Review by Holly Pretsky
Graywolf Press / October, 2019 / 232 pp
For Brazilian journalist Eliane Brum, author of the new essay collection The Collector of Leftover Souls, language and the body are one, each giving birth to the other in an endless loop. “I am what I write. This is not a rhetorical image. I feel as if every word, written inside my body with blood, fluids, and nerves, were really made of blood, fluids, and nerves,” she writes in the introduction to her book, a compilation of her journalism about the lives of Brazilian people from the remotest recesses of the Amazon to the favelas on the outskirts of the megacities.
Language is also an act of resistance, Brum writes, and the many variations and dialects in Brazilian Portuguese represent rebellions. With this weighty premise in mind, reading the lauded journalist in translation feels like a monumental act. Leftover Souls marks the first time the work is collected in an English language book, and each sentence, traveling first through Brum’s body and then across the chasm between the two languages, demands the utmost attention.
“I would like Eliane’s English-speaking readers to have a...wonder in their minds, as if another language were hovering somewhere beneath the surface,” writes Diane Grosklaus Whitty, who translated the book from Brazilian-Portuguese. The result is a moving, often sobering form of journalism in which language itself is a subject alongside the starkly rendered people of Brum’s stories.
In Brum’s writing and in Grosklaus Whitty’s translation, words serve as boundary breakers (Brum calls language a “sledge-hammer”). With unexpected phrases and strange comparisons, her words press against the limits of what can be conveyed in language. Taken together, they press against the limits of English-speakers’ exposure to life in other parts of the world.
“Whenever I visit an English-speaking country, I notice Brazil doesn’t exist for most of you,” Brum writes. “Or it exists only in the stereotype of Carnival and soccer.” Sentence by sentence, the essays force a vital, pulsing Brazil into existence, loudly and from the perspective of the so-called ordinary person. The 17 essays were all originally published between 1999 and 2016, many in Zero Hora and Época.
Brum takes on the body with its betrayals and its wounds again and again, as though she is attempting to lasso it with her words, to finally capture it. She describes a man who makes a living eating glass as “a twig of skin.” In the devastating essay, “Living Mothers of a Dead Generation,” Brum writes of one mother, “Over the course of this life which she clings to so tightly, Selvina first lost her nails and then fingers and then toes—to burns, other accidents, disease. Stumps are all she has left, and with them she resists.” Of a man who has just learned he will lose his house to a major hydroelectric project, she writes, “His legs locked up and so did his speech. João stilled his whole self to keep from murdering the man who embodied the project that had just killed him.”
What most writers shy away from, she inhabits like a solemn cloak: “I wrote precisely to show there are no ordinary lives, only domesticated eyes.” Her insistent focus on people who are not politicians, not spokespeople, not literate, is the most distinguishing factor of the work. She sees resistance and resilience in one man’s collection of trash, in the shrill singing voice of another, in the insistence of an old woman to always dress as if she is attending a party. She notates their every glance and shrug, the possessions they treasure. She hangs on their every word. When one woman repeats the word, “Understand?” at the end of each sentence, Brum describes “[h]er interrogative…like a knife at the listener’s throat.”
With almost Homeric prose, she describes the lives of midwives living in the Amazon, of a poor man seeking to bury his infant son, newlyweds in the favelas outside São Paulo. The reader has no choice but to set aside the remote, to close the tabs, and to face the grimly beautiful courage it takes for Brum’s subjects simply to complete each new day. Initially, Brum’s focus on these people seems novel or radical, but by the book’s close, one wonders why all journalism is not this way. After being immersed so fully in the stories of so many everyday Brazilians, it seems as though the rest of us have been sorely missing the point.
In her final essay, “The Woman Who Nourished,” Brum explains why she has chosen her subject, a former lunch lady dying of cancer. “Ailce is an ordinary woman. She never thought her life could become a novel. Or even a news story. She didn’t summit Mount Everest or decipher a DNA helix or compose a symphony. Nor did she burn her bra in the streets,” she writes. “Ailce lived.”
Holly Pretsky is a writer and editor in New York City.