Amazon poet Thiago de Mello (1926-2022) - “It is dark, but I sing because the morning will come”
In Latin America, Thiago de Mello is an authority mentioned in the same breath as intellectuals such as Ernesto Cardenal, José Saramago, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez and others, but elsewhere the poet and defender of the Amazon, who died two years ago, is less well known. At the same time, the theme of his widely acclaimed and translated poem, Os Estatutos Do Homem/The Statutes of Man, is very timely, especially in a polarized world where there are intense discussions about what freedom really is.
Brazilian Thiago de Mello is the most famous and celebrated poet of the Amazon. In his literary work, he advocated for people whose freedom was threatened. For this he was imprisoned during the dictatorship in his country and lived for a time in exile. After the dictatorship, he served as Minister of Culture for the Brazilian state of Amazonas.
Thiago de Mello was born in Barreirinha, Amazonas, Brazil, in 1926. His literary career began in 1951 with the publication of his book Silencio e Palavra - Silence and Word. The unique musicality and insight of his verses were widely acclaimed, even by those in power at the time. Under the Kubitschek government (1956-1961), Thiago de Mello worked as a cultural attaché in Bolivia and then, in 1962, in Chile, a country to which he maintained a strong affinity.
The military coup of 1964 marked a turning point in De Mello's life and work - his poetry became a vehicle for revolutionary consciousness. When the Brazilian junta issued the Ato Institucional n.º 1 (Institutional Law No. 1) in April 1964, which banned hundreds of people from any political activity for a period of ten years, De Mello publicly responded to the military. He wrote a parody of the dictatorial decree. This became Os Estatutos Do Homem - The Statutes of Man, fourteen articles and two paragraphs in which De Mello poetically (and sometimes derisively) mocks the Latin American dictatorships of the time.
Os Estatutos Do Homem is a parody, but it can also be read as a manifesto in which the author explains, through a series of propositions, how people can live in harmony with each other. Those who encounter Os Estatutos Do Homem for the first time will see similarities with the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Like these "covenants" - between God and man and between people - Os Estatutos Do Homen is about life, living in peace, living in freedom. But there is more. Os Estatutos Do Homem invites people not to take their freedom for granted, but to do something with it. As the final article says:
The use of the word freedom is hereby prohibited,
and will be struck from every dictionary
and from the deceptive mires of the mouth.
Henceforth
freedom will be something living and transparent
like a fire or a river,
like a grain of wheat,
and its home will always be
within the heart of man.
In March 1965, De Mello was dismissed from his diplomatic post. Upon his return to his country, he devoted his talents to political and literary resistance against the growing repression. In October of that year, the University of Brasilia was closed. Intellectuals were arrested on a large scale. Ato Institucional nº 2 banned all political parties. On November 21, Thiago de Mello and some of his comrades were arrested during a demonstration against Castello Branco, the first president (1964-1967) of the Brazilian military dictatorship, as he opened the Conference of the Organization of American States in Rio de Janeiro.
On February 5, 1966, Ato Institucional nº 3 was issued. It abolished all direct democratic elections of the governors of the Brazilian states.
By the end of the 1970s, the Brazilian dictatorship was in crisis. The government of João Figueiredo (1979-1985) released many political prisoners in August 1979, and exiles were allowed to return. Among them was Thiago de Mello.
Struggle, condemnation and forced exile were among the factors that determined De Mello's commitment to the Amazon region, his birthplace. He saw the destruction of this vast and unique natural area and the suffering of the people living there as a direct consequence of “capitalist plunder and class despotism,” writes Richard Chappell in an article on Thiago de Mello in the May 1994 Socialist Review.
Thiago de Mello's poetry has been translated into many languages, including English, Spanish, French and German. In 1970, Geo Pflaum Publisher in the United States published a selection of his poems under the title What Counts Is Life. De Mello's work has been translated into Spanish by his friend Pablo Neruda and by Mario Benedetti, and into English by Robert Márquez and Trudy Pax.
The above English translation of the final article of Os Estatutos Do Homem is from an edition published by Livraria Valer in Manaus. The source used for the early history of Thiago de Mello is the article Richard Chappell reviews Brazil Festival Poems of protest from the May 1994 Socialist Review.
Thiago de Mello and the Amazon
Thiago de Mello has always been a passionate defender of his native land, both in his essays and poetry and in his social and political activism. He has repeatedly referred to the tropical rainforest of the Amazon region as a key ecological area for all of humanity.
The world's largest natural area is shrinking at an alarming rate, with direct consequences for the world's fragile ecological balance. The indigenous peoples of the Amazon region have a saying: “He who ‘slaughters’ the forest destroys the ‘house of life’.” To protect this ‘house of life’, the Amazon Ecological Research Center (AERC) was founded in 1992 in the middle of the Amazon, on the outskirts of Manaus, the capital of the state of Amazonas.
AERC founder Daisaku Ikeda (1928-2023), a Japanese Buddhist philosopher, peacemaker, educator, author, and poet, believed that humanity could learn from the laws of nature and the wisdom of the Amazon’s original inhabitants, people who lived in harmony with their natural environment. Together with other like-minded activists such as former Soviet leader and founder of Green Cross International (GCI) Mikhail Gorbachev, renowned economist and futurist Hazel Henderson, and internationally acclaimed Brazilian poet and ‘Guardian of the Amazon’ Thiago de Mello, Ikeda sounded the alarm thirty years ago about the critical state of various ecological systems in our world “due to the lack of solidarity of humanity with other living beings that inhabit the earth and a genuine sense of responsibility for future generations.”
In March 2006, I spent a week at Thiago de Mello's house, Porantim do Bom Socorro, on the banks of the Andirá River, not far from Barreirinha, the Amazon city where he was born in 1926. He was enthusiastic about the CD I gave him: Cristina Branco Canta Slauerhoff. Poets met in that house in the Amazon, where a giant tarantula lived between the beams, and I slept in the room of Thiago's son Manduka, who died in 2004, a composer, musician, poet and artist, surrounded by photos of Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Pablo Neruda, Salvador Allende, Ernesto Cardenal, Fidel Castro, and others, the turbulent history and culture of Latin America.
Our lively conversations, which began at breakfast and continued until the night choruses of the surrounding forest silenced us, touched on the immediate meaning of Os Estatutos Do Homem at the time the poet wrote it, but also on the value the work still has, or can have, for Latin America, for the world, for people living today. Other topics of conversation were De Mello's friendships with Pablo Neruda, Pablo Picasso, Brazilian composers Heitor Villa-Lobos and Pixinguinha, Dutch film director Joris Ivens, and the art project Claridão do Verde, initiated by Thiago in Barreirinha, which focused on the relationship between art, culture and nature, all important themes in the poet's work. Claridão do Verde, which also aimed to offer a future to the region's disadvantaged youth, was housed in one of the poet's three houses in Barreirinha, designed by the French-born architect and urban planner Lúcio Costa (1902-1998), known for his revolutionary design of the street plan of the Brazilian capital Brasília and also a mentor of Oscar Niemeyer, the architect of most of the public buildings in the same city.
I remember his large, spider-like hands, the expressive gestures with which he supported his arguments, his kind corrections of my Portuguese. I remember the tribute that poets and musicians paid to him in 2006 at the famous Teatro Amazonas in the Amazon city of Manaus on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. Because that's what they do in Brazil, they honor each other, they sing to each other, freely, without envy.
Thiago de Mello remained active and true to his ideals until the end, continuing to fight for social justice. When I was the field producer for the Manaus episode of the IKON TV program 'Paul Rosenmöller en de strijd van Latijns-Amerika' in 2013, I asked Thiago if he wanted to participate in the program. He refused. He refused to participate in a program that he said was a promotion for the then government of the PT, the Workers' Party of (former) President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010), which he said had “institutionalized corruption”.
Freedom is a challenge
Os Estatutos Do Homem - The Statutes of Man has found its way into books, posters and CDs all over the world. Os Estatutos Do Homem has been performed in theaters as an oratorio and a ballet. It is one of the most translated poems in the world. However, a Dutch translation does not yet exist. August Willemsen, known as the Dutch translator and advocate of Portuguese and Brazilian writers such as Fernando Pessoa, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Machado de Assis and João Guimarães Rosa, and an author himself, would have been an obvious choice, but he is no longer with us. Why I didn't do it myself was once suggested to me by a Dutch composer and lyricist. To work on Os Estatutos Do Homem, Thiago de Mello had already given me a notarized power of attorney signed by him. But let's face it: I'm no August Willemsen, no Pablo Neruda.
“Dare to live,” says a popular song. In the same way, Os Estatutos Do Homem challenges people to live their freedom. Written as a manifesto against tyranny, the fourteen articles together form a roadmap to a world where people live in harmony with each other and enjoy it. In this sense, Os Estatutos Do Homem can be used as a benchmark to measure the degree of freedom or rather the experience of freedom in society.
Freedom is a challenge and, along with climate change, one of the greatest challenges of our time. Thiago de Mello loved kites. In northern Brazil, these toys are called papagaio. The papagaio stands for air, for light, for colors, for a freedom you hold in your hands. No matter how dark reality may seem, in Thiago de Mello's texts there was always hope, light.
As the first lines of one of his best-known songs, derived from the 1965 poem Madrugada Camponesa (Peasant Dawn), go:
Faz escuro, mas eu canto
Porque a manhã vai chegar
It is dark, but I sing
Because the morning will come
Bleeding Amazonia
Bleeding Amazonia is a suite by conductor, composer and arranger Joan Reinders for the Dutch Millennium Jazz Orchestra, based on a selection of poems by Brazilian poet and environmentalist Thiago de Mello. The central theme of the suite is the loss of the Amazon rainforest. The featured artist is the Brazilian singer Lílian Vieira.
It is a work in eight movements, each with its own specific theme: Prologue (Prólogo), Flora and Fauna (Flora e Fauna), Indigenous Peoples (Povos indígenas), Deforestation (Desmatamento), Forest Fires (Incêndios florestais), Climate Change (Mudanca climatica), Pollution (Poluição) and Hope (Esperança). The five vocal movements are set to four poems by Thiago de Mello: O silencio da floresta, O animal da floresta, É uma questão de amor and Os estatutos do homem. Also the poem Chuva by Lilian Vieira.
Millennium Jazz Orchestra – Bleeding Amazonia (ZenneZ Records)
Thiago de Mello
Os Estatutos do Homem
(Ato Institucional Permanente)
A Carlos Heitor Cony
Artigo I
Fica decretado que agora vale a verdade,
que agora vale a vida,
e que de mãos dadas
trabalharemos todos pela vida verdadeira.
Article I*
It is hereby decreed
that now what counts is truth,
that now what counts is life
and that, hands joined,
we will all work for what life really is.
*English translation by Robert Márquez and Trudy Pax