Ausländer, with this surname that means “foreigner”, found her no man's land in poetry written in German. 

 

In Brazil in 2020, if an ignoble government and its praise of violence were not enough, we were locked at home, dealing with a deadly virus. Home exile, so to speak, enlightened by the experience of poets, pushed me to compose. With the homeland in ruins, I was led to write, to face the blank page, blending in with it and freeing myself through it. 

 

As said by my partner in the title song “Brazilian profound”, Antonio Cicero, a country is the greater “the more it is capable of guaranteeing the coexistence of the greatest possible number of differences”. It is not conceivable, especially in Brazil, a political project that does not affirm differences as riches. In this sense, we support the State's affirmative actions, which, opposing prejudices of different natures, fight in favor of the plurality of the Brazilian people, protecting each individual's right to diversity.

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I am not the profound Brazilian, it's all of us, everyone and everyone who values: the complexity of our individualities; the exuberance of our differences; the commonality of our freedoms; the open world, like the bottomlessness of a blank page. 

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Arthur Nogueira

2022