I'm handing this one over to Djibril and Fábio to discuss We See a Different Frontier and speculative fiction in Brazil. There's also some of my artwork for the sheer sci-fi eye-fry.
--Ernesto
Djibril
is the general editor of The Future Fire an online magazine of social-political
speculative fiction. In the past TFF
published themed issues on Feminist SF and Queer SF, and two
guest-edited, themed anthologies are currently in development: Outlaw
Bodies,
themed around trans, queer and disability issues with a cyberpunk
flavor, edited by Lori Selk; and We
See a Different Frontier,
which will publish colonialism-themed stories from outside of the
white, anglo, first-world perspective, edited by Fábio
Fernandes.
Here
Djibril asks Fábio
to talk a little about his background and the colonial anthology.
D:
When we advertised for a guest co-editor for a themed issue of The
Future Fire last
summer, you suggested an anthology of new stories on the theme of
colonialism. Could you say a bit about what inspired you with this
theme?
F:
Strangely enough, I wasn’t planning particularly anything about
this theme in advance. It was just something that occurred to me as I
read the call for guest editors. Since I already had some knowledge
of The
Future Fire’s
content and mission statement, I decided the magazine would be the
perfect venue to talk about politics. It then occurred to me that,
being a Brazilian writer trying to publish in the English-speaking
world, I had lots of things to say that an American or a British
writer, for instance, couldn’t—or at least would not say with the
same knowledge. I was thinking particularly of Ian McDonald’s
Brasyl,
a novel I liked but at the same time upset me in a way I couldn’t
explain at first. When I read it a second time, I promptly found out
why: even though McDonald had succeeded in portraying Brazilian
landscapes and a few characters, some particular things regarding
their behavior just weren’t right. For instance, there is a scene
in which a white girl and a black guy are playing capoeira,
a Brazilian martial art that is mostly taught as a dance/performative
art instead of a fighting technique today, and the scene, from the
POV of the black character, turns the dance into a competition fueled
by racism. This would seem be adequately put—in the US or in the
UK, maybe, but things don’t usually happen this way in Brazil.
There is plenty of racism here as well, unfortunately, but things are
more subtle in a variety of ways. This scene doesn’t affect the
novel as a whole, but I couldn’t avoid thinking, Damn,
I should have written this novel.
(Talk about being modest, huh?) The thing is, I still thought a
Brazilian writer should and could have done better. But, as we say
here in soccer, “quem
não faz leva”,
that is, if you won’t score, the other side will. I just happened
to notice, when I saw the TFF ad, that I could be the other side
now—inviting writers from other countries (non-Anglo speaking ones,
in particular) to send their stories for a wider audience (the
English-speaking world) to read. That way, we all could score.
Is
there a strong tradition of speculative fiction in Brazil?
There
is a steady flow of speculative fiction since the 19th Century, but
always a closeted one. For instance, Machado de Assis, one of our
most celebrated classic authors, wrote lots of stories that could be
easily labeled Fantasy or Weird stories today, but scholars won’t
even hear anything about it. This thing is happening ever since—the
only writers that are considered speculative fiction authors de
facto
in Brazil are Murilo Rubião and José J. Veiga, our only “Magical
Realism” representatives (even though I must stress out that
Magical Realism neither originate from Brazil nor is popular among
our writers. We love reading Latin American writers as Garcia
Márquez, for instance, but our literary tradition (unfortunately, in
my opinion) is much more deeply rooted in European literature than in
Latin American tradition (more about that later).
As
for spec fic proper, Brazil has a tradition and an ever growing
number of writers. Since the early 1960s, according to some, we’ve
had three “waves” of writers. The first was composed of writers
published by Gumercindo Rocha Dórea, a famous publisher whose small
press was the first to publish now modern classics like Rubem Fonseca
and Nélida Piñon. (Fonseca writes mostly noir fiction, but he wrote
a few SF short stories in the 60s). The second wave, in the 80s, was
the Gen-Xrs wave, writers who started publishing in fanzines and
anthologies with very small print runs. Only a handful had the chance
of publish a novel or two at that time (one of them, Braulio Tavares,
is one of our most celebrated writers and composers—he published a
few stories in English then, among them “Stuntmind”, which is in
the anthology Cosmos
Latinos).
Chronologically, I belong to the second wave but only published my
first novel in 2009.
The
third wave came circa 2007/8 and is more focused on Fantasy (though
there is a lot of interest in Steampunk and there are now quite a few
LGBT authors, an awesome thing here). There are lots of small presses
now and most of these new writers have no hardships when it comes to
publish their stories or novels.
How
does Brazil differ in this regard from the rest of Latin America, for
example?
To
be completely honest with you, I don’t have the foggiest idea. To
quote a recent tweet from Silvia Moreno-Garcia (I’m guessing she
wrote it with irony, I’m using it seriously): “Brazil is not part
of Latin America. You don't speak Spanish.” And she is absolutely
right! For centuries Brazil was a country apart from the rest of
Latin America. Only in the past decade, thanks to our last
President’s (Lula) administration, we have been approaching Latin
countries more and more. Once I read an article on Latin American SF
written by an Argentine writer. It was a very good, all-encompassing
article... but for one thing: it didn’t mention Brazil. Or rather,
he did mention it—only to say he wouldn’t talk about Brazil
because it was a sui generis country in Latin America, a
Portuguese-speaking one with a very different culture and no
connections with the rest of the continent. Sadly, he was also right.
Brazil
has a very rich cultural tradition but its spec fic writers would
rather write about European folklore (vampires, werewolves, and the
like) instead of exploring this richness. I keep telling that to my
Creative Writing students at the university, “You don’t need to
write about rural lore; you can write about urban legends as well. We
also have them a lot.” My latest story, “The
Unexpected
Geographies
of
Desire”,
published in Kaleidotrope
is
about one of these popular urban legends of the 1970s in Brazil. We
have a plethora of themes that are still begging to be explored. We
have the technology. We can do it. ;)
We’ve
been talking about “science fiction” and “speculative fiction”,
but these are terms in Anglo-American genre thinking and publishing
that are not always reflected in the literatures of other cultures.
Are there Brazilian traditions such as magical realism that cross
genre boundaries and are not easy to translate into Anglo genre
terms?
Brazilian
literature in general still has a strong link with Naturalism and
Realism, with lots of Post-Modernism sprinkled in the middle, but
when it comes to spec fic or science fiction, bot terms are still
pretty much anathema. Fantasy is becoming more and more accepted, as
long as its authors have the sense to keep to the YA section, where
they should belong (according to the critics and most of the big
publishers).
We
definitely don’t do Magical Realism, even though we respect it and
love it, but it’s not our cup of tea. What we do best is humor: two
of the best Brazilian science fiction novels in the past twenty years
are cyberpunk-ish narratives plenty of satire, parody, and acid
humor: Piritas
Siderais,
by Guilherme Kujawski, is a near future dystopia in a Brazil where
everyone has her own personal saint/entity due to implants and such.
Kujawski approaches the reader in a way reminiscent of Cory Doctorow
(but Piritas...
is a 1994 novel) with heavy doses of Brazilian Modernist writer
Oswald de Andrade. And Fausto Fawcett’s Santa
Clara Poltergeist,
a cyberpunk romp in Copacabana with plenty of hi-octane adventure,
sex and weird creatures around an energetic nexus caused by a former
exotic dancer-turned-miracle worker who can’t control her
increasing magnetic powers. Both novels would be really hard to
translate to anyone who doesn’t have a big experience of Brazil,
but they are some of our best fiction and definitely challenge
boundaries.
You
have also worked as a translator, rendering some of the classics of
modern science fiction for a Brazilian readership. How does this
experience differ from writing scifi? Do you ever need to translate
more than just language, for example cultural concepts, memes,
pop-culture references or whatever?
The
translator experience is a whole other realm of sensorial experience
from writing. You don’t need to create from scratch, but re-create,
and that makes all the difference. I love it, nonetheless, and
thinking of ways to translate memes and references have helped me
along the years to hone my linguistic skills and, I think, to make me
become a better writer in English. I’m still far from being 100%
proficient in this language, but I’m making a good, steady
progress, and I am in no hurry.
What
work of speculative fiction would you most like to see translated
into Portuguese?
Speaking
as a translator, I’m very fortunate because, in more than 25 years
working as a translator, I did translate several of the works I
wanted to. Neuromancer,
for example. Clive Barker’s Weaveworld
is
another one that comes to mind. But a novel I really would like to
translate because of its linguistic challenges is David Zindell’s
Neverness.
I love it. And EVERYTHING by Gene Wolfe, for that matter.
Regarding
other languages I sadly can’t translate (I can only do English and
Spanish—and a bit of French, but so far I have only translated
non-fiction pieces), I would really like to see Arab world writers
like Ahmed Khaled Towfik (Egypt, author of Utopia,
recently translated to English) and Achmed Khammas (raised in
Damascus but writes short stories in German, which seems to me a very
interesting experience already). From Africa, Mohammed Dib (Algeria),
who wrote in French a dystopian novel called Qui
se souvient de la mer.
What
Brazilian work would you most like to see translated into English,
and why?
Both
abovementioned works: Piritas
Siderais
and Santa
Clara Poltergeist.
I think the English-speaking readers would benefit a lot from reading
these classics, and they would begin to understand Brazil is much
more than beautiful women, beaches, capoeira, cachaça, and all that
tourist-guide talk.
Finally,
would you like to say anything else about what you’d like to see in
the We See a Different Frontier anthology?
I
would like to see in WE SEE A DIFFERENT FRONTIER a weirder-than-weird
anthology. Not necessarily a weird fiction anthology, mind you—just
a book where readers hopefully will be able to find really new,
different, fresh voices from countries really underrepresented. The
very fact that an American or European reader will read a story from
a country she knows almost nothing about (or even a story that
doesn’t take place in the country of origin of said author, but
with her particular view on things) will likely provide for a
cognitive estrangement experience (see Darko Suvin) very similar to
the reading of a good weird narrative. And weird narratives tend to
be eye-openers, a thing we are much in need of in the world today.
