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The Sights and Voices of Dispossession: The Fight for the Land and the Emerging Culture of the MST (The Movement of the Landless Rural Workers of Brazil)

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English (mude para Português)

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Emerging culture by media type -> Poems 46 resources (Edited by Else R P Vieira. Translation © Bernard McGuirk.)

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Culture: Death as life's horizon

Author:

Ana Claúdia

Title:

Mourning combat

My mourning will not be muted
Nor will it be resigned
It will be tall and strong
Rebellious and fine

Nor will it be dark
It will be red and in combat
Born from all that have fallen.
My mourning doesn't stay indoors
For my place is out there in the world

My mourning is 500 years old(1)
And is older yet

When at daybreak
I cast my eye back over history
When I dream of butterflies
And of marguerites.

1 Editor's note: A reference to the 500 years of the Discovery of Brazil by the Portuguese in 1500. The commemorative year brought a great amount of questioning, especially by the dispossessed, not only of the Portuguese 'invasion' and colonization, which represented for them exclusion and dispossession, but also a great number of protests against the commemoration itself.

Date:

November 2002

Resource ID:

MOURINGC459

Anthology of poems
A first-hand selection, unpublished in Brazil and elsewhere. A militant poetics; the social and political importance of the poet-singer (cantador), the construction of a canon of exclusion; the landless woman; the theme of death as life's horizon; the pedagogic project.
Else R P Vieira

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