Bailar, Gullar

When the poet Ferreira Gullar left Brazil, in 1971, he did not know if someday
he would be back. The military dictatorship was on command since the coup in 1964.
Afterward, in 1968, the militaries increased their power with an Institutional Act: the
AI-5 provided legal ways for the military government, so they could rule arbitrarily and
despotically (* no sei se melhor assim: provided the military government with legal
ways, so they could rule arbitrarily and despotically). In this context, political rights
and civil liberties of any citizen could be suspended anytime.
As a participant poet (an unarmed militant), Ferreira Gullar was in the middle of
this risky situation. In 1964, he was president of the Popular Centre of Culture (CPC), a
popular institution ideologically linked to Brazilian Communist Party (PCB). Moreover,
in 1968, he was arrested in his own apartment just a few hours after the military
enactment. Although he was released in a couple of months, military police kept him
close until he decided to leave his own country.
Ferreira Gullar left Brazil by the Uruguayan frontier, and then he went to Paris.
He lived in Moscow for a period and passed through Rome. Back to America Latina, he
lived in Santiago, Lima and, finally, Buenos Aires. There, in 1975, under the preparation
for a new military coup in Argentina, Gullar wrote his most important poem, the Dirty
poem. Following the poets story, and the History itself, this poem is a kind of dancing,
a kind of baile. It deals with the pressures of two different dictatorships and with the
feelings of an exiled man. There is this rhythm marked by the bullets of the present and
by the memories of the past. There is this movement of a body that laughs and cries.
Finally, there is the language that, against but close to death, creates this entire living
and dirty dance.
To write is to create and to sustain movement. Our life until there is life is
the same: an unstoppable movement.
To write, to live: bailar, Gullar, bailar.