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The Sound of Clarice's Silences

2022; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 46; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/uni.2022.0008

1080-6563

Roger Mello,

Literature, Culture, and Criticism

The Sound of Clarice's Silences Roger Mello Regarding this panel's theme "Silence in Children's Literature," what comes to me is the idea and the origin of my 2018 novel Clarice, illustrated by Felipe Cavalcante. The book portrays a moment in the recent history of Brazil, in its planned capital, Brasília, a city created as a utopia that walked through a dystopic maze. Although the city was conceived by artists and thinkers with social concern, both in the idea and in the spatialization of the urban lines, the country was taken by a dictatorial military regime in 1964. Clarice has the same name as Clarice Lispector (1920–77), the notorious writer who dedicated a letter to the newborn capital, in a strong and definitive way. The nonsense and apparent emptiness of the adults' conversations of those days lead to a poetical view point of the children around. Such facts as books thrown over the bridge and deep into the lake to protect relatives or friends from prison for hiding "forbidden" art or political persecution mingle in a city that emerges from the background to become the main character. "Red books" could also be disguised with a fake cover, but the creation of the artists all around would bring the contents and the stories out of the books. Participants included very important modern Brazilian artists like Maria Martins, her sculptural work in a silent dialogue with the mind of the girl, on a visit to the Itamaraty Museum designed by Oscar Niemeyer, and its interior garden designed by Burle Marx. Everything reveals the political environment of that very time's context in its lines of architectural poetry, making the characters into readers of the city images. Just the same way that I myself grew as an image reader. The unspoken hides through the children's fears, since Clarice and Tarso have been constantly left in the house of some strangers, while adults seek to hide books or rescue missing persons. The central theme of the 2019 IRSCL, "Silence and Silencing," takes me back to the book Clarice, in a contemporary Brazil under the menace of a new ultra conservative wave. [End Page 117] Charcoal Boys and Mangrove Boys, two of my other books, show a Brazil that must not be "shown." President Bolsonaro, like military presidents from the 1960s and 1970s, does not want research agencies like INPE (an important agency for protection from deforestation.) to reveal the truth: a country with increasing deforestation and child and slave labor. So he changes the research agencies until they are what is suitable to him. He himself argues that he worked as a child, although certainly he did not do it in coal mines or in cutting cane and breaking cashews with knives. Certainly, not every agrarian or business sector thinks in such unacceptable ways. But it is no longer the 1964 of the coup d'état in Brazil, we no longer speak of metaphors to deceive a foolish and insensitive general; this is very different. Let's not mistake one silence for the other. As composer Chico Buarque said in his song "Maninha," by speaking of a "He" who has come to ruin everything, including the possibility of an imaginary childhood: Maninha ehhh, the story is funny because I made it for my sister Miucha to sing, but really, it wasn't really because it … wasn't because she was my sister …, no, it's because maninha or sister was something that we used to hear in a lot of songs saying I don't know (manda buscar outro, ó Maninha lá no Piauí). There was a lot of Maninha, Maninha in the songs, everywhere. Just as there were the words Iaiá, Ioiô, and so on. I wanted to compose it, of course, thinking that Miucha would record it. A joke with this little sister who actually, in the song … actually doesn't mean sister. Little sister, Maninha, it spoke of an evidently, imaginary, childhood. And Vinicius de Moraes mocked us: it's all lies, all lies, that's a lie, isn't it? There was no house at all. There was not a jackfruit tree. No backyard. All a...