I first met Cidinha da Silva about a year ago, at the International Literary Festival of Paraty (Flip), in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. At the time, I had just begun translating Sobre-viventes! (Pallas Editora, 2016), a collection of crônicas that approach Brazil, past and present, through everyday lived experience. In 2010, Cidinha coined the neologism Exuzilhar, a verb that combines the Portuguese encruzilhar (“to cross”) or encruzilhada (“crossroads”) with Exu (an Orisha in the Yoruba religion, the divine messenger or gatekeeper). Exuzilhamento is indeed a driving force of Cidinha’s work, which, as she reveals here, “revolves around Africanities, Orixalities, Ancestralities, and the tension and dialogue between tradition (African, Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Diasporic, and Afro-Indigenous) and contemporaneity.” The interview that follows, conducted alongside my fellow translator Ana Luiza de Oliveira e Silva, showcases the complexity of Cidinha’s creative process and her critical place in contemporary Brazilian literature.
—Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large for Brazil
Daniel Persia (DP): It’s great to connect with you again, Cidinha, especially after having featured some of your work in our Summer 2020 issue. Can you give us a general panorama of your career as a writer?
Cidinha da Silva (CS): I started publishing literature in 2006, in São Paulo, with a self-financed, independent book of crônicas, Cada tridente em seu lugar. It’s a book that still sells widely, fourteen years later. The fourth edition was just released, with Mazza Edições (Belo Horizonte, Brazil). I had always wanted to publish literature. I wrote crônicas for an online magazine and readers kept asking when we’d have a book. That’s what really got me thinking about publishing my first literary work; I had already published a book of essays in 2003, Ações afirmativas em educação—experiências brasileiras [Affirmative Action in Education: Brazilian Experiences] (Summus).
Ana Luiza de Oliveira e Silva (AO): Tell us about your creative process. Do you have a daily writing routine?
CS: My writing process has practical, creative, and other dimensions that are somewhat intangible. In practical terms, I’m a relatively organized and disciplined writer; I sit and write at predetermined times. I don’t have any problems with the “blank page,” but sometimes I’m faced with a lack of time to write. My writing routine depends on the volume of work at hand, on how much I need to accomplish to ensure survival: lesson planning; preparing and delivering lectures, workshops, and courses; reading; studying; traveling; keeping up with my online store and promoting my books. The time left for writing is very minimal, it boils down to just a few hours a week. I write very little on impulse; I usually write with a particular book in mind, one that I’m still developing or organizing. I also write a lot of commissioned work, for publications of the national press, primarily, but also theatre and essays.
As for the creative dimension, I prefer to write early in the morning, which is the best time of day for me. I write on my desktop computer, sitting in a comfortable chair in a large office, with a glass door on the balcony and the sun coming to visit me. I collect dictionaries and keep them in reach for consultation. My productivity is greatest in the morning, for about four to six hours (when I’m in a more intense process of production), but from the fourth hour onward, what I really do is reread, revise, consult reference materials. I read everything out loud, several times; that’s how I set rhythm and establish harmony. When I’m mulling over an idea for a new book, I tend to take a lot of notes in my notebooks—scattered things, like names for characters, beginnings of crônicas or short stories. I usually only write down ideas, but when I write down full sentences, they almost always unfold into one or two paragraphs at that very moment, when they’re first being recorded. And so there you have the beginning of a new text.
The unimaginable happens in dreams (of which I remember little or nothing), in conversations, in exchanges with real people, in observing the world, in interacting with stones, plants, flowers, water, earth and fire, and smoke, too. In intuition, which I’ve built over the years, in exercises and life tests, to pay full attention and remain confident. Spirituality communicates with me through intuition.
DP: What are some of the main themes in your work?
CS: Through two of my more recent books—Um Exu em Nova York (2018), a collection of short stories, and Exuzilhar (2019), the first volume in a series of selected crônicas—I’ve come to understand that my aesthetic interests revolve around Africanities, Orixalities, Ancestralities, and the tension and dialogue between tradition (African, Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Diasporic, and Afro-Indigenous) and contemporaneity. Other topics include racism, racial discrimination, and racial inequalities, though the central theme really is that tension and dialogue mentioned above. I’m also interested in themes of death, love, soccer, and politics. I write a lot about politics.
AO: The crônica is a genre that’s very well known in some countries, less so in others. How would you define the genre, and what do you think readers who aren’t familiar with it need to know?
CS: The crônica is a genre that dialogues with time while fighting against it, against the temporality of facts and writing. A genre whose raw material is the everyday. The crônista is faced with the challenge of tackling the here and now while simultaneously ensuring that the text won’t become dated (that is, restricted in meaning, or directed only to a certain group of people). It’s a genre of many faces—reportage, dialogue, journalism, op-ed, cultural critique, and social commentary, among others. It’s composed of several different tones: levity, critique, irony, rhythm, humor, and poetry, to name a few. One time, in a public debate, referencing a statement made by the writer Ruth Rocha—that the novel wins over the reader point-by-point, while a book of short stories wins with a KO (citing an idea from Cortázar)—I asked, “And the crônica? How does the crônica win over the reader?” At first, she said she didn’t know. Later she went on to respond, wittily, “with a WO” [short for walkover, meaning no other contestants take the ring].
DP: Where does that leave the crônica among other genres, such as short stories, poems, essays, etc.?
CS: In Brazilian literature, the crônica is what we call the “poor cousin”—something that doesn’t have much value in a determined ranking. The crônica isn’t worth much in the realm of Brazilian literature. To give you a better idea, I’ve been writing crônicas regularly for many years. I tackle a wide and diverse range of themes. I had eight books of crônicas published but wasn’t really noticed in Brazilian literature until I published my first book of short stories, in 2018, which immediately won the National Library Award. I remember a friend who would always listen to my complaints about the literary system. “Publish a book of short stories,” she advised me, “even if it’s a small one.” I followed her advice, and it worked. The crônica in Brazil has always been tied to newspaper publications, from the 1940s/1950s through the 1980s. From 1990 onward, along with the decline of the print newspaper, space for the crônica diminished. Great writers in Brazilian literature wrote and published crônicas in newspapers and print magazines as an honest way to earn some money, dedicating a minimal amount of time to write in a less prominent genre. Books of crônicas are generally collections of publications from these newspapers and other periodicals.
AO: Often we hear literature being classified into categories such as escrita feminina [feminine writing] or literatura negra [black literature]. What are your thoughts on these terms? Do you consider yourself a part of these movements?
CS: I despise the term escrita feminina, it’s an absolute depoliticization. After decades of struggle and conquest within the feminist movement, women are still talking about escrita feminina. I don’t authorize anyone to qualify my work under the political aberration of literatura feminina [feminine literature]. The expression literatura de mulheres [literature written by women], however, I think is fair and relevant, with a reflexive and sustainable political slant. That makes sense to me and puts me at ease.
Here in Brazil there is an ongoing conceptual and political discussion about literatura negra. There are various conceptions and many of my colleagues, black male and female authors, are involved. They take considerable time discussing these concepts and their consequent literary-political affiliation. That’s not the case for me; I leave that discussion to the literary theorists and to my colleagues, black male and female writers who are activists in that arena. I’m not an activist—in any movement, for any cause.
In theoretical-conceptual terms, I like the classification autoria negra [black authorship], it’s what best represents me because it protects my alterity. But I also feel comfortable with my work being qualified as literatura negra, literatura afro-brasileira [Afro-Brazilian literature], and literatura afro-diaspórica [Afro-Diasporic literature]. But to reiterate, I’m not too preoccupied with such a conceptual discussion, or the activism behind it. I don’t let it occupy my time. What matters to me is discussing my works and my creative process.
DP: Earlier this year, we had the pleasure of featuring one of your crônicas, “Marigô,” for Translation Tuesday, which takes on a micro-aggression from a very humorous point of view. Can you talk about how you developed these characters?
CS: I find that internal critique—by members within a particular group or community—and self-critique are very healthy practices. They help us to avoid repeating the mistakes we criticize others for making. In processes of identity construction, it’s common for us to go overboard, to compensate for the historical and atavistic faults that have left us with painful fractures. There are situations in which we can laugh at ourselves—a laugh that comes from deep within, signaling something that’s completely over the top, like the clothes we wore as teenagers to rebel against our parents and stand out from the crowd. Today, looking back, we ask ourselves, “how could I have been so ridiculous?” That’s how the characters in Marigô came to life, with that intention of criticizing excess through humor.
DP: Humor, irony and sarcasm really do play such as an important role in your work.
CS: They’re my supports, the stairs for me to get to where I need to go to communicate with my readers.
AO: “Marigô” is from Sobre-viventes!, a collection of crônicas first published by Pallas Editora in 2016. Throughout the book, you develop a complex universe of characters. Some, like Alice Walker and Assata Shakur, are real, in the sense that they’re known historical figures. Others, like Marigô, are “fictional.” How do you develop these characters? Are they always based on real people?
CS: Yes, there are real characters, like Walker and Shakur, as you mentioned. As a genre, the crônica allows to us to dialogue with the here, the now, the real, and so these characters tend to be very present. There are other characters who are not “real,” in the sense that they exist more as basic individualities. They are based on real life, archetypes, fusions of various things, people, characteristics, situations. They’re personas made to say what I want to say. I have a lot of control over my characters (I don’t know if this will be true once I start writing a novel!), which is important to me. They’re my little creatures, I decide where they go and how they get there. I said this once during a roundtable and two participants—a literary critic and a writer—laughed, glancing at one another as if saying “poor thing, she’ll mature and come to realize that an author doesn’t control her characters.” And I thought: maybe I’ll change my mind, but, for now, I think this maxim, reiterated by many people who have no writing experience whatsoever, is nothing more than a cliché. I have a lot of respect for my own experience and, in my experience, my characters are my little creatures, and I maintain control, otherwise I write literature I don’t like to read—that is, literature that cares so much about special effects and miraculous outcomes that it loses the necessary attention to detail, to the seams, which a consistent and convincing writing process demands. I’m a writer who looks for soundness, consistency, without forgetting, however, that the stone was once water and the nature of things remains, even when they change form.
DP: The title Sobre-viventes! is a play on words in Portuguese: sobrevivente meaning “survivor,” vivente meaning “one who lives” (and hence sobre viventes meaning “about the living”). Can you talk a little about that, and the importance of that dichotomy between surviving and living?
CS: That’s the history of black people in the diaspora: we survived and continue to survive the atrocities imposed by racism, by economic and human exploitation. We sought and insistently seek ways to affirm our existence, to demarcate places for the living human beings that we are. We sing, we dance, we share meals together, we take care of one another, conspire, dream, cultivate humor, poetry, irony (the best way to not bite one’s lip); we affirm our humanity, in spite of racism’s incessant bent on destroying it. The book Sobre-viventes! materializes this game, this walking on a knife’s edge.
AO: What have your experiences with translation been up until now? Why have your work translated, and what do you hope for?
CS: I still haven’t had a full-length translation published, but I have two books in progress: Um Exu em Nova York (short stories) and Sobre-viventes! (crônicas). I’ve had texts translated into six languages: German, Catalan, Spanish, French, English, and Italian. I’m hoping for full-book translations so my work can be read and discussed in many places around the world. Translation broadens horizons.
DP: Some writers talk about the dilemma of using “the colonizer’s language” (in this case, English) as a postcolonial or decolonial instrument. How do you understand that dilemma, and in what way is it implicated in the act of translation?
CS: I don’t find this conversation to be too prevalent in Brazil; it seems to me that it’s even more relevant to countries in which native languages were massacred and replaced by the colonizer’s language in more recent historical processes, as in African countries, for example. Here, in Latin America, our native languages were usurped five hundred years ago, not one hundred or one hundred and fifty, like the African countries whose processes of independence occurred from the 1950s onward, with those of the Portuguese language occurring in the 1970s (Angola and Mozambique, among other countries). In several African nations, especially in communities in the countryside, many people have maintained native languages as the principal instrument of communication. Several countries have more than two or three official languages—South Africa, for instance, has eleven. Black writers in Angola and Mozambique go back and forth discussing what it means to write in Portuguese. So, for these countries, this is a very vibrant question. Here, in Brazil and Latin America as a whole, we can write or revindicate writing in indigenous languages whose peoples were, or continue to be, exterminated. There are Brazilian writers, writing from the borders with other countries in Latin America, who write books in “Portunhol,” a hybrid “language” mixing Portuguese and Spanish, with a supposed “horrible” grammar, which we use to communicate orally. The question of translation into Anglo-Saxon languages preoccupies me only in the sense that they are faithful translations from the Portuguese, searching, in these languages, for the feelings and meanings closest to what I’ve written.
AO: Um Exu em Nova York won the National Library Award in 2019, and a second edition of Sobre-viventes! will be released later this year. What’s on the horizon?
CS: I hope to see Um Exu em Nova York and Sobre-viventes! translated and published in English by 2021. I also hope to see more and more texts well translated and published in respected journals and magazines. I’m currently working on new editions of two very special books of crônicas, Oh, margem! Reinventa os rios! (2011) and Racismo no Brasil e afetos correlatos (2014). I’m organizing the third volume in a series of selected crônicas, Amores entre iguais. I’m also working on a short collection of crônicas about soccer and another book of new crônicas. In this troubling 2020, I’ll defend my PhD, and after, I’d like to dedicate my time to writing my first novel.
Translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Persia and Ana Luiza de Oliveira e Silva
Cidinha da Silva was born in Belo Horizonte (Minas Gerais, Brazil) and is the author of seventeen published works, spanning a variety of genres, including crônicas, short stories, essays, children’s and young adult’s literature. Among her most notable works are Sobre-viventes! (2nd Edition, 2020), #Parem de nos matar! (2nd Edition, 2019), and O teatro negro de Cidinha da Silva (2019). Her first collection of short stories, Um Exu em Nova York (2018), won Brazil’s National Library Award in 2019.
Daniel Persia has served as Regional Leader for the US-Brazil Fulbright Commission and Editor-at-Large for Asymptote Journal. His work has appeared in a number of literary journals, including Asymptote, Exchanges, Your Impossible Voice, and KROnline. His translation of Escritos (Writings), by Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida, was published in 2019 for the re-opening of the Chillida-Leku museum in Hernani, Gipuzkoa, Spain. Working primarily from Spanish and Portuguese, his research explores collaborative frameworks for translating Afro-Brazilian literature. He is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and a Lassen Fellow in Latin American Studies at Princeton University.
Ana Luiza de Oliveira e Silva is a historian and translator based in Ottawa, Canada. She holds a PhD in Social History and her doctoral dissertation received Honorable Mention for the 2015–2016 University of São Paulo Social History Award. Currently, she is a researcher at the Canadian Council for International Co-operation and a reviewer for Escritas do Tempo, an academic journal at the Federal University of Southern and Southeastern Pará, Brazil. She works with text translation, editing and proofreading in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.
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