This is the first post in our series on Recent Publications. If you would like to introduce, discuss and promote any recent work, contact the editors of the blog at lagukblog@gmail.com
The task is not merely to exist, but to make life more beautiful, and happier
Beatriz Nascimento
In thinking geographically about Latin America, translation is a basic, everyday necessity. Not only for those whose first language is English, but for everyone. Spanish speaking Latin America has to continually translate the Portuguese Americas, the Quechua Americas, the Aymara Americas and the myriad other Americas to itself. And vice versa. The question is not whether to translate, but what position we take up in relation to our necessarily continuous translations, and what this constant process means.
One part of this complex kaleidoscope of linguistic work, also discussed by Matt Richmond on this blog, is that of translating written texts about and from Latin America into languages spoken outside the continent. This process is fraught with political intentions and implications. It raises problems of linguistic primacy and, in particular, the hegemony of English. Yet English remains, for now at least, a privileged language for communication in academic contexts and beyond. It is therefore a fact that writers and thinkers from Latin America whose work has not been translated into English have a more limited potential audience not only in the Anglophone world as such, but in international contexts of intellectual exchange. The world-changing ideas of Latin American theorists, therefore, should be translated into English.
It was with this basic commitment that my collaborators, Christen Smith and Bethânia Gomes, and I began to work on a project to translate, for the first time, the work of Beatriz Nascimento (1942-1995) into English. The first fruits of this work have just been published, in open access form, in Antipode.
Beatriz Nascimento was a militant in the Brazilian Black Movement from the 1960s to the 1990s. She was a poet, a sociologist, a filmmaker and an essayist. She is also a key theoretical inspiration for Christen as an anthropologist writing on Blackness, performance, liberation and violence in Brazil, and for her daughter, Bethânia, in her practice as a ballerina, choreographer and teacher in New York. I first came to her work in my own attempt to write about the historical geographies of Recife in the Northeast of Brazil, thinking through the spatial practices of resistance and liberation of marginalized urban communities.
We hope that the pieces translated in Antipode will help to introduce a wider audience to Beatriz Nascimento’s work. It will raise as many questions as answers. Like that of many Black scholars and militants, Beatriz Nascimento’s work continues to be under-recognized in Brazil, but this is changing. Some of her writing remains unpublished, but much has been made accessible in the superb biography and collection Eu Sou Atlântica [I am Atlantic] by Alex Ratts, and more recently in the impressive collection put together by the União dos Coletivos Pan-Africanistas, Possibilidade nos dias da destrução [Possibility in the Days of Destruction]. As we continue to work through translating her oeuvre, we find not only a unique testimony of the twentieth century Black struggle in Brazil, but a constellation of theoretical insights and political provocations with deep relevance to today’s debates about race, gender, space and political community.
Selecting the two essays to publish first in English was difficult. We were tempted to choose one of the pieces that intervenes directly in debates over Blackness and racial consciousness—such as her remarkable essays ‘For a History of Black People’, or ‘Towards Racial Consciousness’. But we decided instead to give a sense of her achievement through two very different pieces. One that captures her academic approach to quilombos (communities of escaped formerly enslaved people)—the central subject of her research over decades—and one that introduces a different style of writing and thought. This latter, ‘For a (New) Existential and Physical Territory’ is more elusive, but more beautiful. In it, Beatriz Nascimento weaves through her own thought process, reflecting on her return to academic life, her political commitment, her reading of European philosophy, and her understanding of history. Its tone seems to fit our time:
In 1988, three months after the centenary of the Abolition of Slavery in Brazil, I saw that for us to survive this hostile world we would need—like animals need—to seek out more volatile, weightless and mysterious routes through life. If we are to have an influence, our own “violence”—born of resentment, repression, and a fruitless desire for revenge—must not merely reproduce the processes that lead Humanity forward. It would be better, then and now, for us to be serious, grim and nocturnal; to be sinister, to be vampire. Like them, we do not suck out the sap of power through confrontation, but by moving past the obstacles put in our way by the perverse visage and oppressive regime of Capital. […] In this country, my life is not power, but that is not the end of it. A Rock cannot dismantle the structure of power. The task is not merely to exist, but to make life more beautiful, and happier.
We are living through a moment of deep crisis—whether in Brazil or across Europe and the US. It is a time to be serious, grim and nocturnal. But Beatriz Nascimento offers possibility in the days of destruction. Her life and practice can be a source of inspiration, and her writing lays out a path through the night.