Surreal palimpsest in Barbarian Screams (Gritos Bárbaros)

Abstract

In this article, it is important to highlight the existence of palimpsest composition in the poem “Os subterrâneos”, by Moacyr de Almeida (1902-1925), with the poem “Navio negreiro: tragédia no mar”, by Castro Alves (1847-1871). In both there is the same horror of exploitation, the same clamor for social change. The same tone of denunciation, but not only. A series of images compose analogies, words resonate from one to the other poem, revitalizing Hugoan romanticism within the twentieth century. A poet with strong, “monstrous” images, clearly romantically inspired, Moacyr de Almeida, who died at the age of 23, shows traces of what at the time, in Europe, was beginning to be outlined as a surrealist movement. A high-sounding poet, grandiloquent to the taste of recited poetry sessions, working in newspapers since he was 18 years old, Moacyr de Almeida, in the Hugoan lineage of his admired Castro Alves, became involved with social causes and guided his poetry in the same direction. Widely published in Rio de Janeiro newspapers since he was 16, the only book he organized with his poems, Gritos Bárbaros, would only be published after his death, on the initiative of his countless friends, under the care of his brother Pádua de Almeida, also a journalist and poet (in September 1925). Despite being excluded from the canons, he is always mentioned in History of Brazilian Literature, he remained in popular taste and his book, with more and more new “other poems”, that would also have two other publications and a commented anthology (1948, 1960, 2009).