Abstract
One of the most important voices of Brazilian poetry, Cecília Meireles (1901–1964), born in Rio, discovered India in 1953, at a time when a new world order was beginning to emerge from the decolonization processes in Asia and Africa. Meireles had her Poemas escritos na Índia published in the year in which the Portuguese Goa finally became part of the Indian Union (1961), and after her death, her travel chronicles were compiled in a volume. A good deal of this volume concerned not only Goa, but also other territories from the south to the north of the Indian subcontinent, and was populated with sounds, colours and characters that the author encountered. Whereas the long tradition of Western representations of the East only made the ‘Other’ more cognitively appropriate, this chapter asks, did the Latin American writer, who also came from the periphery of the modern world-system, attempt to break away from the dangerous essentialisms and ideologies?
Translated from the Portuguese by Karen Bennett.
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter picks up on part of the theoretical base of my book (Machado 2018), which uses modern world-system theory of Immanuel Wallerstein to broaden the debate about Orientalism. The first ‘turning point’ occurred with the emergence of capitalism as “économie-monde” (Fernand Braudel); the second, with the French Revolution (1789); and the third, with the worldwide social and student movements of 1968 (Wallerstein 2004: x).
- 2.
She wrote poems and chronicles about her trip across India. The latter were first published by the Brazilian press, some were later reprinted in the book Giroflê, Giroflá (1956). All were finally collected, along with accounts of trips to other destinations, thirty years after her death, in three volumes of Crônicas de Viagem (Travel Chronicles, 1999). In 1961, she had published Poemas escritos na Índia [Poems Written in India]. She was on the following route: Mumbai, Delhi, Sikandara, Agra, Fatehpur Sikri, Jaipur, Patna, Kolkata, Cuttack, Puri, Chennai, Coimbatore, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Golconda, Aurangabad, Ajanta and Goa.
- 3.
I shall concentrate on the author’s prose and on a lecture that she gave in India.
- 4.
“The most readily accepted designation for Orientalism is an academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic institutions. Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient – and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist – either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism. […] The interchange between the academic and the more or less imaginative [by artists, thinkers etc.] meanings of Orientalism is a constant one, and since the late eighteenth century there has been a considerable, quite disciplined – perhaps even regulated – traffic between the two. Here I come to the third meaning of Orientalism, which is something more historically and materially defined than either of the other two. Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said 1978: 2–3).
- 5.
In the Afterword to the 1995 edition of Orientalism, Said wrote: “I will not deny that I was aware, when writing the book, of the subjective truth insinuated by Marx in the little sentence I quoted as one of the book’s epigraphs (‘They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented’), which is that if you feel you have been denied the chance to speak your piece, you will try extremely hard to get that chance. For indeed, the subaltern can speak, as the history of liberation movements in the twentieth century eloquently attests” (2003: 335).
- 6.
There is some exaggeration here, both from her and from the sociologist, as a census done in the 1960s (including of Portuguese living in Goa) indicates that fewer than 4% of the population were Portuguese speakers (see my considerations with respect to the idea formed by the two authors in Machado 2009).
- 7.
Uncomfortable with English, she moves into French, and is immediately translated by a colleague.
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Machado, E.V. (2021). Is It Not So Easy to Go from West to East? A Political View of Cecília Meireles in India. In: Gasquet, A., Majstorovic, G. (eds) Cultural and Literary Dialogues Between Asia and Latin America. Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52571-2_14
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