"Like you" is a work aimed for the younger readers combining poetry and illustration in addressing the issues of sex education, civic and environmental education, written by poet and translator, Ana Luisa Amaral. It was a conversation about books that drifted to other readings.
Recently you published a book of poems for children, "like you", is there any difference in terms of writing?
Ana Luísa Amaral: Difference, difference, I would say no, because if I said that writing for young people is different than writing for adults it almost seems that this is something almost pornographic, writing for adults, no one says that. I think it's always writing, poetry can be good or bad, what I feel is that the writing process is that it's not different. I do not feel anxiety when I write for children, but pleasure. While in the other books of poetry, there is also the pleasure mixed with pain. I do not think whether or not the child will understand, I like to put myself in the skin of a child, then I write.
And the idea for this book?
ALA: Initially this book arose from an order of the theater Campo Alegre they requested a script of a play, which was staged and will return to the stage soon called "love to pieces." They asked me to write it, I said I would do it in verse and they said yes once. The poems speak of differences in terms of sex education, about life. Then they asked me if I could put this text in the book and what I did make minor changes, just put the titles that were already dialogues and added two more poems. Then I was fortunate to have Álvaro Teixeira Lopes, who is a pianist playing the music from Antonio Pinto Vargas and Pedro Lamares, Ruth Pimenta to read it and I also read a little. The book comes with a CD.
This is a country of women poets? We that it is a country of poets, but generally forgets women.
ALA: It's true, we still forget the women. I think they continue to be subalternized, minimize in many areas. The country, Europe, the world is in crisis and this is nothing new. When there is a crisis are not guaranteed the basic equality, between sexes, or classes and or races, I think, the poor, the weak, suffer more. This I mean that domestic violence is raising brutally, if an employer needs to dispense someone a woman goes instead of a man. This proves how the subalternization of women is still a reality. The literature will reflect this reality. When I speak of poetry with my students, I ask: how many women you know that write poetry? They say some names. Then I say, fifty years ago? Sofia Melo Breyner. Just before... Florbela Espanca. And even more? They stop. If I ask about the name of men who write poetry, the list is endless. Portugal is a country of men poets from that point of view, the symbolic power. But I say that there are many women writing poetry, there are not many women poets.
You noted that there are many women writing poems, but there is now a new generation of women poets? We never talk about them too.
ALA: Yes, we talk of young men poets precisely. The curious thing is that I do not think literature discriminates, but the technical expertise, science, philosophy, literary critics, they discriminate. What I mean by this? If you have 10 people to write poetry, men and women, we know that five are male and the other female, one speaks more of men poets over them. There is a new generation of poets, Filipa Leal is one of these cases, and I do not know honestly many more. So now, they published too early, is something that I do not quite understand is when a young writer publishes a book of poetry at 22 or less and already talk about my work. A work has Herberto Helder. It's all very fast. I think this aspect Bauman and the liquid modernity that he speaks is true. People are constantly changing and nothing makes sediments. Doesn't stabilize and they do not wait for things.
How do you choose that tree, that place, that particular landscape that interests you?
GA: Those are elections, which are not just one. I'll see a garden, a landscape. When I did, with Nuno Henrique, the king's path, I know that something will turn up into work, because it slide, because it was difficult, it had amazing trees, because he knew the names of all endemic and introduced plants and I had this kind of introduction along the way. When I take all this stuff to the studio and start looking at it, the photos, what wrote and begin to remind me of what I saw for sure that something will happen, because I want to do work on it. Now, I cannot say exactly how. I know that in the art piece the elm, I enjoyed making sculpture of a tree, but wanted to find a species that was interesting, a story. We've been working almost a year in Lisbon looking for anything around the trees until they found an elm, a species that is endangered in Europe, because they have a disease and this was the last on the Avenue of Discoveries, is the same side of the CCB (Cultural Center of Belem), is part of all that urbanization plan and that was interesting. Had a dimension that I liked, those arms could embrace without being too small or too large. There was more or less a body and I thought I could do something with it. The other tree of Vancouver was a bit the same, I found it interesting that a tree in a country that is known as the most natural, unpolluted, that tree die of stress. It was brought from another shore by locals who had nostalgia of this species. These stories are important to me.
Now, you are visiting natural parks in the U.S. and said that there is a difference that arises in relation to Europe which is the size issue.
GA: We no longer have space because everything is built, and then is transformed by agriculture, we are not well aware of the extent of a wild place. The length of a river that comes directly from the mountain and that nothing touches, we do not have that in Europe. So, I'm having further contact with nature that I had not.
Throughout your artistic career, you had always developed various components, from photography, drawing and sculpture?
GA: It is been happening. First I studied traditional painting, I stopped painting and started doing more photography, sculpture and mixed it with drawing. I always drawn, but not always mixed the final product, it was understood as a process and there is a time when everything comes together and with the maturity of the work. It is growing and it makes sense to mix the two things in my case.
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