Bird Song
And now, the third in the series of songs stuck in my head, here is Pau de Arara [the parrot's perch] (mp3 expired) from Zelia Barbosa’s 1968 collection of protest songs from the Brazilian Sertão. As usual, I’ll leave the mp3 up for only a week. If you like the music, support the artist.
I guess that song is in my head because there’s still a parrot in my library but, actually, the song has nothing to do with actual parrots. In Brazil, Pau de Arara has two metaphorical meanings. In the meaning directly referenced by this song, Pau de Arara refers to a kind of flatbed truck on which impoverished workers from the arid northeast travel to cities like Rio de Janeiro in seach of work. Throughout the long and rough ride, the crowded workers cling like parrots to horizontal wooden bars. In the wealthy south, such workers are sometimes derisively called “Pau de Arara” in the same way that Mexican workers are called by names that reference their manner of making their way into the United States.
From what I can make out from the lyrics, this song expresses the hunger and hope that drives the worker to make the voyage and the disappointment and anger that awaits him as he contrasts his hunger to the highlife lived by the rich ones he sees on the beaches. Late in the song, there is a reference to “flicking” his mule harder, which reminds me of the skinny men mistreating skinnier mules I saw in the cities of Porto Alegre and São Leopoldo when I was in Brazil for the 2003 World Social Forum. (I’ll be posting an account of that trip on my website soon.)
To balance out that reference to cruelty to animals, let me share this short story by Regina Rheda, whose first novel was entitled Pau de Arara and who writes here from the perspective of a toad about a person oppossed to vivisection. Unfortunately, that novel is not yet available in English but her book of short stories entitled First World Third Class is. If you like the story, support the writer! This translation comes from Volume 5, Number 1 of the journal Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism. They deserve your support too.
Pau de Arara also refers to a kind of torture perpetrated by the Brazilian military government at the time this song was recorded. At the time, many musicians became interested in the folk music of the Sertão. Some, like Barbosa, merely recorded the songs. Others, such as Caetano Veloso and the band Os Mutantes, used the process of “cannibalism” to combine folk music with an array of other influences, including smaltzy Brazilian music and psychedelic rock from the USA, all of which came together in the music that came to be called Tropicália, which I surely will be writing more about another day. In response — and here is the link to the second meaning of Pau de Arara as well as other threads on this blog — the military dictatorship imprisoned, tortured, exiled, or locked them up in psychiatric institutions.
That military dictatorship finally fell in 1985, by the way. Formerly exiled Tropicá¡lista musician Gilberto Gil is now Brazil’s Minister of Culture.
June 8th, 2007 at 9:32 pm
Thanks for sharing this song, and all this information. I certainly learned a lot, and I’ll have to check out some of the music you mentioned. A weird coincidence, I recently got some music by Joao Gilberto (apologies for the lack of tilda), who has some connection to Gilberto Gil. Joao Gilberto is considered the person who introduced bossa nova in the late 1950’s; he had Gilberto Gil as a guest on one of his albums in the 80’s, I believe.