Vooys. Jaargang 27

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Sing it again Christina
Paulo de Medeiros

Christina Branco die Slauerhoff zingt? Paulo de Medeiros, hoogleraar Portugese taal en cultuur aan de Universiteit Utrecht, besteedt in dit essay aandacht aan een fundamentele vraag die Branco's Fado-interpretatie van Slauerhoffs verzen oproept: is transmedialisatie een geschikt middel om zijn poëzie opnieuw te beleven of is het enkel een oefening in nostalgie?

On a first hearing, the notion of Cristina Branco singing poems of Slauerhoff in new Fado versions seems strange. The songs are beautiful, the music is pleasing, the poems are decent romantic ballads that manage to keep their attractiveness in translation and seem especially fit for a musical transposition. The idea of having Dutch romantic poetry newly interpreted by a Portuguese singer is certainly intriguing. Not only because of the transnational component, but because even though Portugal and the Low Countries have so many historical links given their past as sea-faring nations, in terms of cultural relations the examples of direct interaction are sparse. Not only is Cristina Branco's rendition of Slauerhoff (O Descobridor, 2002) a popular success, at the same time it can be said to raise a number of important questions that have to do as much with the Fado and its reception as with issues of transmediality, claiming as it does, to bridge audiences and to reinvent traditional forms.

Like for so many of my generation, for me the concept of tradition is irremediably enmeshed with bitter memories of repression and manipulation. Growing up in Portugal in the sixties and early seventies was not so much growing up in a decadent and moldy throwback to a by-gone age but foremost feeling encaged in a society that seemed to have given up on the idea of the future, desperately holding on to an image of itself that had never been true. In a sense, Portugal back then could have been described as a quaint large scale open museum for the delight of other Europeans whose own countries had been irreversibly transformed by industrialization and the aftermath of two world wars. Even before the advent of mass tourism and global low cost operators, Portugal already offered itself as a spectacle of a feudal past where the working classes still knew their place and sunshine made everything appear in Technicolor. In a sense only, of course, because that view of Portugal necessarily hid the other side, the complete depoliticization and dumbing of the nation, the political terror, the catastrophe of the colonial wars. António Lobo Antunes, one of the greatest

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contemporary writers and certainly the most lucid of critics, puts it admirably in one of his earliest novels, South of Nowhere (1979), in which he adequately describes Portugal as a country of ghosts, appropriately ruled by a chief spook: ‘The specter of Salazar, our glorious leader, hovered over the white washbasins, protecting us from the gloomy and suspect idea of socialism’. (9) And it was not just socialism we were protected from as the dictatorship, first headed by Salazar and, after his death in 1968, by Caetano, also shielded its sheep from many other modern dangers such as Coca Cola. In a bitter irony of history, Portugal lived most of the twentieth-century pretending to others and to itself that only that which was in the past was genuine. Once in the forefront of European discovery, and even in the first decade of the century, capable of having great artists and minds fully in tune with Modernism, such as Fernando Pessoa, Portugal mummified its traditions and sold them off as so many tourist trinkets.

The regime desperately needed to present an image of Portugal as a land of great historical feats and contemporary quaintness, both a result of a Portuguese ‘soul’ that expressed itself best in the melancholy and resigned popular Fado. Commenting on folklore performances in general, Kimberly DaCosta Houlton aptly notes that ‘Salazar harnessed popular culture, particularly revivalist folklore, to policies of social control and national image management. Salazar essentially drained Portugal's “archive” of cultural forms by either driving out modernist innovators, or co-opting traditional forms in the service of fascist ideology. Following 1974, many of the cultural forms controlled by Salazar were seen as tainted goods, inextricably linked to fascism and policies of cultural repression’. (Performing Folklore, 2005, 10) It is no wonder that the youth of then, and certainly not just after the revolution of 1974, massively rejected any form of Portuguese popular culture and sought their allegiance elsewhere, especially in the pop, counter, and psychedelic culture scenes. Iggy Pop, Major Tom, Janis Joplin, Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk all offered various avenues for escape and identification that seemed more real than the drab controlled reality served up by the regime. It was not even so much that, as Marx puts it in his 18^th Brumaire, ‘the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living’, as that ‘national’ attributes and symbols in general, and certainly the Fado, had come to be regarded as tainted kitsch.

Students first made me reconsider the Fado as they were interested enough to write about it and consequently I had to learn about its different styles and especially about its history, its possible roots in African slave songs in Brazil and its implementation as the musical expression of Lisbon's proletariat in the nineteenth century, before being co-opted by the dictatorship. In the process, the received, generational, prejudice was checked against the richness of the Fado as musical expression. The fact that several young performers, Madredeus for instance, were intent on reviving and transforming the Fado, making it not only accessible but appealing to new generations and different sensibilities, made it necessary to reevaluate these new performances in a way that allowed for the possibility that what was at stake now might be radically different from the uses the Fado had been put to in the past. Above all, one should not look at new Fado revivals, even instances as unique as that of Cristina Branco singing Slauerhoff, as if they were unique, isolated cases. Rather, it makes more sense to place them alongside other cases in which contemporary performers retrieve older material, establishing both a link to the past and reinventing it in the process. The process itself is not new of course, and one could say that artistic creation, in a sense, always involves such a reprocessing

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of traditional forms. Yet, perhaps in the wake of postmodern recuperations of romantic forms, what one should look for are the varying degrees of irony and complicity that such reinventions can bring about, that is, to what extent the revivals manage to significantly recast the materials they rediscover, or whether they limit themselves to a nostalgic expropriation.

In the case of say, Snoop Dogg's 2004 remix of the famous The Doors title, ‘Riders on the Storm’ (1971) for Electronic Art's video game Need for Speed 2 one is tempted to say that expropriation does not even involve any irony at all and the remix is a gratuitous grafting on the cult image of Jim Morrison as there is no significant remedialization of the original. But even then, of course, there is much more involved, not only because the dark side of Morrison's song, the fact that it is about a killer, does get transposed into the gangsta rap's mode, but also because the medium chosen is not even the traditional cd or music video but a computer game. Likewise, Cristina Branco does not simply translate the verses of Slauerhoff from Dutch into Portuguese but by adapting them and setting them to new Fado music, a comparable, even more complex process of transmedialization is at work. Perhaps even more to the point might be a comparison between what Cristina Branco does and the productions of a group like Nouvelle Vague, with their adaptations of famous hits from the eighties, mostly out of the punk and post-punk scene, with a dose of bossa nova eclecticism to produce immensely appealing, romantic, numbers that not only pay homage to the original tracks but actually re-discover them for a new generation. In Nouvelle Vague's remake of ‘Dance With Me’, the 1983 hit of The Lords of the New Church, there is plenty of irony, especially in their use of the famous dancing scene from Godard's Bande Apart (1964). Allied to the irony there is also a rich and complex intertextual play, that offsets any nostalgic undertone. But at the same time there is also a troubling domestication of the violence of the original. The same effect can be seen in other numbers, with special significance perhaps to their remake of the Clash's 1979 ‘The Guns of Brixton’ that even if it does not completely annul the political force of the original, runs the risk of substituting it for an easy romantic nostalgia. And that is perhaps one of the fundamental questions that Cristina Branco's rediscovery of Slauerhoff poses: to what extent is such a transmedialization an effective means for recuperating the value of Slauerhoff's poetry, or simply an exercise in nostalgia?

One difficulty such a question poses is the fact that Slauerhoff's poetry, in a sense, already was highly nostalgic even if what his verses pine for is not so much the longing for any real homeland but for an imagined, exotic one, both the Portugal he encountered and the one he dreamt of. Long before its use in psychology nostalgia had already been associated with music - the often-cited reference to Rousseau's entry on the Swiss ‘Ranz-des-vaches’ in his Dictionnaire de Musique (1768) - and with a sort of overpowering longing to return to a lost homeland. Of course, Cristina Branco in a sense is not nostalgic at all about Slauerhoff's invention of Portugal but can one say the same about her audiences, either in Portugal or the Netherlands? While there is no doubt that the transmedialization effected succeeds on a number of aesthetic levels, the risk is not only that it allows for an easy forgetting of the dark elements of the Fado's past, but that it continues them in a much more subtle manner, allowing new audiences to slip, unnoticed as it were, into an easy, because so enjoyable, exoticization of both past and present Portugal.