Cidade Tiradentes de Menina a Mulher (Voe, menina Voe)
Tradução: Margaret Anne Clarke
CIDADE TIRADENTES: FROM GIRL TO WOMAN - Claudia Canto
I don’t know how to describe my life now. I come and go, I live here and there, moving on after a little while. What I can say that Cidade Tiradentes is the place I know and love best.
A girl who’s transformed herself into a resolute woman, and knows what she wants from life.
She’s twenty-nine years old now, and has gained a certain fame for herself. But she has followed her own path in life, writing her own story, and never conforming to pre-conceived ideas or hard and fast rules
Miss Tiradentes was born in 1984 in a forest inland from Brazil’s Atlantic coast. At latitude of 35ᵒ to the far east of São Paulo, the population of the city is approximately two hundred and fifty-four thousand.
It’s one of the great districts of São Paulo, and sixty per cent of the population is of African descent. The largest residential area in Latin America, with almost forty thousand habitations.
The plan for the construction of the estate came about in the 1970’s, when the government began to acquire a number of territories within an old plantation called Santa Etelvinda. The plantation was, in fact, largely forest area, covered with huge eucalyptus and many bushes of various kinds.
When Cidade Tiradentes was inaugurated, no-one could have foreseen that it would become …
Stop right there !
I don’t want to begin this story with a geographical description, full of impersonal statistics. As if any of us, or our places were a string of numbers, as if we had no life, pain, love, longing and afflictions
I refuse to write a linear narrative, full of data and planned script. I feel that the way of the city of which I am writing isn’t that. Here, everything is arduous and intense, only someone who lives here, or has passed through its borders, can understand what I am saying.
The feeling which the residents of Cidade Tiradentes have for the city is not something that can be avoided or dismissed, you can’t speak of Cidade Triadentes without raising banners of hatred, love or indignation.
It’s something like the love a football fan has for their team, but not an armchair fan, or one who goes simply to drink with his mates. It’s a feeling which goes beyond that, similar to one who follows his team heart and soul, living for the match results every week.
That’s what I’m going to try to convey to you, but never a vision free form ideologies and dogmas.
So, I wonder: what’s the best way of beginning this story?
It’s very difficult to speak of Cidade Triadentes to anyone who doesn’t know the area. My account cannot be impartial; it has to be a passionate and violent discourse, moving from love to pain and back again in an instant.
And, another conclusion: this story will have to be recounted from Cidade Tiradentes’ birth, so that we don’t’ run the risk of missing crucial details which help us to understand.
When Cidade Tiradentes was one years old, I had reached the age of eleven. But, obviously I wasn’t born at that time, and Miss Tiradentes wasn’t born with no mother and father, no origin, in fact.
But it was only after some time had passed that people wanted to live in the space created by the government, and with some specific destiny of purpose in mind, when Cidade Tiradentes had become a strong and vigorous woman.
So then I thought it might be better to begin the story at the end, twenty-nine years after Miss Tiradentes’ birth. That was everything would become clearer and easier to comprehend. But if I were to begin my tale that way, many details along the way would be lost, the ins and outs of the city’s birth would not be clear either.
Perhaps I would forget to include the key formative events of the city, and thus it would be easy to give the impression that Cidade Tiradentes had always been the way it is now, strong and proud; that would be easy.
I think it’s better if the narrative simply had a beginning, a middle and an end.
No, that won’t do either !
It’s better to let the facts and their sequences emerge spontaneously, or, perhaps they would be better dealt with by a historian or an anthropologist, and not by myself, a maelstrom of emotion, with poetry within me which I hardly know how to express.
Why is this? How has this feeling of mine, the way I feel I must write, come about, in fact ?
Because, essentially before Cidade Tiradentes was built, life was terrible for myself and many others.
She rescued us from a forgotten pit of misery and desperation. My home before consisted of two tiny shacks – barely even rooms, badly lit, and where we lived in the shadows. It was an environment where we cohabited with rats and cockroaches, who by day lay hidden in the holes in the wooden floor which we tried to plug with old newspaper. These strategies never worked and in the dead of night the vermin emerged to torment us.
That was the environment of my childhood, and shame was an ever-present condition of my life, especially when some little friend asked me where I lived, and I was obliged to reveal that filthy back yard, at the bottom of which were two small shack-like rooms, further back another smaller one, which served as our toilet and bathroom.
In that squalid bathroom where I washed as best I could, I was uplifted by the promises of my mother, who always told us that one day we would have a house of our own, and with a bathroom installed within. We would never again have to make that journey, numb with sleep, in the small hours to do what we had to.
That one promise of my mother was always soothing balsam, a rose-water solace for my soul.
But it was also in that bathroom that I suffered one of the greatest traumas of my life. My privacy was invaded horribly, and I have always guarded it since as if it was gold-dust.
I never imagined I was being watched and my nakedness exposed. Someone was watching me through a chink in the window. I don’t know for how long, but when I did finally notice, I burst into tears and tore out of the hut into the arms of my mother. No-one could imagine the trauma which that prying little boy could cause in my mind. Some essential bond of trust was broken, my innocence was torn away from me. I was ill for some time after that, filled with shame, and from that point, I refused to wash at all.
And when the situation became intolerable, my mother exerted harsher discipline and forced me to wash. That was just the first psychological violence to which I have been subjected, and the innate shyness which has always been my biggest problem worsened from then on.
We had ended up living in this place when we gained permission to lodge in a piece of land which had been abandoned some time ago by its original owners.
But this permission was granted not by the owner of the land, but by someone - whose name I can’t remember - who had appropriated the land for himself to grow fruit and vegetables.
We got hold of a builder to construct something for us, materials to build with, all the while gripped by perpetual insecurity and fear.
What might happen to us?
We were one of many, many, families who had to resort to illegal means; they call us the landless, invaders, slum-dwellers, squatters, thieves, drug-addicts, the dregs of society, and so on.
Sooner or later, they would evict us or perhaps demolish our shacks with their bulldozers, with no concern whatever as to where we would go.
After that, perhaps, they would compensate us at a rate of a third of what our shacks were worth, or throw us into some charity hostel in the city.
But, thanks to what some would call God’s intervention, others luck, that wasn’t our destiny. Call it what you like, but we left our lives as squatters behind, and turned into another sort of category known as the city’s peripheral population.
It was then that Cidade Tiradentes came into our lives. I don’t have to describe the happiness and joy this news brought, the fulfilment of the life-long dream of a plot to call our own.
We would have our cherished house, we would become, at last, citizens. Oh my ! And I wold have my room in which I could keep my cherished rag dolls, space for the poetry I was beginning to write, a new life.
And more so because it was far away from where we were living now, and where no amenities existed, nor any transport, nor supermarkets, and no hospital either…
I simply can’t put our intense happiness down on paper.
I remember some scenes from that time, such as the day of our move: we were perched on the top of a lorry load together with our beds, the cooker, the table, the old television, the sofa which was also my brother’s bed, and other bits and pieces I can’t remember off-hand. I yelled goodbye at my playmates and friends from the top of the lorry.
Today I can see the scene more clearly. As in a film, as if it hadn’t actually happened to me.
At that time, my father had not yet become drunk on a regular basis, and so was able to share in our happiness.
Those were sweet memories of my childhood, comparable to an evening before a romantic night with a lover.
No, reliving this, I don’t even want to finish this chapter.
As if these memories filled in the fissures and gaps in my existence. As if I had returned once more to the top of that lorry.
In truth, the compulsion to write this book feels more like a form of therapy than anything else, and at the end of each page my soul unfurls, leaving me ever more free.
Believe me, I really am trying to find the most appropriate words to describe how important this story is, but all my efforts elude me, and I can’t find the most appropriate words to carry you with me on the road to Cidade Tiradentes.
If I could transform this chapter into some kind of human form I would, and then I would take him by the hand, to drink a glass of dry white wine, or a beer with me.
Or perhaps I would hold him in a tight embrace, or a long delayed passionate kiss …and I’d say: I love you, my darling chapter, because only with you I feel innocent, and full of pure hope.
I carry myself back to that day and make myself, somehow, relive the joy we felt then.
So let’s go, darling, surge out of these pages, full of so many words, so many tears. Let’s put on our party clothes and walk hand in hand.
I ask your pardon, dear readers, you must be finding these words of mine very strange, thinking that I’m writing them while drunk, that I am not thinking lucidly and that all these digressions are an attempt at some kind of rhetoric or simply exaggeration.
Absolutely not!
All these wild words, these feelings I am exposing, are authentic and true.
Only those who have lived or do still live in the sub-housing I had just escaped can grasp the meaning of what I am trying to say.
Anyone else may be able to imagine, but I don’t think they can actually feel it.
Our new house was almost comical in its contrast: it had a roof, water, no rats visible anywhere, a proper address and postal code, a public identity, a certificate of origin.
It also had a garage and a kitchen. And, as it didn’t have constant damp either, we could put pictures on the walls. It had a new water tank, a clean sink, and an indoor bathroom.
Instead of bringing us mosquitos and disease, the house brought us health, self-esteem, pride, belonging and citizenship.
And a new life …
And while we were getting used to our new house, Miss Tiradentes was running though the red clay of the houses, which were still being constructed even as we moved in.
In the meantime, I was trying to think of how I could tell my mother that something strange was happening in my body.
First the strange protuberances underneath my blouse, and then that blood which appeared without warning on my white underwear.
I think I and Miss Tiradentes even began to menstruate together.
For me, this new phase meant that I couldn’t play with my dolls anymore, nor play hopscotch in the street.
So I concealed the childish self who had played freely with the other children, fearful of other’s opinions, obliging me to behave like a young woman.
But Miss Tiradentes grew up without reins, without norms, and much, much more disobedient that I, never worried of what others said about her.
And look how harshly they did speak of her, without compassion, without any consideration for all those who depended on her. The people who came to the city had lived in little twinned white houses and buildings without walls, where everyone knew each other, and the residents within all had similar, or very nearly the same dreams, and the same problems.
The colourful paper kites which flew in the sky were flown by boys who were all the same, of the same hue, shall we say. Only the different colours of their kites distinguished them, and it was by flying kites that they dreamed, smiled, and were happy.
Tradução: Margaret Anne Clarke
I don’t know how to describe my life now. I come and go, I live here and there, moving on after a little while. What I can say that Cidade Tiradentes is the place I know and love best.
A girl who’s transformed herself into a resolute woman, and knows what she wants from life.
She’s twenty-nine years old now, and has gained a certain fame for herself. But she has followed her own path in life, writing her own story, and never conforming to pre-conceived ideas or hard and fast rules
Miss Tiradentes was born in 1984 in a forest inland from Brazil’s Atlantic coast. At latitude of 35ᵒ to the far east of São Paulo, the population of the city is approximately two hundred and fifty-four thousand.
It’s one of the great districts of São Paulo, and sixty per cent of the population is of African descent. The largest residential area in Latin America, with almost forty thousand habitations.
The plan for the construction of the estate came about in the 1970’s, when the government began to acquire a number of territories within an old plantation called Santa Etelvinda. The plantation was, in fact, largely forest area, covered with huge eucalyptus and many bushes of various kinds.
When Cidade Tiradentes was inaugurated, no-one could have foreseen that it would become …
Stop right there !
I don’t want to begin this story with a geographical description, full of impersonal statistics. As if any of us, or our places were a string of numbers, as if we had no life, pain, love, longing and afflictions
I refuse to write a linear narrative, full of data and planned script. I feel that the way of the city of which I am writing isn’t that. Here, everything is arduous and intense, only someone who lives here, or has passed through its borders, can understand what I am saying.
The feeling which the residents of Cidade Tiradentes have for the city is not something that can be avoided or dismissed, you can’t speak of Cidade Triadentes without raising banners of hatred, love or indignation.
It’s something like the love a football fan has for their team, but not an armchair fan, or one who goes simply to drink with his mates. It’s a feeling which goes beyond that, similar to one who follows his team heart and soul, living for the match results every week.
That’s what I’m going to try to convey to you, but never a vision free form ideologies and dogmas.
So, I wonder: what’s the best way of beginning this story?
It’s very difficult to speak of Cidade Triadentes to anyone who doesn’t know the area. My account cannot be impartial; it has to be a passionate and violent discourse, moving from love to pain and back again in an instant.
And, another conclusion: this story will have to be recounted from Cidade Tiradentes’ birth, so that we don’t’ run the risk of missing crucial details which help us to understand.
When Cidade Tiradentes was one years old, I had reached the age of eleven. But, obviously I wasn’t born at that time, and Miss Tiradentes wasn’t born with no mother and father, no origin, in fact.
But it was only after some time had passed that people wanted to live in the space created by the government, and with some specific destiny of purpose in mind, when Cidade Tiradentes had become a strong and vigorous woman.
So then I thought it might be better to begin the story at the end, twenty-nine years after Miss Tiradentes’ birth. That was everything would become clearer and easier to comprehend. But if I were to begin my tale that way, many details along the way would be lost, the ins and outs of the city’s birth would not be clear either.
Perhaps I would forget to include the key formative events of the city, and thus it would be easy to give the impression that Cidade Tiradentes had always been the way it is now, strong and proud; that would be easy.
I think it’s better if the narrative simply had a beginning, a middle and an end.
No, that won’t do either !
It’s better to let the facts and their sequences emerge spontaneously, or, perhaps they would be better dealt with by a historian or an anthropologist, and not by myself, a maelstrom of emotion, with poetry within me which I hardly know how to express.
Why is this? How has this feeling of mine, the way I feel I must write, come about, in fact ?
Because, essentially before Cidade Tiradentes was built, life was terrible for myself and many others.
She rescued us from a forgotten pit of misery and desperation. My home before consisted of two tiny shacks – barely even rooms, badly lit, and where we lived in the shadows. It was an environment where we cohabited with rats and cockroaches, who by day lay hidden in the holes in the wooden floor which we tried to plug with old newspaper. These strategies never worked and in the dead of night the vermin emerged to torment us.
That was the environment of my childhood, and shame was an ever-present condition of my life, especially when some little friend asked me where I lived, and I was obliged to reveal that filthy back yard, at the bottom of which were two small shack-like rooms, further back another smaller one, which served as our toilet and bathroom.
In that squalid bathroom where I washed as best I could, I was uplifted by the promises of my mother, who always told us that one day we would have a house of our own, and with a bathroom installed within. We would never again have to make that journey, numb with sleep, in the small hours to do what we had to.
That one promise of my mother was always soothing balsam, a rose-water solace for my soul.
But it was also in that bathroom that I suffered one of the greatest traumas of my life. My privacy was invaded horribly, and I have always guarded it since as if it was gold-dust.
I never imagined I was being watched and my nakedness exposed. Someone was watching me through a chink in the window. I don’t know for how long, but when I did finally notice, I burst into tears and tore out of the hut into the arms of my mother. No-one could imagine the trauma which that prying little boy could cause in my mind. Some essential bond of trust was broken, my innocence was torn away from me. I was ill for some time after that, filled with shame, and from that point, I refused to wash at all.
And when the situation became intolerable, my mother exerted harsher discipline and forced me to wash. That was just the first psychological violence to which I have been subjected, and the innate shyness which has always been my biggest problem worsened from then on.
We had ended up living in this place when we gained permission to lodge in a piece of land which had been abandoned some time ago by its original owners.
But this permission was granted not by the owner of the land, but by someone - whose name I can’t remember - who had appropriated the land for himself to grow fruit and vegetables.
We got hold of a builder to construct something for us, materials to build with, all the while gripped by perpetual insecurity and fear.
What might happen to us?
We were one of many, many, families who had to resort to illegal means; they call us the landless, invaders, slum-dwellers, squatters, thieves, drug-addicts, the dregs of society, and so on.
Sooner or later, they would evict us or perhaps demolish our shacks with their bulldozers, with no concern whatever as to where we would go.
After that, perhaps, they would compensate us at a rate of a third of what our shacks were worth, or throw us into some charity hostel in the city.
But, thanks to what some would call God’s intervention, others luck, that wasn’t our destiny. Call it what you like, but we left our lives as squatters behind, and turned into another sort of category known as the city’s peripheral population.
It was then that Cidade Tiradentes came into our lives. I don’t have to describe the happiness and joy this news brought, the fulfilment of the life-long dream of a plot to call our own.
We would have our cherished house, we would become, at last, citizens. Oh my ! And I wold have my room in which I could keep my cherished rag dolls, space for the poetry I was beginning to write, a new life.
And more so because it was far away from where we were living now, and where no amenities existed, nor any transport, nor supermarkets, and no hospital either…
I simply can’t put our intense happiness down on paper.
I remember some scenes from that time, such as the day of our move: we were perched on the top of a lorry load together with our beds, the cooker, the table, the old television, the sofa which was also my brother’s bed, and other bits and pieces I can’t remember off-hand. I yelled goodbye at my playmates and friends from the top of the lorry.
Today I can see the scene more clearly. As in a film, as if it hadn’t actually happened to me.
At that time, my father had not yet become drunk on a regular basis, and so was able to share in our happiness.
Those were sweet memories of my childhood, comparable to an evening before a romantic night with a lover.
No, reliving this, I don’t even want to finish this chapter.
As if these memories filled in the fissures and gaps in my existence. As if I had returned once more to the top of that lorry.
In truth, the compulsion to write this book feels more like a form of therapy than anything else, and at the end of each page my soul unfurls, leaving me ever more free.
Believe me, I really am trying to find the most appropriate words to describe how important this story is, but all my efforts elude me, and I can’t find the most appropriate words to carry you with me on the road to Cidade Tiradentes.
If I could transform this chapter into some kind of human form I would, and then I would take him by the hand, to drink a glass of dry white wine, or a beer with me.
Or perhaps I would hold him in a tight embrace, or a long delayed passionate kiss …and I’d say: I love you, my darling chapter, because only with you I feel innocent, and full of pure hope.
I carry myself back to that day and make myself, somehow, relive the joy we felt then.
So let’s go, darling, surge out of these pages, full of so many words, so many tears. Let’s put on our party clothes and walk hand in hand.
I ask your pardon, dear readers, you must be finding these words of mine very strange, thinking that I’m writing them while drunk, that I am not thinking lucidly and that all these digressions are an attempt at some kind of rhetoric or simply exaggeration.
Absolutely not!
All these wild words, these feelings I am exposing, are authentic and true.
Only those who have lived or do still live in the sub-housing I had just escaped can grasp the meaning of what I am trying to say.
Anyone else may be able to imagine, but I don’t think they can actually feel it.
Our new house was almost comical in its contrast: it had a roof, water, no rats visible anywhere, a proper address and postal code, a public identity, a certificate of origin.
It also had a garage and a kitchen. And, as it didn’t have constant damp either, we could put pictures on the walls. It had a new water tank, a clean sink, and an indoor bathroom.
Instead of bringing us mosquitos and disease, the house brought us health, self-esteem, pride, belonging and citizenship.
And a new life …
And while we were getting used to our new house, Miss Tiradentes was running though the red clay of the houses, which were still being constructed even as we moved in.
In the meantime, I was trying to think of how I could tell my mother that something strange was happening in my body.
First the strange protuberances underneath my blouse, and then that blood which appeared without warning on my white underwear.
I think I and Miss Tiradentes even began to menstruate together.
For me, this new phase meant that I couldn’t play with my dolls anymore, nor play hopscotch in the street.
So I concealed the childish self who had played freely with the other children, fearful of other’s opinions, obliging me to behave like a young woman.
But Miss Tiradentes grew up without reins, without norms, and much, much more disobedient that I, never worried of what others said about her.
And look how harshly they did speak of her, without compassion, without any consideration for all those who depended on her. The people who came to the city had lived in little twinned white houses and buildings without walls, where everyone knew each other, and the residents within all had similar, or very nearly the same dreams, and the same problems.
The colourful paper kites which flew in the sky were flown by boys who were all the same, of the same hue, shall we say. Only the different colours of their kites distinguished them, and it was by flying kites that they dreamed, smiled, and were happy.
