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Issue 10. The Visualization of the Subaltern in World Music. On Musical Contestation Strategies (Part 1)

Sem Terra/ Desterrados : The Music of Dissent of the MST in Dialogue with the Tango Culture

Author: Else R.P. Vieira
Published: March 2005

Abstract (E): This paper examines the song 'Por honra e por amor'/ 'For honour and for love', by the MST, as the musical and choreographic expression of the intersecting class-gender struggle of a nondominant social group within hegemonic structures. Those expropriated from the land in Brazil enter dialogue with the tango, the musical expression which codifies the values and concepts of the emerging subculture of the desterrados in 19th century Argentina. Through a muse of destitution, Ana sem terra , it also establishes dialogue with Ana Terra, an emblem of brave womanhood in the conquest of land in southern Brazil, at the same time un-naming this predecessor as a ruling class figure of land ownership. A third relationship is established with the equally emblematic feminist dancer of Derrida´s  Choreographies (1982).

Abstract (F): Cet article analyse la chanson 'Por honra e por amor'/('Par honneur et amour') du groupe MST comme l'expression musicale et chorégraphique d'une lutte a la fois sociale et sexuelle d'un groupe non-dominant a l'intérieur des structures hégémoniques. Les paysans sans terre du Brésil nouent un idalogue avec le tango, le genre qui a codifie la subculture émergente des exclus en Argentine au 19e siècle. A travers l'évocation d'une muse des pauvres, Anne sans terre, la chanson établit aussi un lien avec un symbole du courage féminin dans les luttes pour la terre au Brésil (en meme temps que s'efface le renvoi au nom d'une grande propriétaire du passe). En troisième lieu, l'analyse établit un rapport avec la figure également emblématique de la danseuse féministe d'un livre de Derrida, Choréographies (1982).

keywords: Ana sem terra, MST, Derrida, Choreographies, tango

Ana sem-terra - landless Ana - introduces her ragged presence onto the stage of history, through a symbolic expression, the tango-canción [tango-song] 'Por honra e por amor'['For honour and for love']. Her brief appearance as the muse of a history of dispossession was as intense and contingent as the life of the landless people in encampments. The song was first presented in the landmark First National Agrarian Reform Festival (February 1999), sponsored by the MST (Movement of the Landless Rural Workers of Brazil) in Palmeira das Missões, a town in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, close to the border with northern Argentina. T he collective space of the Festival enabled the landless people greater public recognition as an aggregation of deprived individuals, further authorizing and dignifying a culture seeking to transform, 'an identity negatively defined by a lack - sem-terra [landless] - into an affirmative collective expressions of a 'we' (Gohn 2000: 137). This festival also gave rise to the second CD of the Movement, Canções que Abraçam Sonhos [ Songs Embracing Dreams ] (launched in 1999), which consolidates the emblems, symbols and icons of this militant culture, already present in the previous one, Arte em Movimento [ Art in Movement ] , conceived during the momentous three-month Landless National March to Brasília, the centre of established power, in 1997. But while reaffirming the Movement's political platform and oppositional identity, the second CD also complements the first one with the expression of emotions and feelings, through such as 'Por honra e por amor', which lays bare the individuals' sufferings within this class conflict. This melodramatic narrative, the tango-canción, is a variant of the tango which foregrounds themes of abandonment, dissolution, exile and nostalgia. At stake is also the Schopenhauerian view of music as a relief for suffering (Storr, 1992:151). In the constructed political spaces of festivals and marches, the landless people socialize and politicize those sufferings which bespeak ever-deepening wounds in the very body of Brazilian history.

Any social organization needs a symbolic basis that will provide the group with a sense of unity (Žižek 1999:109). But why would the MST, the major contemporary Brazilian social movement, whose actions are mainly in the rural area, choose the tango - a late 19 th century musical and choreographic development of suburban Buenos Aires, also geographically distant even from southern Brazil - to express their deepest conflicts and sentiments? What ideas meet in the lyrics of the tango? What values dance themselves out in its choreography? What social situation is inscribed in the tango? What are the associations of the tango in today's popular imaginary? If music and dance have the visceral power of hearing of familiarity, how can the sem-terra 's choice of the Argentine tango and its variant for its expression be accounted for?

In pursuit of an answer, this paper looks at music and choreography as narratives of nondominant social groups within hegemonic patriarchal structures. Echoing Homi Bhabha (1994), it claims that, through the performative, the class-gender tensions of national pedagogies oblivious to the country's social divide will surface. In further consonance with the trend in contemporary scholarship to emphasize less origin and internal organization of movements and to focus on discourse and symbolic resources (Feldman, 2002:32), it analyses the class-gender intersection in 'Por honra e por amor' through the dialogue established by the song with two major Latin American traditions. One of the intertexts relates to Ana Terra, an emblem of indomitable womanhood in Brazilian literary tradition and imaginary (Assis Brasil 2001: 217), summed up in the song as ' the popular allusion contained in Ana sem-terra.' Another is the Hispanic American tango tradition. It will be argued that the MST absorbs and transforms the ethos of the tango, a musical expression which codifies the values and concepts of an emerging subculture of desterrados (those displaced from the native land, associated with the origins of the tango in Argentina), to express the class struggle of the sem-terra (those in Brazil expropriated from the land understood in the Marxist sense of means of production). The tango is related to the emergence of a new sense of human organization. From a cultural standpoint, a variety of ideas meet in the tango: displacement, land-deprivation, eroticism, passion; machismo, identity and gender. Ana sem-terra, however, will be seen to disrupt the ruling class figure of land-ownership as a power symbol and to side-step the male-dominated logic of the tango culture. She opts for the revolutionary march. A third connection will thus be established with the equally emblematic figure of the feminist dancer Emma Goldman in Derrida's Choreographies (1982).

Listen to the dense tunes of the tango-canción in 'Por honra e por amor', listen to the Spanish ring in the southern sem-terra's Portuguese.

http://www.landless-voices.org/vieira

Today's Ana, a dispossessed woman, will be seen to echo in difference her predecessor Ana Terra, the brave woman in the conquest of land and formation of the latifundium [1] in the south of Brazil in the late 18 th century.

A prelude: upper-case Ana Terra

Ana sem-terra names and at the same time un-names Ana Terra and, in so doing, takes a certain revenge on her predecessor. Sem, an absence, insinuates an opposition. Ana sem-terra, certainly not upper-case, is certainly not upper-class. Inhabited though she may be by certain traces of her predecessor (b oth express a new kind of womanhood in their respective contexts; both are brave women fighting, alone, for the land; both defy patriarchal authority) , Ana sem-terra 's name introduces another individual in the historically shifting struggle for the land in Brazil.

This intertext is taken from O Continente [ The Continent ], the first volume of the trilogy O tempo e o Vent [ /Time and the Wind ] , the epic narrative of nation-building and of the formation of latifundia in the south of Brazil . Ana Terra is part of the dominant class; she is the daughter of pioneers from São Paulo, the Terras, one of the foundational families and one of the formative trunks of the patriarchal rural culture of the frontier province of Rio Grande do Sul. The Treaty of Tordesilhas did not clearly mark out the details of the borderlines between Brazil and the neighbouring Hispanic countries; as the Iberian crowns left it to chance or the greed of their respective subjects to define the frontiers on the basis of uti possedetis, i.e. the land belongs to whoever arrives there first (Assis Brasil, 2001:210), strong tensions existed between those of Portuguese and Spanish origins. No less serious were the clashes with the Indians of Sete Povos and Missões in a region where the power of the strongest prevailed . But Ana Terra goes against the authoritarianism and male-hegemonic structures of this pioneer culture and surrenders to the love of a stranger, the dispossessed Indian-Spanish mestizo Pedro Missioneiro, whose Indian mother had died in childbirth, who had been brought up by Catholic priests in the Missions, and to whom the Terra family gives shelter when he arrives wounded. An orb of intimacy is created between two lonely young people naturally ready for love. Pedro, a cultural hybrid, indeed fascinates Ana. When Pedro plays the flute, hee aesthetic emotion of hearing a musical instrument for the first time mixes with an erotic response (Gonzaga 2004) which intensifies at the sight of the ease with which he masters the larger-than-life Pampas. He reads Latin, but also speaks the native Guarani and tells stories in a mixture of Spanish and Portuguese (Assis Brasil 2001:234). The good but inflexible patriarch Maneco Terra is unable to understand the inevitability of love in the context or even to recognize the power of attraction of otherness-in-sameness, let alone the beauty of nascent love. He adheres to the clan's code of honour and orders his sons Horácio and Antônio to kill Pedro Missioneiro, 'desonrador da família' (Assis Brasil 2001: 234), one who broke the laws of hospitality by consumating physical love with the unmarried virgin. Her son Pedro Terra is born already an orphan in 1789. A few years later, the castelhano [Castillian] bandits arrive, rape Ana Terra and kill her fathers and brothers. Ana Terra buries them all and, in order to escape further violence, runs away with her son to an emerging far away village, Santa Fé. Priests, natives, Spanish, Portuguese, meztizos, revolutionary men, resilient women: it is around these legendary and emblematic figures conquering the open Pampas, preserving the land according to the law of the strongest and giving rise to the ever growing and indivisible latifundium that the official history of Rio Grande do Sul is today taught.

Santa Fé in fact becomes the stage of several generations descending from Ana Terra and 'her obstinate management of her own destiny' ( Pesavento's expression, quoted in Assis Brasil 2001: 234) . Brave Ana inaugurates constancy in this territory where everything is shifting and provisional and where the minuano wind, blowing relentlessly, is a symbol of instability and death (Gonzaga 2004). In turn, the symbol of the clan she inaugurates is the cambará tree, the cedar, whose deep-rootedness contrasts with the instability of the Pampas. This woman of elemental passions, using a pair of shears, also becomes the midwife in the village of Santa Fé, through her profession 'paying a constant tribute to life in the barren Pampas'; she further introduces 'fecundity and feminine constancy on a forever barbarian and provisional soil' (Assis Brasil 2001: 234). She in fact inaugurates a lineage of women who take over the bringing up of children and firm management of the sobrados (akin to manor-houses) while their husbands are away in batlle. But Ana Terra is also a new Penelope who, albeit working at the spinning wheel, rejects its symbolism of servile womanhood which she associates with her mother.

CLIP ANA TERRA [2]
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Ana Terra weaves, instead, the continuity of a pattern established in colonial times by the hereditary capitanias, those 15 horizontal strips into which continental Brazil was divided between 1534 and 1536, and donated by the King to Portuguese gentlemen who had absolute rights over the land. The world in perpetual flux in which Ana Terra lives prompts her quote from Ecclesiastes, 'One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever' 1:4). This is originally a response to the sapiential question, 'What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?' Crucially, the Authorized Version, for example, uses 'earth' (fecundity) where one would expect 'land' (the estate and mode of production). The two notions automatically coalesce in all versions of the Bible in Ana Terra's Portuguese, a language that uses terra both for 'land' and for 'earth'. Levinas is resonant here: 'fecundity is a relation to the future that gives continuity to history' (1969:269). To Ana sem-terra's splittering of the continuum of history we now turn.

Lower-case Ana sem-terra

The shift from Ana Terra to Ana sem-terra is indeed a shift from upper-case Das Kapital to lower-case sem capital, a significant change in meaning and ethos that demands that criticism touches on material institutions. Ana Terra is not only terrateniente (landowner) ; she is anchored in the formation of the latifundium. But Ana sem-terra, an expropriated rural worker, is adrift in the struggle for land in the Marxist sense of mode of production, subsistence and housing. Whereas Ana Terra represents adherence to what are now arguably called land rights in Brazil - two-thirds of arable property owned by less than 3% of the population and agribusiness), Ana sem-terra is symptomatic of deep-rooted land-wrongs in the country (the indivisible latifundium, a historical legacy aggravated through interaction with multinational agribusiness, a context that has laid off millions of rural peasants and brought very few social benefits in counterbalance).

Ana sem-terra affirms her predecessor's bravery and the lonely struggle for the land. But she debunks essentialist notions of place for women, challenges man's firstness and invents a new gender idiom, inspired by the consciousness that emerges from her participation in the political struggle for the land. The landless people's experience of occupying lands and demanding their rights to citizenship creates an identity for them at the same time that it transforms their own reality. Bernardo M. Fernandes has thus explained the complex socio-spatial and political process of land occupation developed by the MST as a form of resistance of the peasantry, built upon the experiences of popular struggle against the hegemonic power of capital:

The model of agricultural development implemented in Brazil since the 1960s has intensified the concentration of land-tenure, with the expropriation and the expulsion of millions of families from the country. Thus, over the last two decades, the occupation of latifundia has become the main action of landless families and an important form of access to land, in that it pressurizes the government in the disappropriation of latifundia and in rendering effective a policy of rural settlements. As a form of intervention by workers in the political and economic process of expropriation, occupations force an agrarian reform that the government has elaborated but failed to implement with the Land Statute (1964) and the National Agrarian Reform Plan (1986). Occupation is thus part of a movement of resistance and of defense of the workers' interests, aiming at the production and reproduction of family labour, co-operation, the creation of agricultural policies for the development of peasant agriculture and the generation of public policies destined for the basic rights of citizenship (Fernandes 1993).

Ana sem-terra is one of those landless women who rebuild their lives as political subjects in this historical process. Sônia F. Schwendler has established the more specific connection between the struggle for land and the reconstruction of gender roles, when men and women jointly take part in a larger process of social, economic, political, and cultural changes. In this experience of land-struggle, she claims, women broaden their participation in society, occupying spaces historically exclusive to men public life, learning to argue, to express ideas and to take militant action; the struggle also offers them land possession which was before restricted to men, since the woman was not recognized as a rural worker. Women thus become a fundamental historical agent, whether by confronting exclusion, by struggling for spaces, or by embracing relations formed through her active presence in the struggle (Schwendler 2003).

A major clash exists between the social interpretation of the Brazilian Constitution by the landless people and the legal one, intent on preserving the use of the land by those who actually own it. Raízes da Terra [Roots of the Land ] , a film produced by the MST, presents their point of view that, if non-productive latifundia do not fulfill the social function of the land prescribed by law, occupation is a way of pressurizing the government to carry out agrarian reform. [3] The internationally renowned photographer Sebastião Salgado, interviewed in the film, stresses the importance of the Movement in terms of its participants taking on responsibilities, once the government, thus far, has not undertaken to rescue the citizenship of the landless. A scene of confrontation between the police defending property as a legal right and the landless people occupying land as what they perceive to be a social right gives a measure of the inequality of power relations and of the class divide. http://www.landless-voices.org/vieira
/archive-05.phtml?rd=THEBEGIN719&ng=e&sc=2&th=29&se=2

Because the encampment is a foremost space of landless resistance, the repressive forces intervene and a vicious cycle of evictions, new occupations, new evictions may last as long as ten years until the government disappropriates the nonproductive latifundia for the creation of rural settlements. Another scene of eviction of 2500 landless families bears evidence to the magnitude of the conflict and the authoritarianism of the established forces which dogmatically impose the letter of the law without considering the immense social problem inscribed in the conflict.

http://www.landless-voices.org/vieira/
archive-05.phtml?rd=EVICTION477&ng=e&sc=2&th=29&se=2

Vulnerability, constant threats and extreme discomfort mark out life in the encampments. Another poignant photo focuses on children evicted during school hours, children whose basic needs in life, such as education, are unheeded for by the State. As a political gesture, they go on having classes within the most precarious conditions, namely voluntary teachers lecturing on the motorway.

http://www.landless-voices.org/vieira/
archive-05.phtml?rd=CHILDREN343&ng=e&sc=2&th=29&cd=&se=2

The aporia of the legal versus the social carries into the dramatic personal relationship between Ana sem-terra and the watchman of the encampment. He is the external intrusion who introduces into the space of resistance, in Lacanian terms, the law of the father, the power that represses and prohibits; in Foucauldian parlance, his role is that of vigilance and punishment, of which the woman he loves is potentially a victim, and which may intensify the social oppression on her dispossessed class. T he decision she has to face is accepting the love of the repressor and become, through connivance, an oppressor and a traitor herself to her class, or to reject his love and continue to fight for the land rights of a group within a web of land wrongs in Brazil. She eventually opts out of the lover-oppressor bind.

'For honour and for love' in dialogue with the tango culture

The musical and poetic expression of the MST has remarkably woven symbolic networks of solidarity and mutual empowerment of deprived individuals within Brazil, thus incorporating into their '-less' identity other socially excluded such as 'roofless', 'homeless', 'shirtless' groups. [4] Theirs is a non-essentialized notion of identity and a view of the political subject as both collective and multiple. Further broadening their political horizons, the rhythms and themes in 'Por honra e por amor' now solicit class identification and a shared counter-hegemonic expression outside Brazil: the tango culture.

The tango, perceived by many today outside Latin America as an erotic art form, is deeply linked, in its brothel origins in the late 19 th century, to socially and economically excluded groups who agglomerated in the conventillos (sort of slums) in suburban Buenos Aires. These were the desterrados (European immigrants and the impoverished gauchos from the interior). In this nearly unisexual culture, lonely men who spent time drinking, gambling and looking for company, found a way out in prostitution. Hence the association of the tango with the lower classes; only after the tango became the dance of fashion in Paris in the 1930s and then in New York did it re-enter Argentina as gentrified dance integrated into the upper class (Savigliano, 1994: 73-134). The men practiced the steps of the tango among themselves so that they could exercise their dancing skills and capacity for seduction (Savigliano, 1995: 63) and later attract admiration. Men far outnumbered women, so the tango enacts the duelo [duel], a dispute of the priority to enter the prostitute's room, performed by men dancing alone, when their legs move quickly across the stage and their kicks are very fast. A fter the duel, the woman decides which man she will tango with. There follows the prologue to the sexual act: a close embrace, cheek to cheek, chests together, long conversations of passion, deep looks and caresses culminating with the interlocking legs invading each other's space : the entre-piernas. The final move is that of the rechazo: after love-making, the man who has fought for the woman and seduced her, abandons her, because she has lowered herself as a prostitute.

CLIP OF THE TANGO [5]
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' Tango: pensamiento triste que se baila' [ The tango: sad thoughts one dances away']. The Argentine Alfredo Moffat, bridging psychoanalysis and Marxism, has given theoretical expression to such popular view. [6] The fatalistic tango, is for him a form of libidinal elaboration by the desterrados of a traumatic and complex emotional situation involving loss of the affective link and of place of youth, betrayal, social and economic exploitation , degradation and the never-fulfilled project of returning. The immigrants had come with the promise of the Argentine government of 'hands for the soil' but this selfsame oligarchy prevented their access to the land; they soon became cheap and abundant labour (over two million immigrants, half the population of Argentina). This class of dispossessed people lived under instability and substandard conditions of life in very small places which oppressed them even more; prostitution thus emerges as a libidinal way out as revealed by the elements of bodily performance in its choreography, namely, the duel and the sexual act in a triangular situation also emblematic of betrayal (Moffat, 1975: 122-29). Sexuality devoid of affection in this nearly unisexual culture of the early tango is further complicated by another sense of betrayal, this time relative to the original tie (1975: 125). Moffat also refers to the obscene words of those men waiting for their turn to enter the prostitute's room which emerge in the lyrics of the early tangos, but he fails to address their impact on the prostitute inside the room. While he centres his analyses on the desterrado 's diffcult psychological elaboration of loss and betrayal , but leaving out the plight of the prostitute, his scholarship implicitly reaffirms the phallogocentric logic of the tango.

Donald S. Castro (1991) foregrounds class and the collective in his analyses of the tango as the musical vehicle and the dance of the socially unacceptable urban poor. He opts for the term orilla (fringe) rather than suburbio for the place where the immigrant and the gaucho met and created a new system; orilla, he claims, describes not only a geographic place; it also conveys a strong sense of marginalization and the socio-economic conditions of those disenfranchised and disinherited by the elite's policies of modernization through capital importation and massive immigration of primarily males. For him, the tango is more than a lyric or a dance, but a symbol of class conflict and a weapon in a duel no longer seen only as the dispute for love in the brothel but in its collective dimension, the urban duelo (1991:120). He reports that in the centennial year of Argentine Independence in 1910, the sound of the tango echoed through the streets of Buenos Aires as a defiant gesture of the crowds despite the European cultural verneer of the city and the apparent triumph of the elite's project of modernization (1991:90-92). But the gender dimension remains outside his focus.

Iris Zavala, in tune with Castro, also hears in the early tangos the first voiced expressions of social groups marginalized by the development of the capitalist system of production and their at times violent sense of loss. But she complements his analysis in terms of class and goes beyond Moffat's Marxist-psychoanalitical instance by elaborating on the libidinal economy of the tango as class defiance. The first tangos, she claims, gave expression to the material life of the immigrant, to the life of the impoverished gaucho and to the tragic life of the prostitute (1992:160); she hears in them the orchestration of social voices externalizing an impulse towards class contempt. L ibidinal rebellion is the term she chooses for the hyperbolic gestures and poses and for the lascivious movements and transgressive language whose contextual overtones symbolically overthrew oppressive social structures (1992:159, 169). Crucially, as she elaborates on gendered roles beyond the phallogocentric theme of male virility and power (the man who possesses superior physical attributes and capital), she brings out the counterpart of the woman in the tango culture as a commodity to a predominantly male population, both as sexual object and as economic possession. Her analysis thus stands out for catering for a feminine space within this male-dominated structure that also framed most existing studies of the tango (1992:160-61).

Latin Americans who dance to the tango today may not be aware that it sings out and eroticizes a complex social conflict. They may not be aware that it depicts the social history of the economically exploited desterrados in Argentina, who produced discourses to challenge the dominating symbolic orders and elaborated through music and dance t he loss of affective links. But the selfsame Latin Americans who, for decades, have listened to the deep, emotional voice of Carlos Gardel, the idolized singer who strongly incorporated the tango-canción - a slower combination of voice and tango - into Argentine popular culture, will remember the landmark Mi noche triste ['My sad night'] which he popularized (Collier, 1988:60-64). This expression of abandonment and the sadness of sex without love, associated with the tango-canción, depicts the lover, with ' el alma herida' [the wounded soul], drinking and sharing his woes with the bedroom light. Deeply rooted in the Latin American imaginary is that the music and the lyrics of the tango are expressions of intense melancholic feelings, that its choreography foregrounds conflictual relations and measurements of power, and that it sexualizes tensions. [7] To the dramatic ending of the tango-canción I shall return.

The role of a revolutionary woman within a hegemonic model of masculinity is the very stuff of 'Por honra e por amor' and no less so of Derrida's Choreographies (1982). The recognition of the complicity of Western metaphysics with a notion of male firstness, which Derrida has called pallogocentrism, should, in his view, permit the invention of an older inscription, a displacement of bodies and places (1982: 445). In the written interview Choreographies, he is prompted to discuss Emma Goldman, a feminist from the late 19 th century, in relation to the question of the place of the woman. It is through the filter of this revolutionary woman debunking essentialist notions of places and of the feminine and moving-away from a certain history that I shall now be looking at Ana sem-terra.

Side-stepping: from the dancing Eros to the body politic

'If you can't support my revolutionary struggle, I won't be part of your life', thus says the dancer Emma Goldman of the feminist movement in the late nineteenth century (Derrida 1991: 441). Emma maintained some reserve in the face of the militant feminist action, because of a mismatch of the steps between dancing and revolutions; yet, one important aspect of Choreographies is the text's association between 'dance' and the 'chance' of creating a space anew (Morgan, 2004). Derrida's main interest, as Morgan still points out, is allowing for the differing rhythms of bodies moving in time, to listen to rhythms unknown and to the chance of desire; his concerns are displacing the male/female binary and feminist thoughts opening to the rhythms of futurity; 'what he is making a move towards is a thinking that dances, mobilises its way out of double-binds by being open to the "to - come"' (Morgan 2004). Derrida himself says with reference to dance as disrupting essentialist notions of the place of woman:

This step only constitutes a step on the condition that it challenge a certain idea of the locus [ lieu ] and the place [ place ] (the entire history of the West and its metaphysics) and that it dance otherwise. This is very rare, if it is not impossible, and presents itself only in the form of the most unforeseeable and most innocent of chances. The most innocent of dances would thwart the assignation à résidence, escape those residences under surveillance; the dance changes place and above all changes places (Derrida 1991:443).

The mismatch of the steps between performances and revolutions foregrounded with reference to Emma finds no parallel in Ana sem-terra. Having become a feminist through the need to survive in a hostile environment, she expresses a new womanhood as a key element for the new history she hopes to inaugurate. She will have absorbed Ana Terra's defiance as a woman as she constitutes herself as a female subject in a male-dominated system. B ut she will not subscribe to her essentialized notion of the feminine associated with stable, fixed images of locus, nor her 'pedagogy of the nation' (Bhabha) related to the preservation of the indivisible nonproductive latifundium. Captain Rodrigo Cambará, a descendant of Ana Terra, is perhaps her alter ego: one who, as Assis Brasil points out, has the instinct to be free, who responds both to the call of the telluric and to the challenges of the world at large, one who contests, one who feels impelled towards a revolutionary destiny and adheres to the claims of history (2001: 226-27).

Ana sem-terra also side-steps the male-dominated logic of the tango through her refusal of the love of a man who represses her class struggle and subjugates her in her lower social position. The high intransigence of power sparks off her desire for counter-hegemonic moves. She leaves behind the residence under the lover's surveillance. U nlike Emma, she does not maintain reserve in the face of militant action; she cannot reconcile the love of a surrogate class oppressor/ repressor and fight for the land, so she opts for revolutionary struggle. Ana sem- terra envisages a different syncopation for history. Hers is a body politic, moving in space, opening the rhythms of futurity. In line with the tradition set up by one of the MST mentors, Che Guevara, a tradition whose formative moments, in his youth, the world has recently seen in the blockbuster The Motorcycle Diaries, she opts for the march, often described as a motor moving a population away from a hostile history towards a project of reconstruction. The movement of her feet convey a libertarian demand for alternatives to landlessness and other forms of exclusion. By marching away, she reaffirms her class consciousness, authorizes herself as a woman agent in history and creates a new space for her womanhood. Her destiny is Eldorado de Carajás, the site of the massacre of 19 landless people on April 17th 1996 and today an emblem of resistance along with other such historical communities as Palmares and Canudos which are part of her revolutionary pedagogogy. The date of the massacre is now the International Day of Peasant Struggle.

Her revolutionary defiance of class-gender oppression will not harmonize with her body's desires. She side-steps, listens to the voice of history. There is no choreography of love, no symbolization of the sexual intercourse by interlocking legs. She does not lower herself and, in a gender-inverted rechazo, is the one who abandons the watchman of stifling privileges . From 'the sensuality of the dancing Eros and the beauty of music' (Wisnick 2000:123), associated with the tango, this landless woman will have elicited a political voice which resonates in the no less wobbling social structures of Brazil. The watchman, who became the perpetrator of a history of patriarchal oppression relative to the dispossessed, now abandoned, goes on in his monothematic, monosexual and 'mono-tonous' rumination. Blind to a more complex and multilayered history, deaf to the Hegelian affirmation of solidarity with the oppressed as fighting at their side, paralysed in the attempts to change the objective reality that breeds oppression, he now shares his noche triste with the bandoneón. T hrough the melancholy, dense, plaintive and deeply-felt tunes of this instrument, his anguished discourse of discovering himself to be an oppressor to the woman he loves finds an expression . The tango and the variant tango-canción, broken by dramatic silences and repetitions, will also solicit the participation and emotional involvement of the listener (Zavala). The rechazado confides to his instrument and to his listeners, Eros cum class betrayal has not stood a chance.

Ana sem-terra has no doubt asserted her feminine dignity by not surrending to an invasive guest in the space of political resistance that is the encampment; she has certainly disrupted the male-hegemonic code of sexual conduct of the tango ; she has clearly gone beyond her feminist predecessor Ana Terra by debunking essentialized and fixed notions of the place of woman. In fact, in terms of gender, Derrida's challenge to history in Choreographies would have been eloquent and nuanced enough as a concluding line for her: 'How can one breathe without the multiplicities of rhythms and steps?' (1991:446).

But what has been achieved by her foreclosure of dialogue with the watchman? In terms of class, her logic, paraphrasing Derrida, has become oppositional, dialectical in the Hegelian sense but also beyond Hegel - setting off a war, precipitating an end, not a synthesis (1991:449). The opportunities of humanizing a brutal situation of oppression has been lost to both. She has not followed her historical task, in Paulo Freire's terms, of liberating both herself and the oppressor; she did not resolve the conflict in which both were caught (1995:46). By imposing silence on his words to her, she has in fact confirmed the dilemma that the oppressed have carried throughout history, that of being psychologically dual, complex beings who host an oppressor inside them (Freire, 1995:45-67). It is her internalized oppressor that found an expression when confronted with its double, the watchman. She reversed positions and became, instead, his antagonist, the other oppressor.

Ana sem-terra's task is indeed not an easy one. The challenge for her and so many women below the poverty within the sharp inequalities of peripheral economies is that their gender politics is indissociable from powerful class dimensions. Theirs is a double duelo. But what other possibilities can there be than a 19 th century gender-inverted rechazo? In lieu of a closure, can another syncopation, another relativity ever be found across a confining class binarism?

A coda: framing Jacques Derrida

As I was putting in final form ideas conceived in two places across the Atlantic, the sad news that Jacques Derrida has passed away reached me. Less than two months ago, upon the invitation of the French Embassy in Brazil, I had the rare privilege of having lunch with him, amongst shared friends, overlooking, from the living-room on the 10 th floor, a breathtaking view of Rio de Janeiro - that beauty that never sleeps. His eyes sparkled even more as he reflected on his life and gave away the blessing of his most brilliant mind without any claim to reciprocity. As we were leaving, a gorgeous, cuddly baby irrupted into the scene, waking up to the voices of philosophy and literature. A broad, welcoming smile on his face was his own token of hospitality to the philosopher.

It would be presumptious to call Derrida a friend. I only talked with him at length on two occasions, once in London, this other time in Rio. A deep affinity may be a better term to describe a third very close encounter, this time when, recently, I was translating into English a text he wrote in French on the Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos. Spivak once described translation as a very intimate act of reading that demands that the translator surrender to the text; but the translator also has the task of facilitating love between the original and its shadow, a love that permits fraying. Taking chances, I radicalized the fraying towards a more complex weave, rendering a third explicit, my Brazilianness in this French-English vector. In the new textual fabric, Derrida's style was cast into the proverbial regional-become-universal metaphors of another major Brazilian writer, João Guimarães Rosa, from the same province in which I grew up. Implicit in this mediation was my invitation for Derrida to share with me and other Brazilians more of the intimacy of our literature and culture. His warm, thrice-repeated merci - merci-merci as approval were the last three words I ever heard from him.

The rhythms of his body no longer harmonize with those of his mind. But his most inspirational thoughts and unsurpassable use of body metaphors in philosophical discourse now live on in another materiality. In order to frame this last face-to-face image of Jacques Derrida on such a luminous, numinous day, I omit another major background to this text. A lesson to remember, amongst so many, relates to history as multiple and open-ended choreographies - bodies embracing, bodies deferring, bodies listening to calls unforeseeable within the determinisms of (hi)stories, bodies alert to new syncopations, bodies allowing life to dance otherwise, bodies (as)signing other residences, bodies opening anew the trails of desire.

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Notes

[1] ' Latifundium ', plural ' latifundia ': 'Landed estate, or large rural property, has two definitions: landed-estate by size, which is a rural estate with an area greater than six-hundred times the average size of family property; landed-estate by use is a rural estate with an area lesser than six-hundred times the average size of family property whose lands are uncultivated' (Fernandes, Bernardo Mançano in Vieira 2003 (ed), 'Glossary' (http://www.landless-voices.org/vieira/archive-13.phtml).

[2] Clip from the Globo TVadaptation of Érico Veríssimo's trilogy O tempo e o vento/ Time and the wind (Brazil 1985).

[3] A clip of the film is available in http://www.landless-voices.org/vieira/
archive-05.phtml?rd=ROOTSOFT973&ng=e&sc=1&th=5&se=0

[4] For an extended essay on the music and poetry of the sem-terra, see introduction to the anthology...

[5] Clip from Tango Bar, directed by Marcos Zurinaga; Puerto Rico / Argentina 1988.

[6] Moffat is a disciple of the prominent social psychologist and founder of the Psychoanalytic Association of Argentina (1942), Pichon-Rivière; for the latter the subject is an incomplete system that only becomes a system in interplay with the world ; one of his specific contributions has been the theorization of desire in specific contexts of misery and joblessness. Moffat's equally trans disciplinary construct is in fact part of a broader attempt to complement European-derived psychotherapy with some specific illnesses of poverty that remain important ingredients of the psychological experience of the Buenos Aires suburban poor.

[7] For a study of the sexualization of racial tensions in the emerging tango, see chapter 2 of Savigliano 1995.

Else R.P. Vieira is a Reader in Brazilian and Comparative Latin American Studies, at Queen Mary, University of London. Previous posts include: Senior Research Fellowship in Brazilian and Latin American Studies at the University of Nottingham (2001-02), Visiting Professorship at the Centre for Brazilian Studies, University of Oxford (1999), and carer in Comparative Literature at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. She has published internationally and in Brazil several books, book chapters and articles in Journals. She was the Director of Research and Editor of the major website The Sights and Images of Dispossession: The Fight for the Land and the Emerging Culture of the MST.

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