5 - Confronting Brazil

Summary

When Bishop began to write about the Brazil that had become her home, she did so with the conflicted voices of a self-imposed exile not of and not apart from her subject. The position pressured issues with which her writing had dealt since the beginning of her career. Always feeling, as she told Elizabeth Spires, that she had been a guest in her family's houses (75), she was most concretely here a foreigner, a guest, an observer-writer-translator of a culture not her own. Yet from her first few months, as she wrote repeatedly to friends, among the effusive affection of her Brazilian friends and acquaintances she felt so much at home that she found her writing returning home to Nova Scotia. The concepts of home and not-home were foregrounded for her amid this oddly coincidental social geography. What was difference? what foreignness? what inside and what outside? Was it ever possible to reach “the interior,” for which she sets off in her first Brazilian poem, or was the culture's interiority finally as inscrutable as her mother's or grandmother's would prove to be, during the same years of poetic inquiry? Would what she called her “double point of view” ever offer an intimacy with Brazil, or would the inbreath of her empathy interfere with her knowing the other? Bishop worked these questions in her writing about Brazil, much of which she never finished, perhaps because she never found satisfactory answers.