Is Drummond really fascist and misogynistic? – 04/26/2023 – Thais Nicoleti

Antonio Prata wrote a somewhat provocative article last Sunday, simulating a literature class in which a teacher tried, in vain, to analyze the famous “Poema de Sete Faces”, by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, with the students. These already got stuck in the opening verse, when the poet mentions a certain “crooked angel” who would have predicted his destiny to “be a gauche in life”.

In Prata’s chronicle, a student questions the use of the image of the “angel”, a clear influence of the Western Christian culture of the oppressive colonizer, while another is concerned with the adjective “crooked”, which seems to him to be prejudiced or “capacitist”. An even more refined person, who knows that “gauche” in French means “left”, is indignant with the association between “being left wing” and “being crooked” – and so on.

Everything indicates that the professor, who comes from the remote 20th century, would not even imagine raising these questions when analyzing the already established text. Apparently, Prata chose Drummond because he was one of the poets most acclaimed by critics and readers, one of the greatest in our canon, which leads us to think that any other writer of our tradition who was subjected to the scrutiny of that classroom would also leave scorched, if not destroyed.

After all, is the chronicler on the side of the teacher or on the side of the students? That was the subliminal question that divided the readers willing to comment on the text. Some have said that we will never know the answer and that this is one of the highlights of Prata’s text, which seems to be excessively benevolent.

Considering the paths of analysis of the group of students valid, Drummond is stripped of all his glamor and, most importantly, his importance in Brazilian culture, reduced to a pastiche of European culture. It is difficult not to find ridiculous the content of an observation such as “crooked” being an alleged offense to the capacity of the physically handicapped, given that, in the context, the adjective characterizes an angel, not a person, and – more importantly – gives that angel a trait of sympathy, a less perfect and more fallible character, the same idea, by the way, present in the adjective “gauche”, which, in the context, does not mean “to be of the left”, but to be clumsy, shy, ill-adapted.

Even so, it is still interesting to reflect on what we worship or what we consider valuable in the context of culture. Drummond, for example, refused to take a seat in the Brazilian Academy of Letters, seen as a symbol of conservatism. The bard from Itabira was not seduced by the uniform woven with gold threads, which many people of literary importance not even remotely similar to his own have worn. Drummond didn’t like the spotlight, and that – well into the 20th century – was a well-regarded trait in a writer or intellectual.

If today, completely surrendered to the publicity mode of social networks, we are all, even the intellectuals, desperate in search of a few seconds of glory, what to say about achieving the “immortality” granted to the members of the select group of ABL? In the 21st century, no one refuses the spotlight. Fardão is pop!

In any case, to take the concerns of the students in the hypothetical literature class to the last consequences, we would have to erase our entire culture, including our language, so often, in recent times, accused of being a repository of prejudices. Obviously, this is impossible, unless you want to adopt another language and another culture.

Furthermore, without a doubt, important struggles must be fought for society to advance, but condemning our culture to exile, taking words literally and making moralistic interpretations of art, seems more like crooked reasoning.

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