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The Sights and Voices of Dispossession: The Fight for the Land and the Emerging Culture of the MST (The Movement of the Landless Rural Workers of Brazil)

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Emerging culture by media type -> Poems 46 resources (Edited by Else R P Vieira. Translation © Bernard McGuirk.)

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Encampments: The houses of black plastic

Author:

Zé Pinto

Title:

What next?

Alan? Alan, is that you?
It sounds such an important name…
Nay, not I sir!
Of course, it's still you!
But for those that live on the road it has another meaning.
Alan, you're a comrade three years old
Despite your hair of lovely sunshine
Your face aflush with colour
Like a sunflower blossom
You live beneath black plastic,
Denying false commands
Insistent on repeating
Plod on ploughman, plod away,
Trek and perish in the city,
Now, now my brother!
If Paulo were more of a saint,
In Pontal there'd be less complaint
In Paranapanema , you see,
Daring justice would be
Tearing out by the roots
What makes a little child
Grow up so sad.
But in the shacks of life
Alans abound… a majority.
WHAT NEXT?

1 Editor's note Pontal: Pontal do Paranapanema

2 Editor's note: Paranapanema, Pontal do

Date:

November 2002

Resource ID:

WHATNEXT789

Anthology of poems
A first-hand selection, unpublished in Brazil and elsewhere. A militant poetics; the social and political importance of the poet-singer (cantador), the construction of a canon of exclusion; the landless woman; the theme of death as life's horizon; the pedagogic project.
Else R P Vieira

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