1

Discourses of resistance Maria Irene Ramalho Santos

I propose to speak today of discourses of resistance. After going briefly over the two

concepts – discourses and resistance – I shall address different instances of resistance and

its discourses in different contexts, ranging from the political, the social and the cultural

to what is closest to my major concerns: poetry, in its broadest sense, and the literary

canon. I must confess I am daunted by my project and indeed feel exactly like Foucault

when he was about to deliver his lecture, entitled L’ordre du discours, at the Collège de

France on 2 December 1970: “Plutot que prendre la parole, j’aurais voulu être enveloppé

par elle…”1 But there is nothing I can do about it now.

Etymologically, discourse comes from classical Latin discursus, meaning originally

the action of running off in different directions, hence dispersal, action of running about,

bustling activity, even course, for instance, of celestial objects. In post-classical Latin

discourse gained the meaning of conversation as well. Somewhat later, the notion of

rational discourse was added (in English in the fourteenth century, in Portuguese a

century later). In English, discourse could also mean many other different things,

including passage of time and discharge of matter. For my purposes here, I will favor,

though not exclusively, the idea of discourse as what as early as the sixteenth century was

understood as the faculty of linguistic reasoning or the thread of an argument in the

language. We had to wait for the twentieth century and Foucault to realize that the very

faculty of reasoning resides in language and that language depends, more than on who

speaks, on what is spoken and whence it is spoken, and when and where the spoken

occurs. Indeed, in the wake of Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida

scandalously killed the author by suggesting that language is not spoken by a subject at

all; that it rather speaks the subject and speaks for the subject. Although I am fully aware

of the ancientness and power of language, I take the post-structuralist demise of the

author with a grain of salt. What the phrase – the death of the author – really means is

that the authority of the author has been put in question forever. Even self-possessed

authors, let alone our students, are often caught saying: “that’s not what I wanted to say –

1 Michel Foucault, L’ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971) 7.

2

or what I meant – at all.” That is why we constantly find ourselves going over our

discourses. Repeating with a difference or, as the American feminist poet Adrienne Rich

says, constantly resorting to the “verbal privilege” of “starting to speak again.” 2

Discourse, as I understand it here, interests me mainly, but not exclusively, in its

linguistic content, and that is why we cannot speak but of discourses. We do not always

realize the power of language to speak us and speak for us, but once we do, we have only

one of two alternatives: either to comply; or else to try to speak resistance, whether

verbally or non-verbally. That is to say, we either conform to the status quo and repeat its

discourse ad nauseam, as when Gertrude Stein ironically says in “Composition as

Explanation,” “everybody knows it because everybody says it”; or we try to find ways of

interrupting the noise of the dominant discourse in order to resist it by opening the way to

what we really believe in and want spoken – or accomplished.3 That is when discourses

of resistance materialize. Often not as language proper, but as gesture. Not gesture in the

Agamben sense of not “being able to figure something out in language”; rather gesture in

the sense of acting, of communicating (or “speaking”) before, during, and after

language.4

The concept of resistance in the western languages implies protesting and opposing

and, hopefully, overturning an oppressive power, such as occupation and colonialism. In

a word, fighting any kind of domination. Not by chance, when in Europe we speak of

resistance what immediately comes to mind is la Résistance française, the French

underground opposition to German occupation and the Vichy government during the

Second World War. The French Resistance was a courageous instance of political

struggle against foreign occupation. Vichy conformed to nazi occupation, whereas la

Résistance withstood, albeit at a very high cost. Feuillets d’Hypnos, by the poet and

résistant, René Char, is a heart-breaking, poetic testimony of what the French Resistance

entailed. In Fragment 128, relating a long day of dangerous acts of material resistance,

the poet concludes: “J’ai aimé farouchement mes semblables cette journée-là, bien au-

2 Adrienne Rich, “North Atlantic Time.” Your Native Land, Your Life (New York: Norton, 1986) 33-36. 3 Gertrude Stein, “Composition as Explanation” (1926). In Stein, Writings 1903-1932 (New York: The Library of America, 1998) 520. 4 Cf. Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture.” Means without Ends. Notes on Politics. Trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000) 50-60 [59].

3

delà du sacrifice.” 5 Many other French poets, besides René Char, protested nazi

occupation and incited resistance with their writing, even if not always fighting in the

Résistance. Amongst the French poets who joined the Résistance alongside René Char

are Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon, and Albert Camus.

The French Resistance was engaged, political resistance. Its major forms of

expression, its discourses of resistance, if you will, did not so much resort to the word as

to action. The Resistance’s major means of withstanding nazi occupation was counter-

hegemonic gesture – spying, subversion, sabotage, fighting back. When in 1945 the war

finally came to an end, everybody in Europe believed that resistance of this kind would

never be needed again. Pure illusion. For one self-serving reason or another, large-scale

abuse of power never seems to end, in Europe and elsewhere, whether it be political,

military, cultural, or financial and economic domination. As Foucault says, “Where there

is power, there is resistance.”6 However, as happened in occupied France and we observe

over and over again, resistance alone cannot overturn power. Barely three years after

WWII, the Zionists were granted the power to create the all-Jewish state of Israel in

Palestine. The dire consequences are well known: the forceful occupation and

colonization of Palestine, the razing of numberless villages, the expulsion of their native

inhabitants, and the slaughter of entire populations. No resistance could have prevailed.

On a different scale, the same had been true of the Holocaust. Under the absolute,

dehumanizing power of colonization, no resistance, let alone discourses of resistance,

even if possible or inspiring, can ever be ultimately successful. It boggles the mind to

find the main victims of the Holocaust a few years later serving pretty much the same

recipe, albeit in a smaller dose, to the Palestinian victims of the “compulsory transfer”

prescribed by Ben Gurion ten years earlier (“transfer” turning out to be, of course, a

euphemism). The Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said’s “Reflections on Twenty

Years of Palestinian History” (1991) is a disquieting account of the devasting

consequences of the Israeli occupation and colonization of Palestine after 1948, including

Palestinian tenacious, destructive, and self-destructive modes of resistance. “Two decades

after Black September (1970),” writes Said, “the main aspects of Palestinian life remain

5 René Char, Feuillets d’Hypnos (Paris: Gallimard, 1946). 6 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, vol 1: La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1982).

4

dispossession, exile, dispersion, disenfranchisement (under Israeli military occupation),

and, by no means least, an extraordinarily widespread and stubborn resistance to these

travails.” As Said goes on to observe, the thousands of lives lost or irreparably damaged

did not diminish the Palestinian spirit of resilient resistance that was nonetheless divested

of the power to stop Israel’s relentless grabbing of Palestinian land and water.7

Fifteen years later, the situation had not changed at all in favor of the Palestinians,

quite the opposite. By then, even Israeli scholars, like the historian Ilan Pappé, had begun

to denounce the egregious, criminal injustice that the creation of the exclusive Jewish

state of Israel in Palestine had been. At the onset of his book, Pappé uses as epigraph

David Ben-Gurion’s outrageous recommendation (indeed, not his alone) to the Jewish

Agency Executive in June 1938, to which I have already alluded. Wrote Ben-Gurion,

who ten years later would become the first Prime Minister of the newly created State of

Israel: “I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it.”8 Neither does

today Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Max Blumenthal, the Jewish-American author who

supports Palestinian resistance against Israeli apartheid, does not hesitate to call a

“transferist” as well. 9 Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine remains a moving

account of the original sin that resulted in the troubled Middle East as we know it today:

the unilateral creation of Israel, the ensuing Nakba, the desperate flight of the

Palestinians, the refugee camps, and the painful rise of Palestinian resistance, of which

Pappé’s book becomes an unexpected mouthpiece (or discourse of resistance) in the

twenty-first century. Blumenthal’s Goliah also vehemently decries the increasing

sectarianism and racist segregationism of the Jewish State of Israel, often termed the only

democracy in the Middle East, but where not even all Israeli Jews are treated as equals.

The discourses of Palestinian resistance are thus many and varied. The most talked

about in the media are violent gestures of resistance (or “terrorism”), constantly met with

by what could be called Israeli counter-resistance – or retaliation. This is overwhelmingly

disproportinate counter-resistance (or “state terrorism”), always carried out with total

impunity: Palestinian rocks met with by Israeli bullets; Palestinians’ unauthorized moves

7 Edward Said, “Reflections on Twenty Years of Palestinian History,” Journal of Palestine Studies XX, nº 4 (Summer 1991) 5-22 [5]. 8 See Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (London & New York: Oneworld, 2006). 9 Max Blumenthal, Goliah. Life and Loathing in Greater Israel (New York: Nation Books, 2013) 32.

5

inside their own homeland met with by incarceration; Palestinian rockets met with by

Israeli bombs; and all Palestinian transgressions, including helpless and hopeless suicide

attacks, met with by Israeli total obliteration of places, homes, schools, hospitals, and

people.

Palestinian militant resistance has proven futile, given the Zionist mythical narrative

that has been fully backed from the start by the British and the Americans, about a god-

given land-without-a-people-for-a-people-without-a-land, where the native Palestinians

are barely tolerated and gradually made to be as scarse as possible. The narrative justifies

more and more Jewish settlements, while Palestinian right of return remains non-existing

and Palestinian territory goes on shrinking. Yitzhak Rabin’s wishful thinking about Gaza

– “If only it would just sink into the sea,” Rabin burst out at the time of the Oslo Accords

– did not materialize, even after successive Israeli attacks, but living conditions in the

Gaza Strip are appalling, as reported, among many others, by the Israeli journalist Amira

Hass. Like Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Hass’s Drinking the Sea at Gaza

can also be read as a poignant discourse of Palestinian resistance by an Israeli Jew.10 But

perhaps the most powerful discourse of Palestinian resistance by a Jewish voice is Noam

Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle, even if, or precisely because, it does not spare the

Palestinians for their blunders and corruption.11 Israeli counter-resistance, on the other

hand, continues to picture the Palestinians as non-human and discardable, and the Gaza

Strip as a hornets’ nest and a dunghill. In Israel, the dismissive “go to hell” is often

verbalized as “go to Gaza.”

That the Palestinian predicament is worse today than it has ever been since the end

of WWII only proves that the Palestinian discourses of resistance have not been

efficacious at all. Political resistance without the support of material power rarely, if ever,

works. For reasons that I am not going to go into here (and regardless of the undeniable

suffering of Jews under antisemitic persecution throughout the centuries), the State of

Israel has always had strong support for its existence, even before it was made a nation;

Palestine never did, not even from Arab countries. The recent swerve to the right of

10 Amira Hass, Drinking the Sea at Gaza. Days and Nights in a Land under Siege (New York: Owl

Books, 2000). In this book, Amira Hass reports, “Just before signing the Oslo Accords, the late Yitzahk Rabin said of Gaza: ‘If only it would just sink into the sea’ (p. 9). 11 Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle. The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (1982; Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press 1999).

6

Israeli politics originated new attempts at legalizing segregation “for security reasons” in

mythic “Greater Israel,” which the illegal settlements of orthodox Jews in the West Bank

want totally rid of the aboriginal, non-Jewish inhabitants of the land. And yet, Palestinian

resistance lives on. Or “holds on,” as in the words of Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian

poet who was encarcerated in 1964 by Israel for having dared to write and publicly read a

resistance poem entitled “Identity Card”: “Put it on record! / I am an Arab /And the

number of my card is fifty thousand / I have eight children / And the nineth is due after

summer / What’s there to be angry about?”12 I am sure conservative Israelis knew very

well what to be angry about, particularly when, twenty years later, the siege of Beirut left

the Palestinian cause devastated but Palestinians still resisting. Writes Darwish in his

exquisite poetic memory of the siege in Memory for Forgetfulness: “The important thing

is to hold on. Holding on is a victory in itself.”13

I am already engaging with a different kind of discourse of resistance: poetry, or art,

speaking beyond itself by speaking itself alone, and accomplishing nothing except itself.

One of the most compelling analyses of Palestinian poetic or artistic discourses of

resistance I know of is Shahd Wadi’s “Corpos na trouxa,” her doctoral dissertation on

poetry and art of resistance by feminist Palestinian women in exile.14 Firmly anchored in

Foucault’s insight that where there is power there is resistance, Wadi goes on to consider

Lila Abu-Lughod’s reformulation (where there is resistance there is power) as well as the

latter critic’s caveat against the danger of romanticizing resistance.15 And romanticize

Wadi does not. She argues, convincingly, that resistance and power are always

inextricably linked together and that resistance must be understood alongside the power

that gives rise to it. But what is really original and interesting about Wadi’s work is her

feminist perspective, which allows her to support Palestinian resistance to Israeli

occupation and colonialist, racist appartheid, at the same time that she embraces the

12 Mahmoud Darwish, “Identity Card.” Trans. Denys Johnson-Davis. Go to http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.pt/2014/04/mahmoud-darwish-identity-card.html. 13 Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness. August Beirut, 1982. Trans. Ibrahim Muhawi (Berkeley: U of Californis P, 1995) 62. 14 Shahd Wadi, “Corpos na trouxa. Histórias-artísticas-de-vida de mulheres palestinianas no exílio.” Tese de doutoramento em Estudos Feministas (Universidade de Coimbra, 2013). See esp. chapter IV, “Resistências.” See also Wadi, “Feminismos de corpos ocupados, as mulheres palestinianas entre duas resistências.” Dissertação de mestrado em Estudos Feministas (Universidade de Coimbra, 2010). 15 See Lila Abu-Lughod, “The Romance of Resistance. Tracing transformations of Power through Beduin Women.” American Ethnologist 17.1 (1990) 41-55.

7

resistance of Palestinian women against the oppressive, masculinist order of Palestinian

patriarchy. After carefully identifying the two discourses of power – Israel’s ruthless

colonization and Palestine’s staunch patriotism, both of which she finds equally sexist –

Wadi goes on to give examples of poetry and art by Palestinian women in exile which

resist both Israeli occupation and Palestinian patriarchalism. It would be impossible to do

justice here to Wadi’s ample and subtle analysis in “Corpos na Trouxa.” An example will

suffice.

The “trouxa” [bundle] is Wadi’s metaphor for the next-to-nothing that the expelled

Palestinians managed hastily to carry with them after 1948, in many cases, literally, their

own bodies alone, which, for Wadi, is extremely important in the case of the Palestinian

women artists in exile. For example, in her reading of “Over My Dead Body,” a self-

portrait by Mona Hatoum, Wadi explains how the artist uses her body to subvert the

representation of women (and of the conflict itself) both in Israeli and Palestinian

propaganda discourse.

Hatoum’s haughty profile of a clearly emancipated woman undermines both the

image of a sexless, dedicated child-bearing mother-Palestine and that of an alien, targeted

woman-land to be conquered, raped, and destroyed. The tiny toy soldier perched on the

woman’s nose, at which she sternly stares, ironically turns upside down the power

relations in the conflict: the miniature soldier overbearing upon the woman’s body

8

ridicules war and male dominance; while the woman’s strong face de-identifies women-

as-dependent in Israel-Palestine, at the same time that the slogan – over my dead body –

reinscribes the reality of the innocent civilians’ dead bodies in the land. As Wadi makes

clear, Hatoum’s body is her art, art is her body. In the context of Palestinian resistance, in

art the woman’s body is not colonizable.16

*

Governments imposing dictatorship, authoritarianism, repression, oppression,

discrimination or segregation have always inspired as much protest and resistance as

illegal invasion, occupation and colonization by a foreign power. During Salazar’s

dictatorship in Portugal lyric poetry, arguably the least “useful” of discourses, often

spoke loudly interrupting the noise of the violence of the imposed culture. Poems

probably circulated just among poets and lovers of poetry. Think of the vibrant explosion

of Portuguese lyricism from the 1930s to the 1970s. Poets like José Gomes Ferreira,

Natália Correia, Jorge de Sena, as well de Mello Breyner Anderson, Mário Cesariny,

Alexandre O’Neill, Manuel Alegre, José Afonso, among others, movingly sang of a time

and at a time of social darkness hankering after light. No doubrt the poems were heard

and had consequences. Óscar Lopes speaks in this case of “poesia de intervenção.” I do

not agree. “Intervention” implies engagement in order to change the course of events. For

intervention, Portugal had to wait for the April captains on 25 April 1974. The lyric

poems in question are rather remarkable discourses of resistance. Poetic discourse,

because it “nothing afirmeth,” as Sir Philip Sidney memorably put it centuries ago, by

immediately putting language in question, is the quintessential discourse of resistance.

Listen to Sophia’s “Este tempo,” a 1958 poem from Mar novo, clearly resisting a dark

time of forced renunciation:17

Este é o tempo

Da selva mais obscura

Até o ar azul se tornou grades

E a luz do sol se tornou impura

Esta é a noite

16 For the use of the body in Hatoum’s earlier work, see an interview with Hatoum by Janine Antoni: http://bombmagazine.org/article/2130/mona-hatoum. Accessed 1 June 2015. 17 Sophia de Mello Breyner Anderson, Obra poética, vol. II (Lisboa: Caminho, 1995) 68.

9

Densa dos chacais

Pesada de amargura

Este é o tempo em que os homens renunciam.

Compare it now with Sophia’s celebrated “25 de Abril” (1974), the iconic lyric cry

of joyful amazement at the much longed-for liberation:18

Esta é a madrugada que eu esperava

O dia inicial inteiro e limpo

Onde emergimos da noite e do silêncio

E livres habitamos a substância do tempo

Even if Sophia often leaves her poems without a final period, as if in suspension, in

this particular poem this gesture of poetic incompletion becomes extremely significant,

even prophetic in hindsight: inhabiting the substance of time cannot but be riddled with

precariousness.

Nonetheless, neither of the Sophia poems quoted above changed the course of

events. Neither poem made anything happen. We can’t even say that either of the poems

brings any news. However, as William Carlos Williams once taught us, even if you can’t

get the news from poems, the lack of what is found there puts life at danger.19 Of course,

literary discourses, including lyrical poetry, always have a circumstantial basis, but this

fact, referring to what we might call “the news” – Salazar’s dictatorship or revolution – is

not what lasts. What lasts – and I am now echoing Hölderlin – is the power of poetry to

disquiet language, that “most dangerous of goods,” in order to resist conformity.20 To my

thinking, poetic discourse is not poetic at all if it is not a discourse of resistance, that is to

say, a discourse that, though being powerless to make things happen, interrupts the

conventional and institutionalized language of life and reality, and of existence in

general, by intimating radical questions about them.

* 18 Id., ibid. vol. III (Lisboa: Caminho, 1996) 195. 19 Cf. William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.” The Collected Poems, volume II. 1939-1962. Ed. Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions) 310-337 [318]. The exact quote reads: “It is difficult to get the news from poem / yet men die miserably everyday / for lack / of what is found there.” 20 Friedrich Hölderlin, “Andenken” (http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/friedrich-h-262/41) and “Im Walde” (http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/friedrich-h-262/103).

10

Poetry, in the broadest sense of the word – we might call it “poetic discourse” – is a

complex set of ongoing gestures of resistance to what we, in the Western tradition, call

“the canon.” What is interesting is that resistance to the canon begins by sprouting inside

the so-called canon itself. Eventually, what we might call resistance to the canon (even

outside resistance – for example, from the point of view of race, gender or class) will be

absorbed by the omnivorous canon, but each time, for a brief, interesting period, it does

put in question the canon as such. That is why I like to say that poetry is written in

poetry. We might even say that poetry goes on constantly recycling poetry. Let me spare

you hundreds of years of intermingled layers of literary history in the West and start with

just two completely different rewritings (or recyclings) of Shakespeare’s The Tempest

(1611). As with many other plays by Shakespeare, The Tempest has inspired numberless

works – whether literary, artistic, musical, cinematic, or essayistic.

I will linger briefly on two modern plays: Aimé Césaire’s Une tempête (1969) and

Ana Luísa Amaral’s Próspero morreu (2011).21 Césaire keeps the structure of his play

very close to that of Shakespeare: there is the same island and the same characters,

though now Prospero is explicitly identified as a white colonial master-owner of slaves,

and Caliban is a black and Ariel a mulatto slave, and an extra character is added, Eshu, a

black trickster god [“un dieu-diable nègre”], representing Caliban’s indigenous culture;

there are the same games of political and magical power, authority, enslavement and

obedience; the same play with usurpation and revenge, transgression and chastisement,

pardon and reconciliation; the same summoning of chaos to restore order. But there are

crucial differences that are as many gestures of resistance. Having taken possession of the

island and fully subdued and exploited Caliban, Shakespeare’s Prospero abjures his

imperial, self-serving magical powers and returns to the old world to embrace its

hierarchical, imperial order; on the other hand, the Prospero of Césaire’s postcolonial

play decides to remain in the island, intent on defending “the western values” as an

ideologically engaged colonizer-with-a-self-appointed-mission. However, while the play

minimizes Ariel as the mild conformist, it is clear that the colonizer will have to count on

the fierce resistance of Caliban, who has become aware and proud of his own culture and

21 Aimé Césaire, Une tempête (Paris: Seuil, 1969); Ana Luísa Amaral, Próspero morreu (Lisboa: Caminho, 2011).

11

will struggle fiercely for liberation. Unlike Shakespeare’s, Césaire’s Caliban has fully

conceptualized the difference between submission and freedom, and is determined to

fight for full personhood and political existence. Unlike Shakespeare’s, Césaire’s Caliban

will use the foreign language imposed on him to resist, and not just to curse, his

oppressor. Here is Shakespeare’s Caliban:

You taught me language; and my profit on't

Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you

For learning me your language!

And here is Césaire’s Caliban’s defiant use of Prospero’s language to respond to the

tyrant’s offer of conditioned reconciliation:

Prospero tu es un grand illusionniste:

le mensonge, ça te connait.

Et tu m’as tellement menti,

menti sur le monde, menti sur moi-même,

que tu as fini par m’imposer

une image de moi-même:

Un sous-développé, commes tu dis,

un sous-capable,

voilà comment tu m’as obligé a me voir,

et cette image, je la hais! Et elle est fausse!

Mais maintenant, je te connais, vieux cancer,

Et je me connai aussi!

Et je sais qu’un jour

mon poing nu, mon seul poing nu

suffira por écraser ton monde!

Le vieux monde foire!

12

At the very end of the play, Prospero tries very hard to summon Caliban one more

time to force him back into submission. Caliban’s response, his freedom chant, comes

from very far away:

LA LIBERTÉ OHÉ, LA LIBERTÉ!

Ana Luísa Amaral’s Próspero morreu dismantles Shakespeare’s The Tempest

completely. Apparently to mourn the death of Prospero and, presumably, to bury him,

Amaral’s one-act play convenes a set of literary and mythical characters to stage a drama

about men, women, power, love, jealousy, and the dangerous relations between them all:

Shakespeare’s Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban; Homer’s Penelope; Ariadne and Theseus of

myth; Luiz and Barbara as in Camões’s “Endechas a Bárbara escrava.” In Amaral’s

intricate rewriting of poetry and myth, Ariel, the play’s narrator and Master of

Ceremonies, though referring to herself in the feminine, poses queer questions about the

ultimate relevance of sexual difference; Ariadne and Theseus stay closer to the myth,

with Theseus, rather than abandoning Ariadne, who has miraculously fallen in love with

Caliban, stabbing her in the end out of jealousy; Luiz and Barbara recreate the ambiguous

relationship of love as reciprocal enslavement in the “endechas.” I saved the characters of

Prospero and Penelope for last because they are the key to Amaral’s powerful resistance

to both their stories: Penelope, as the paradigm of the patiently waiting, faithful wife;

Prospero, as the symbol of colonial and patriarchal power, who is not dead, after all,

since the imperial, colonial structure he represents still lives on:

Abriu na ilha a época de Inverno,

realmente,

e Próspero morreu.

Sem ter morrido,

que as magias que fez nos deixaram ainda

descendência.

(…)

E Próspero venceu, mesmo na morte.

13

It is interesting that Amaral, an attentive reader of Judith Butler, didn’t want to have

anything to do with Prospero’s unquestionably very “feminine” daughter, Miranda, so

bedazzled by “the brave new world” of men, rather replacing her by a set of different

female figures, challenging Shakespeare’s portrait of a meek, male-dependent and dutiful

woman, and paying harshly for such challenge. Love is dangerous, Próspero morreu

states, but it is far more dangerous for others-than-white-males in the hegemonic culture.

The exquisite archaic language and tone of Próspero morreu intimates a truth about a

colonial and patriarchal structure of society that has lived a long history, has been bravely

resisted, but is unfortunately still with us.22

*

I have written oftentimes that poetry is not philosophy.23 This is not to say that, by

definition, philosophers cannot be poets. Vítor Matos, just to give a Portuguese example,

was an accomplished philosopher and teacher of philosophy, as well as a very fine poet.

But he clearly distinguished his two calls by signing his poems as Vítor Matos e Sá. As

he puts it in the preface to one of his books of poetry: “Nela mesma … a poesia não diz

nada de explícito. O que a torna … poesia e não filosofia ou ciência só poderá descobrir-

se no que diga implicitamente . . . A linguagem simbólica da poesia é . . . uma linguagem

deformadora . . .”24 Poetic language, he goes on to explain, aims at breaking with the

conventional meanings of philosophy or science. Or, I would add, common sense. In

other words, as I have already said, poetic discourse is a language of resistance by

interrupting the established culture and knowledge. Once asked “Che cos’è la poesia?,” 22 I disagree, therefore, with Rui Carvalho Homem’s conclusion to his fine review of Próspero morreu: “O [Amaral’s] texto firma-se na ambição de des-inscrever Próspero como uma presença dominante de um acervo patriarcal – ou, se quisermos, de nos propor uma fascinante teia que coincide com desatar para a liberdade as tradições.” See Homem’s “Fio e fantasma,” Convergência Lusíada 28 (Jul/Dez. 2012). Accessible at http://www.realgabinete.com.br/revistaconvergencia/pdf/2044.pdf. 23 See, e.g., “‘The god that was missing’: Poetry, Divinity, Everydayness.” The Turn Around Religion in

America. Literature, Culture, and the Work of Sacvan Bercovitch. Ed. Nan Goodman and Micahel P. Kramer (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011)239-256 (esp. 252ff) 24 Vítor Matos e Sá, O silêncio e o tempo (Coimbra: Coimbra Editora, 1956). 24 “Che cos’è la poesia?” Poesia 1,11 (November 1988). Accessible at http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jacques-derrida/articles/che-cose-la-poesia/. For an English translation, see Jacques Derrida, “What is Poetry?” trans. Peggy Kamuf. In A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. Ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia UP, 1991).

14

Derrida wrote, from the viewpoint of his re-invented symbol for poetry, the dangerous

and vulnerable hérisson: “Pour répondre à une telle question . . . on te demande de savoir

renoncer au savoir. Et de bien le savoir, sans jamais l’oublier: démobilise la culture mais

ce que tu sacrifies en route, en traversant la route, ne l’oublie jamais dans ta docte

ignorance . . . [il t’aura fallu] désemparer la mémoire, désarmer la culture, savoir oublier

le savoir, incendier la bibliothèque . . .”25 The philosopher’s discourse can’t really tell

what the poem is, but it clearly intimates the poem’s mysterious power to say what

cannot be said in any other way.

If poetry is not philosophy, neither is it sociology. I summon now a sociologist who

resorts to poetry to perform a discourse of double resistance: his poeming interrupts

conventional sociological discourse, including his own, at the same time that it overturns

the canon. The distinguished sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos has published so far

8 volumes of poetry. Lyric poetry, to be precise, which from the start has been

determined to subvert the very notion of lyricism, a tendency that became even more

marked since the poet’s conception of Escrita INKZ. Anti-manifesto para uma arte

incapaz, first published in Brazil in 2004, and RAP GLOBAL. Queni N. S. Oeste, also

first published in Brazil in 2010.26 Escrita INKZ presents itself as an anti-manifesto, thus

explicitly a discourse of resistance, opening, not with a “Prefácio” [Preface], but with a

made-up anti-preface of sorts the poet names “Desfácio.” The “Desfácio” is not a great

help to the reader beyond the contrarian prefix [des]. It does explain the structure of the

book as based on the concept of the monad. However, the six so-called monads – Figura,

Cidade, Andamento, Momento, Mulher Nua, Orador-Ninguém – are not real monads

according to Leibniz. They are manifold, rather than indivisible, impenetrable units, and

they have a “window” not sanctioned by the philosopher either. Furthermore, the

“window” is a seventh monad, the “mónada-cão,” which is, as recognized by the poet,

“aa very special monad since it has no autonomy vis-à-vis the other monads. Its

specificity is to be the autonomous and free voice of the other monads.” This voice is the

“canine wisdom” printed in bold on the right side page, contrasting with the “swift and

short stories to leave room for the readers’ imagination,” printed in roman on the left

26 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Escrita INKZ. Anti-manifesto para uma arte incapaz (Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano, 2004); RAP GLOBAL. Queni N. S. E. Oeste (Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano, 2010)

15

side. The “mónada-cão” and the “canine wisdom” sound like a parody of the Greek

chorus. Evidently, the poet didn’t think of it, otherwise he might have called the

“mónada-cão” a “descoro.” Throughout the book, the import of the undoing prefixes –

des, anti, in – reveals the poet as a provocative contrarian who challenges the reader with

the absurd to make her look again and think anew, many times over. One example only

(pp. 82-83).

Uma figura desvê

Dessente

Dessaboreia

Desouve

Descheira

A pouco e pouco o descorpo

Cobre-se de corpo

Quando os abismos dispensam os disfarces

Uma figura vem para a janela

À espera de ser denunciada

Preocupada com os acidentes diários

Uma figura toma as seguintes decisões:

Dividir entre corpo e alma

E nunca sair com os dois ao mesmo tempo

E por inteiro

Dividir o corpo em partes e a alma

Em princípios

E preparar combinações adequadas

Para as diferentes ocasiões:

Partes baixas com princípios vermelhos

Para as intimidades curvas

Partes médias com princípios convincentes-falsos

Para o emprego

16

Partes altas com princípios extremos

Para discussões inúteis e decisivas

Partes comestíveis e princípios em primeira versão

Para os amigos

The reader could engage in exegesis and point to the absurdist handling of words and

concepts to denounce not only the separation of body and soul but also the division of

body and soul into “parts” and “principles” for “different occasions.” She could suggest

that the six des-words at the beginning, and “descorpo” in particular, speak the “soul” in

order ultimately to yield the “body.” She could comment on the paradoxes of the

distinctions between the public and the private, the professional and the personal, the

useful and the superfluous, the pleasurable and the threatening, the noble and the mean.

She could invoke the work of the social scientist and write from the point of view of the

paradigmatic transition, the epistemology of blindness, the sociology of absences, the

sociology of emergences, genocide and epistemicide, the ecology of knowledges,

colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy, equality and difference, and the call for a truly

exacting understanding of the world. Or she could highlight some memorable canine

wisdom diclosing the humans, such as “Na margem/Quem fala é falado” (p. 131) or “Até

a mijar/Pensam que são diferentes” (p.169) or “Deve haver um deus/Que não nos

governe” (p. 241). But she doesn’t have to. Throughout the book, the “descoro” does the

work for her. As here:

Não deve ser difícil de entender que o corpo

É a parte da alma

Que começa onde se quer

Se me chama para casa

Tenho de me acautelar:

Há cada vez mais resíduos pessoais perigosos

17

O que se parece

Com uma resposta

É sempre mais pequeno

Canine wisdom

Or here, from the monad “Orador-Ninguém” (p. 127):

O importante

É ser-se especialista

Do que não acontece

Quando o pai nosso não está

Pede para deixarem os pedidos

Nas caixas das esmolas

Cânone não vem de canino

Se cânone é trela

Como poderia ser um cão a inventá-la?

Cânone deve ser uma armadilha

Para apanhar humanos.

Canine wisdom

This piece of canine wisdom leads me to RAP GLOBAL. Queni N. S. Oeste, the

long-poem-made-of-poems-rap-lyrics that literally overturns the canon by presenting it as

a leash and a trap. In order to keep himself free, the poet promiscuously brings together

“high” and “low” culture and prodeeds to recycle the canon. Here is the closure of the

book:

18

19

In an interview he gave in Brazil when the book came out, Boaventura de Sousa

Santos explains the creation of RAP GLOBAL as a much-needed supplement to his

academic work.27 In Santos’s many scholarly works, Western modernity is critiqued for

its betrayal of an exalting promise of emancipation that rapidly became a matrix of social

regulation and domination assuming three major forms: capitalism, colonialism, and

patriarchy. RAP GLOBAL emerges to account for what is left out of scholarship because

of academic protocol: different kinds of real people with different kinds of aspirations;

their private joys and sorrows; their resistance and struggles; modern creativity riddled by

madness, fanaticism, and violence; poetry always on the brink of nonexistence; the

brutality of progress and the dangerous seductiveness of order; what comes after god; and

finally, the things we can’t even imagine because they only exist as absence, thus causing

inexplicable anxiety and suffering. In order to express what is left out of his scholarly

work, Santos gathered together authors, works or characters he, for one reason or another,

most admires, be they canonical or trashy, ranging from the Bible, Sappho or Camões to

Pessoa Eminem or Wolverine, and makes them all rap away. The “author” of RAP

GLOBAL is Queni N. S. L. West, a gifted Portuguese rapper of Angolan roots, whose

name evokes the American rapper, Kanye West, but makes him a man of all seasons

(West, but also “Norte,” “Sul” and “Leste”). RAP GLOBAL should be read aloud with

hip hop rhythm. It has been set to hip hop music and is being turned into an opera. The

amazing thing is, it is all a recycling of the canon. A maelstrom of magnificent leftovers.

Let me close with two lines from Santos’s latest book of poetry:

decidi recolher os restos do dia de ontem

para os reciclar como agora é exigido28

27 Miguel Conde, interview with Boaventura de Sousa Santos, O Globo, 24. 07. 2010. 28 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, 139 epigramas para sentimentalizar as pedras (Rio de Janeiro: Confraria do Vento, prelo).