Industrial Park     by Patrícia (Pagu) Galvão, Translated by Eliz. & K. David Jackson Original title: Parque Industrial Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by Nebraska UP Pub. Date: 1993 Pub. Place: UK Format: 153 pages List Price: £19.95 Not available for ordering Publisher Unknown Pub. Place: UK List Price: £8.95 Not available for ordering

Patrícia Galvão’s 1933 ‘proletarian novel’ Industrial Park records a crucial moment in working class life in the São Paulo of the early 1930s, and so adjusts the rural bias that has dominated impressions of the fiction of that time. Industrial Park also reveals the unique perspective of one of Brazilian Modernism’s more fascinating but neglected female figures.

In his useful and informative ‘afterword’ translator K. David Jackson reminds us that Galvão, or ‘Pagu’ as she was known, was censured by and expelled from the Communist Party in 1930, for her ‘individualism and sensationalist agitation’, and was forced to adopt a pseudonym, Mara Lobo, for the book’s publication. This novel however demonstrates her ‘agitational’ commitment to transforming the complex and contradictory reality of class struggle into literature.

It is a very different approach from the socialist ‘realism’ of Jorge Amado, with its unproblematic narratives of feudal decline and capitalist modernisation. Here rather is the disturbingly chaotic maelstrom of social life — the novel’s title in fact was taken from a contemporary advertising billboard, whose triumphant celebration of the new capitalist order of things is the object of her satirical critique.

What we are given, rather than an evolving narrative, is a fragmented series of vignettes, juxtaposing the cynical self-indulgence of São Paulo’s rich with the daily struggle for existence of the workers, particularly the women, of the immigrant industrial quarter, Braz, on whom they prey. Alongside the exposure of racism, poverty, the exploitation of the textile factories in both its petty and most brutal forms, and the repression of a young trade union movement, it is perhaps Galvão’s particular insight into the sexual lives of her characters which, without sensationalism, voyeurism or sentimentality, manages to dramatise the precariousness of their existence. Sexual vitality and sexual vulnerability, that ambivalence encapsulates the optimism and energy of this new social class, its determination to imagine and snatch glimpses of love and solidarity inside and outside the sordid world of factory and slum, yet its all-too easy victimisation in the brothel or the workhouse for single mothers. The novel ends, not with an easy victory for the socialist ideals which the characters struggle to sustain, but with a chance encounter between two of the novel’s fleeting figures who, ‘clinging together, victims of the same unawareness, cast on the same shore of capitalist ventures, carry salted popcorn to the same bed’.

The novel’s style, which its translator describes as having a ‘primitive’ rawness of rapid-fire, truncated language descends partly from the ‘telegraphic’ style Oswald de Andrade had explored in his Manifestos da Poesia Pau-Brasil and Antropofágico (Pagu participated in the Movimento Antropofágico of the late 1920s and was married to Oswald for a time). Like Galvão’s fragmented narrative technique, this corresponded to the movement’s commitment to deconstruct or explode the illusory and repressive unity of perspective and narrative which had held together Brazil’s pre-Modernist self-image.

This style does succeed in conveying the dynamism of the novel’s social milieu and usually accommodates the vigorous blend of colloquial and political language which, in another context, might sound like crude sloganeering.

Sampson Street moves full in the direction of the factories. It seems like the worn paving stones are going to break apart.

Coloured slippers drag along still sleepy and unhurried on Monday. Wanting to stay behind. Seizing the last small bit of freedom.The girls tell about the previous evening’s dates, squeezing lunches wrapped in brown and green paper.

‘I’ll only marry a worker!’

‘Knock on wood! One poor person is enough. Spend my whole life in this shit!’

‘You think the rich date us seriously? Only to fool around.’

‘I told Braulio that if it’s a fling, I’ll tear him apart.’

‘There’s Pedro!’

‘Is he waiting for you? Then I’ll get lost!’

The powerful cry of the smokestack envelops the borough. The laggards fly, skirting the factory wall, gritty, long crowned with spikes. They pant like tired dogs so as not to lose the day’s pay. A small red slipper without a sole is abandoned in the gutter. A shoeless foot is cut on the slivers of a milk bottle. A dark girl goes hopping and crying to reach the black door.

The last kick at a rag ball.

The whistle ends in a blast. The machines shake in desperation. The street is sad and deserted. Banana peels. The residue of black vapours vanishing. Blood mixed with milk. 8-9