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The politics and poetics of travel: the Brazil of Elizabeth Bishop and P. K. Page

2009; UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE SANTA CATARINA; Issue: 57 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5007/2175-8026.2009n57p105

2175-8026

Sandra Regina Goulart Almeida,

Literature, Politics, and Exile Studies

This essay reads the work of these two writers as a means of mediating the ambivalent cultural encounter and it also attempts to map out the gaze that reflects and digests the foreign experience.Both Bishop and Page, when writing about their travels, as in the texts quoted in the epigraph, are often referring to the specific context of their journeys to and around Brazil.Bishop, an American who was born in Massachusetts and was raised by her grandparents in Nova Scotia, Canada, and also Worcester and Boston in the US, came to Brazil as a tourist in 1951, but having decided to stay, lived here with Lota de Macedo Soares, in Ouro Preto, Petrópolis and Rio de Janeiro until 1966.Page lived in Brazil from 1957 to 1959, following her husband who had been appointed Canada's Ambassador.She describes her experience in the country as something concurrently surreal and wonderful.Both writers, before coming to Brazil, were highly acclaimed poets, who, once in a new land, devoted their time and energy to writing about traveling in the country: Bishop set out to write Brazil (1962) for the Life World Series.She also wrote the so-called "Brazilian poems" and translated into English poetry by Brazilian authors and also the Diary of Helena Morley.Page, on the other hand, published in 1987, her Brazilian Journal, a book based on letters and extracts from her journal, written during her stay in Brazil, published in 1987.Besides those works, both authors wrote extensively about their travel experiences and their encounters with "the other."Adrienne Rich in a poem from a collection entitled An Atlas of the Difficult World evokes the subjective nature of mapping and points to the relevance of the "gaze" as the determining element in spatial perceptions.The persona begins by stating that "This is a map of our country" and after describing a list of possibilities of visualizing this country in a critical way comments that "I promised to show you a map you say but this is a mural / then yes let it be these are small distinctions / where do we see it from is the question" (6).Here, the supposedly objective rationality of the maps is replaced by a "mural" as a personal compilation of images.What is relevant in this case is "where we see it