EYES IN COLOR

“It’s me, the river that finds the sea. /Branches, ripe saps, I’m mirror/sand dunes, green on the beaches./In acacia leaves, fleshy moon/thick fruit, music of flavors/nervous fluid, lunar, the flow./The sounds of Rio Araguaia and Xingu,/lakes, sloughs, flooded islands/jumping, pulsing, veins of the earth.”
Eyes in Color.

I must admit that today, in the canvases of Maestro Franco Azzinari, the spirit of the verses that I have dedicated over the years to my marvelous land of Amazonia strongly resists.

“It is not death that kills / but the greed of men / who arrive in an immense boat to plunder the forest.”
In the portraits that the Italian artist dedicates today to my Amazon, there are not only the bright colors of my people, the strong characters of their faces, the expressive strength of a population eternally fleeing and despoiled, the beauty of the landscapes that have accompanied my existence and my cultural education, but there are above all the Indio children of my land, and that Azzinari narrates and represents with a light in his eyes that is as true and as real as one can grasp along the thousand green and lush forests of my people.

“The warrior children/each one embodies a myth/have belts of woven straw/decorated with Arara feathers/earrings of Arara feathers/necklaces of jaguar nails/bracelets of river shells…”

Children who are the last of the world, children light years away from the civilization of Western peoples, children who have been warriors since birth, with a pride and a strength of spirit that is difficult to imagine or even to recount, but which Azzinari has captured and reproduced wonderfully well in their gazes and in their ability to be icons of the resistance of a population willing to give up everything, except the beauty of its uncontaminated and sun-kissed landscapes.

In the master’s frescoes, I find today the most authentic colors of my Amazon, my “homeland”.
My paternal grandparents were born in the forest. And so was my father Djalma. They were from Acre, an interior region of the Brazilian Amazon, the land of Chico Mendes. My father worked there and that’s where I spent part of my childhood. I played with other children, in complete freedom, imitating the sounds of birds, swimming in the river, climbing trees.

Children identical to those Azzinari discloses us about today in his canvases, children drowned in light and colors, the extraordinary light and colors that only my land still knows how to protect and offer to the rest of the world, in an almost religious way.
My grandmother used to tell me the ancient myths, the stories of mermaids and goblins. And she taught me the voices of the wind, the metamorphosis of the moon, the language of flowers. The encounter with their reality is the origin of my poetic inspiration. My mother’s family, on the other hand, of Portuguese origin, represented for me the city, the school, the European way of life. I discovered that in the forest there is an autonomous language, different from that of the tribes, different from all other languages. I learned it and, thanks to it, I can feel how the spirit of the forest breathes.

The Indian children whom Azzinari met, and to whom I am told he also taught how to paint, bringing them from distant Europe the right canvases and colors to do so, the Indian children with whom Azzinari spent long months of his stay in the Amazon, also taught him the true great secret of my people.
This is the simplicity of daily life, the serenity with which one faces the passing of time, the desire to grow up happy but remaining on Indio land, smiling at animals and talking to animals. From birth to death.

Only an Indian woman like me can fully understand when an artist like Azzinari confesses to having met and known a people who do not know what “gray” is.
“Gray” is the only color that is missing in the Amazon’s range of colors.
But it is the same for all of us who were born there, far from everything and everyone. Raised to grow up with the light in our eyes of the strong colors of the parrots, or the flowers that my land is full of every day and every month of the year.

As a child, I remember I learned the language of the forest and I have done nothing but translate it in order to let the world, sensitive people, know its meanings. In the hope that even those who are insensitive may mend their ways, so that this world may be saved, preserved and loved.
Inside the Amazon is my heart that beats and inside my heart is the Amazon that breathes.
Poetry, as well as painting, is a free tool, true, without conditioning. It strikes the heart and the mind. That’s why I chose poetry as a weapon of redemption for my land. I knew that sooner or later the power of words would conquer the rest of the world.
Azzinari must have thought the same thing.

Everything can be business, not poetry. Through it, men and women can understand that trees are us. And that we are trees. We are united. To kill them is to kill ourselves. Deforesting thousands of square miles is pure cruelty, not only to nature, but to humankind, which without the breath of that green membrane, would become extinct.

I understand Maestro Azzinari’s emotion when he says, “I wish I could be buried one day in the land of the Indios, where the Indio children gave me back the joy of life and helped me understand why the Amazon is dying.”
“The baby jaguar/is transformed into all things/that live in the water/is transformed into all things/that live on the earth/there is no difference between animals and Plants/what lives in the forest is inside the goddess…”

I learned to write when I was five years old, and immediately, in the eyes of my father’s family, I became “Márcia la scrivana.”
I wrote letters for my grandmother, love poems for friends to dedicate to their boyfriends, short stories to recite. I composed my first verses when I was thirteen. Poetry came naturally: it is my companion, my second skin, my prayer. It blends with the myths and rituals of Brazil, in its mystical and sensual culture.
As a teenager I devoured the masterpieces of Portuguese and Brazilian literature. I loved the chronicles of the great voyages to the Americas and the first contacts between Indians and conquistadors. I also read the French and Russian classics, especially Racine, Victor Hugo, Camus, Tolstoy and, above all, Dostoevsky.

My hero was, however, Don Quixote. Of the great Italian authors, I adore Mario Luzi, who also wrote the preface to my poem about the Jaguar children. A great honor. He was a true teacher and friend.
Now, after him, the Indio children come back into my life thanks to the strong line with which Azzinari tells and represents them.
“They begin to dance in circles/the children, animal skin dances in them/kaiku-si ma gelê tapé-wai/I said this was a jaguar/coming out of the circle/kaiku-sí ma gelê tapé-wai/I said this was a jaguar…”

You have to think that I studied anthropology just to better understand the indigenous identity of my people. Anthropology, however, is a scientific discipline that privileges material culture. I consider myself, therefore, rather a poet-anthropologist: at the center of my work is the spirit of the forest.
It is the same forest that can be seen behind the children portrayed by Azzinari.
“She is the Jaguar deity/as the forest/ancient is her life…”.

Faced with Azzinari’s portraits, I am reminded of an old piece of writing of mine, which reads more or less like this: “Dreamers, artists, are the sense of the universe, something more than science, they are the soul of matter, unpredictable and profound as the infinite universe. How long does the child in the human being last? Is there a universality of the creative world of children? Children feel natural and supernatural beings, beings that fly and sing, and with the joy of their imagination in everyday life, even a tin can, a wheel or a tin box, they are the principle of all dreams”.
In Franco Azzinari’s canvases one can grasp the strength of the dreams and fantastic illusions of our Indio children.

Amazonia meu amor”
Màrcia Theòphilo