post-colonial_translation

100 Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira
novel Galvez, Imperador do Acre (The Emperor of the Amazon) by
Márcio Souza (1976) keeps the anthropophagic attitude and creates
an allegory of economic and cultural imperialism. The symbol of the
castrating function of colonialism is to be seen in the character of Sir
Henry Lust, a British scientist who collects Indians’ genital organs
(Johnson 1987: 54–5).
The two generations of Cinema Novo (Brazilian New Cinema) also
reintroduce the discussion on cultural identity and dependence using
the digestive metaphor or variations upon it in their examination of
the question of Brazil and external influences. As remarked by Hollanda
and Gonçalves in their study of the Cinema Novo, its first generation,
associated with the name of Glauber Rocha, attempted to make
decolonized films by deconstructing the dominant American and
European models and by defending the thesis named A Estética da Fome
(The Aesthetics of Hunger). Hunger, Glauber Rocha claims, is the
distinctive trait of the social experience of underdeveloped and
peripheral countries – so the Cinema Novo represented ‘Latin hunger’
and its cultural manifestation, violence. Underdevelopment is thus the
very stuff of Cinema Novo (Hollanda and Gonçalves 1989: 44–5).
The second generation of Cinema Novo, whose main exponent is
Arnaldo Jabor, reflects differently on the relationship between Brazil
and what is foreign. Says Jabor:
From 1965 to 1980 the country changed a lot. Brazil. . . became a
country of technological surplus, of contradictions generated by
the invasion of the multinationals, a hungry and empty country
surrounded by superfluities and pockets of development like São
Paulo. We are still hungry, but the situation has changed. I think
that the aesthetics of today is that of ‘I want to eat’. The aesthetics
of . . . the wish to appropriate the [colonizer’s] equipment . . . but
not one of lament.
(Jabor in Hollanda and Gonçalves 1989: 87)
A parallel development to that of the two generations of Cinema
Novo is to be seen in Brazilian popular music. In the mid-1960s, when
a CIA and multinational-capital-backed dictatorship was established
in Brazil, protest singers like Nara Leão held the view that art should be
committed and express a political opinion mostly against
authoritarianism. Nara Leão’s ‘mais que nunca é preciso cantar’ (‘more
than ever it is necessary to sing’) reveals the tone of mobilization used
to elicit an emotional rather than a critical response from the public