I gatti di Roma

For Bruno and Camila

They fled the Colosseum, where once
they could nap undisturbed
and where now, every hour
three thousand selfie-absorbed
absent-minded ant-men pour
from its ribs.
 
They deserted the Roman Forum
where columns stand like broken teeth
in the jaw of an empire still chewing.
And they slipped from the piazze and fontane
when coins began to fall like metallic rain
into Neptune’s indifferent beard.
 
O cats of Rome, green-eyed anarchists
striped with the dusk of seven hills
you have no patience for the ant-men
stacked like empty pizza boxes
at the mouth of the ages
gnawing the Urbs Aeterna to a souvenir
an Instagram post.
 
You remember when sand tasted of blood
when across the Via Appia Antica
six thousand slave-rebels flowered in agony
their bodies a forest of warning.
The breeze had carried a different scent then.
 
There, under the Mausoleum of Cecilia Metella
which Byron loved
in grass that grows like whispered Latin
you lick your paws as empires pass.
 
Some sleep near the unadvertised
tomb of Seneca the Younger
where stoic bricks instruct the wind
in the grammar of endurance.
 
Others curl in the forsaken Protestant ground
where a young poet whose name was writ in water
dreams beneath a tilted stone
and another
advocate of non-violence and free love
shipwrecked in the Gulf of La Spezia
rests with salt still singing in his hair.
 
There too lie le ceneri
of a giant
ashes arguing softly
with the roots of cypress.
 
And in the now-peaceful borgate
along the old aqueduct on the via del Mandrione
in the neighborhood of Accattone
where dust once tasted of hunger
and prophecy
near the memory of Ferdinando Persiani
whose rebel flame, perhaps
burns still under the pavement
you stretch across Vespas and lemon trees
like commas of an unfinished manifesto.
 
O cats of Rome, furred question marks
curled against the rhetoric of ruins
you leap the low walls of history
and drink from broken sarcophagi
where rainwater gathers like unwritten poems.
 
And then lay on a slab of travertine
holding the last heat of day.
 
                                  ⁂

Para Bruno e Camila

Eles debandaram do Coliseu, onde antes
podiam tirar uma soneca sossegados
e onde agora, a cada hora
três mil selficentrados homens-formiga irrompem
de suas costelas.
 
Desertaram o Fórum Romano
onde as colunas se erguem como dentes quebrados
na mandíbula de um império que ainda mastiga.
Também sumiram das piazze e fontane
quando as moedas começaram a cair como chuva metálica
na barba indiferente de Netuno.
 
Ó gatos de Roma, anarquistas de olhos verdes
listrados com o entardecer das sete colinas
vocês não têm paciência para os homens-formiga
empilhados como caixas de pizza vazias
na boca dos tempos
roendo a Urbs Aeterna até reduzi-la a uma lembrancinha
uma postagem no Instagram.
 
Vocês se lembram quando a areia sabia a sangue
quando na Via Appia Antica
seis mil escravos rebeldes floresceram em agonia
seus corpos uma floresta de advertência.
A brisa então exalara um aroma diferente.
 
Lá, sob o Mausoléu de Cecília Metella
que Byron tanto amava
na relva que cresce como sussurros em latim
vocês lambem as patas conforme os impérios passam.
 
Alguns dormem perto do túmulo sem alarde
de Sêneca, o Jovem
onde tijolos estoicos ensinam ao vento
a gramática da persistência.
 
Outros se enrolam no esquecido solo protestante
onde um jovem poeta cujo nome foi escrito n’água
sonha sob uma pedra inclinada
e outro
defensor da não-violência e do amor livre
naufragado no Golfo de La Spezia
descansa com o sal ainda cantando em seus cabelos.
 
Lá também repousam le ceneri
de um gigante
cinzas que discutem mansamente
com as raízes dos ciprestes.
 
E nas agora pacíficas borgate
ao longo do antigo aqueduto na via del Mandrione
no bairro de Accattone
onde a poeira outrora tinha gosto de fome
e profecia
perto da memória de Ferdinando Persiani
cuja chama rebelde, talvez
ainda arda sob o pavimento
vocês se espreguiçam por entre Vespas e limoeiros
como vírgulas de um manifesto inacabado.
 
Ó gatos de Roma, interrogações eriçadas
enroscadas contra a retórica das ruínas
vocês saltam os muros baixos da história
e bebem de sarcófagos quebrados
onde a água da chuva se acumula como poemas não escritos.
 
E em seguida se estendem sobre uma laje de travertino
guardando o último calor do dia.
 
[poem originally written in Portuguese; English translation by the author]

Paranoia and Dis-Memory

Two Cinematic Allegories 

Comparing societies through similar or contemporaneous works has long been a particularly fertile critical strategy. For many of us, the classic case remains Antonio Candido’s essay that contrasts North American puritanism with Brazilian malandragem through a crossed reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Manuel Antônio de Almeida.

I recently read a review that set Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent alongside One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s film released shortly beforehand and presented by the reviewer as a kind of American counterpart to the Brazilian work. In the contrast he proposes, the critic ultimately comes down in favor of the Brazilian film, precisely because it is less optimistic: there is no resolution, nothing neatly comes together, whereas the American film, for all its darkness, still closes on a note of hope. This difference, the reviewer suggests, would reflect a society (the Brazilian one) that is more “realistic” – that is, less naïve – than the American.

Starting from our earlier conversation, I would take hold of the thread from the opposite end. The two films do in fact share several important structural features. In both, the “double-agent” protagonists – Armando/Marcelo (Wagner Moura) and “Ghetto” Pat/Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) – are single fathers on the run. Yet the motives for flight already point to a difference of some consequence: the American is a former guerrilla hounded by his political past; the Brazilian, a former public-sector employee locked in a collision with a São Paulo bigwig, in a conflict that is essentially personal. From that point on, the two characters only diverge further.

Bob Ferguson is an internally conflicted figure, and it is precisely this tension that gives him density. At once progressive and conservative, he is torn between disciplining his daughter and encouraging her rebelliousness; between protecting and passing on; between immediate survival and fidelity to a memory of struggle. His paranoia, the product of a concrete historical conjuncture, does not immobilize him. When the net tightens, he activates every resource at his disposal to save his kid, even if this means reawakening bonds, narratives, and gestures drawn from a defeated past.

Armando, by contrast, is a smoother figure, perhaps precisely because he lacks more fully articulated convictions. His linearity is less a strength than a symptom. Confronted with danger, knowing that a price has been put on his head, he responds with a kind of tropical stoicism: he throws himself into Carnival, appears to accept his fate as if violence were an atmospheric condition rather than a historical conflict. More than that, he becomes fixated on uncovering his mother’s identity, even when doing so places his own life at risk. The son who initially motivates his return to Recife quickly recedes into the background.

Memory, a central concern in both films, may be the point at which the comparison acquires its greatest historical thickness. In Anderson’s film (itself adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland) the intergenerational transmission of oppositional values, under conditions of political regression, occupies the center of the frame. This is a memory that is besieged, fragmentary, and paranoid, yet still capable of being transmitted. In The Secret Agent, by contrast, the dominant motif, as we have been unpacking, is not memory but dis-memory, or, more precisely, a systematic indifference: the traces of the past do not settle, do not generate learning, do not lead anywhere.

From a Brechtian standpoint, the characters ultimately matter less than the historical dialectic they embody. In Anderson’s film, they give shape to the paranoia of a nation in which the Other figures permanently as a threat, but also to the virtual possibility of a formation against the grain, grounded in the persistence of a minimal core of resistance and historical memory that traverses generations. Nothing quite analogous seems to exist in Brazil. Armando, an apparently uncontradictory character, is at once indifferent and obstinate; his search for his mother’s identity operates as an allegory of a country intent on knowing “what it is”, when the decisive question should instead be “how it works”. The old question of national identity thus returns as a false solution to a real problem.

In short, even in the United States something still appears capable of taking form, however much amid ruins, surveillance, and paranoia. In Brazil, by contrast, everything ends in samba: interminable carnivals in which death is ever-present. The only thing that truly accumulates is bodies, dissolved into the festive repetition of a present without ballast.

[This is a fragment of a conversation on Mendonça Filho’s film, to appear, in Portuguese, in the upcoming issue of Sinal de Menos.]

From Car Bomb to Drone

A piece I wrote is out now in the February issue of The Brooklyn Rail. 

It traces the lineage from the car bomb to the drone, and explores how everyday technologies slide into tools of warfare, reshaping cities, infrastructure, and civilian life.

Honored to appear alongside Robert B. Pippin and T.J. Clark, and very grateful to Paul Mattick Jr. for his thoughtful comments.

🔗[Read it here].