Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Poetry Editor
Jorge Mateus de Lima was considered by many to be the most complicated of the artists who took part in the Semana de Arte Moderna (Week of Modern Art) in São Paulo in 1922, the event that has come to mark the independence of Brazilian literature and art from its European models. Rejecting the Parnassian ideals of the past, with its limiting views of national reality, modernist writers initiated a poetic rediscovery of Brazil and sought a new identity through popular language set in regional and folkloric detail. An identity rich in music and magic, dance and myth. The movement aimed to produce a literature for export to replace the dominant imported literature with its rigid definitions of class, landscape and imperial certainty.
Characteristic of Brazilian Modernism as a whole is the promotion of a critical consciousness of national reality, accompanied by an incorporation of its most diverse elements, the Indian and the Portuguese, the piano and the berimbau, the jungle and the school, the religions of the descendants of African slaves and the Landowner Elite.
Though few of de Lima's critics were as enthusiastic about his so-called Christian Phase, when he converted to Catholicism and used its many icons and images in his poetry, he remained true to the ideals of the Semana de Arte Moderna, where myth and reality are not two opposites, but a melange of sounds, scents and colors of the Brazilian Soul.
Poem To A Sister
(translated by Mariza Góes)
O sister
now that the nights come early
and an immense sadness
hovers above everything
and the silence lingers for so long
turning the dogs insane on the streets,
sister, come to remind me
that we grew up together
when the days were long and different.
Sister, if you know the signs
to change the time, come.
Come because I want to leave
to other places
where seagulls are less useless
and where a heart can be found at each harbour;
and the seabirds
so cleansed and white
and so slow and aware of journeys
come to flap
above my pipe
where the comets of the sky faded.
Sister, on my rhythms
are friends who shout:
Daubler, Ehrenstein, Stramm, suicides,
vagabonds, lepers and prostitutes who
still remember their family prayers.
There are, somewhere, other air, other hills,
other limits...farewell sister.
O, what a long night,
o what such a long night!
What cries outside?
The humanity, or some fountain?
-- Jorge Mateus de Lima
One of the best incarnations of Brazilian Modernism is exemplified by Seu Jorge.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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A batch of secret files found on a longtime Republican operative’s computer was found after his death which showed that he compiled race based data and blatantly used it to help the GOP intentionally stop Black voters from making it to the polls.
According to Salon, Thomas Hofeller is widely considered the master of modern gerrymandering, and after his death in August 2018, his estranged daughter stumbled across over 70,000 files that he had left behind.
Some of those files have already been used to successfully challenge North Carolina’s gerrymander and the Trump administration’s plan to add a citizenship question to the census, which Hofeller argued would help “Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.”
The records showed how he used racial information to draw new political maps and impose voter ID laws targeting Black people. Hofeller once argued that the Trump administration’s plan to add a citizenship question to the census would help “Republicans and non-Hispanic whites,” and his files confirm that his tactics were often successfully used to make those sorts of policies a reality.
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Hundreds of Bahamian evacuees trying to fly to the United States have been turned away at the international airport in Nassau.
In addition to a passport, airline officials confirmed to the Miami Herald that U.S. Customs and Border Protection is now requiring some Bahamians to have U.S. visas instead of clean police records as the agency has required previously.
Several passengers — some with visas, some without — who made it to Miami International Airport on Wednesday evening told the Herald that they are only allowed to stay in the country for two weeks. Travelers from Abaco and Grand Bahama are being subjected to extra screenings by U.S. immigration agents in Nassau, passengers and airline officials say.
Other documents CBP agents are requesting include proof of income, property ownership, utility bills, employer contact information and proof of pre-purchased return flights.
The more in-depth screenings represent a dramatic departure from the fluid immigration relationship that existed between the U.S. and the Bahamas prior to Hurricane Dorian.
“I can’t prove I own property when all my documents were carried away by the storm. They are asking me for the impossible,” said Rachel Thomas from Abaco, who was rescued from her roof amid rising waters.
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Brazil saw an alarming rise in racial abuse, sexual assault, femicide and violence against women and LGBT people in 2018, according to new figures released on Tuesday.
The data illustrates a country which became more bigoted and more polarised against the backdrop of last year’s incendiary election campaign and the increase in inflammatory rhetoric by the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, and his supporters, specialists said.
“We are observing a rise in violence against women in all forms: aggression, femicide and rape,” said Samira Bueno, executive director of the Brazilian Public Security Forum, which published the figures using state and federal government data.
Intentional violent deaths – which include homicides, robberies leading to death, deaths of police officers – fell by 10% in 2018 to 57,341. Murders of police officers also fell – from 373 to 343.
But femicides rose by more than 4% to 1,206.
A total of 66,041 incidents of sexual violence were reported in 2018, of which 82% were against women and girls, a 4.1% rise on the previous year and the highest number ever registered. More than half of the female victims were girls under 13.
With 263,067 domestic violence injuries reported, the figures indicated a woman was attacked in Brazil every two minutes.
Bueno cited Bolsonaro’s inflammatory language – such as telling a congresswoman she did not deserve to be raped and his praise for cold war-era Latin American torturers – as contributing factors.
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When most people think of careers in television, their first thought usually goes to someone in front of the camera. I am no different. When I got serious about my broadcast journalism major, I too had visions of being in front of the camera to become the next Oprah. I knew I wanted to be a reporter and eventually an anchor until a professor told me it is easier to get a job behind the camera as a producer. Post-graduation, I sent out dozens of resumes to news stations across the country for openings for reporters or producers. When itty bitty Amarillo, Texas, called with a producing position, I answered.
Working in Amarillo allowed me to produce and turn around stories. The opportunity made me realize I prefer crafting a show to trying to run people down to get them to talk to me about a story. I also learned that the real power of storytelling is not necessarily who you see on the screen but the person behind it pulling the strings.
I am that person. The storyteller. The puppet master. The voice in a news anchor’s ear. The person who organizes a newscast; deciding the stories you see, the order in which you see them, the soundbites you hear, the video you watch, and any graphic that hits the screen.
I started my journalism career six weeks before Bear Stearns failed, marking a prelude to the financial collapse of 2008. This was also the time when the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain were in full swing. I was a 22-year-old black girl from the South Side of Chicago working in rural, Republican red, Amarillo, Texas. I was one of four black people at my station and the only one who touched content. My experiences were different from my coworkers. My sensitivities were different from my coworkers. My political preferences and social proclivities were different from my coworkers.
Offhand remarks like, “That’s so ghetto,” hit me hard. A rope tied together like a noose and left on a nearby desk made me question, “Was that meant for me?” The order to run a two-minute package on John McCain’s announcement of Sarah Palin as his running mate, when all we had been running on Obama and Biden were 40-second ads made me wonder if the “equal time” rule was really a rule or more of a suggestion.
But I was young, eager, and learning; and being steered and guided in an environment that is biased.
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Mr. O’Hara is the director of “Slave Play,” Jeremy O. Harris’s raunchy, riveting and risky new work, whose many provocations begin with its double entendre title. Mr. O’Hara, like Mr. Harris and many members of the cast and crew, is black. So with just four weeks to go until the first preview, he ignored the naughtily named snacks and invoked his forebears.
“For many years of my life, I’ve had random white people come to me and ask me about where my last name came from, and I would just look them in the face and say, very politely: ‘Slavery’,” Mr. O’Hara told the rapt gathering at New 42nd Street Studios, quieting the lingering chitchat. “I just want us all to be mindful that it’s because of what our ancestors endured — and survived, and abolished — that we have the audacity to be in this room.”
Upping the ante, he turned to the show’s producers, most of whom are white, and threw down a challenge. “I want you to be mindful of the responsibility that you have, to put the marquee with the name ‘Slave’ on it in Times Square,” he said. “And I would ask you, with every decision that you make, are you upholding the legacy of that name?”
Broadway is a perilous place: Even amid an overall boom, most shows fail financially. But “Slave Play,” which is costing up to $3.9 million to capitalize, is chancy in new ways.
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