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"Brazil, January 1, 1502" was first published in 1960 and collected in Questions of Travel that was published in 1965. The detailed descriptions of selva and Indian women are based on Elizabeth Bishop's trip to Amazon with Aldous Huxley and his wife, Laura Archera, in 1958. This trip inspired Bishop a lot and rescued her from the tedious daily life. It is this trip that made Brazil novel, and to be more specific, exotic again for Bishop. As Peter Brazeau mentions in Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography, Bishop saw Indians in this trip to Brazilia and Amazon. "They delighted Bishop. Here was the fresh, primitive Brazil with which she had lost touch. The Indians were a friendly, happy, peaceful, even sweet-smiling people." Fusing what she saw and what she had read about Amazon, she wrote " Brazil, January 1, 1502" with "dense foliage, giant flowers, and elusive Indian women who retreat in to the jungle, 'calling to each other' like birds (Brazeau 164).
Bishop, in fact, had ever read the image of the Indian women that communicate with each other with the voice of bird before. When she was a teenager, she read descriptions about the bird women in W. H. Hudson's Green Mansions. In Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry, Lorrie Goldenshon quotes Bishop's review of Hudson's book to show how Bishop was attracted by the exotic descriptions of the Indian women: "I wished that the book had been twice as long when I put it down, and I was filled with longing to leaver for South America immediately and search for those forgotten bird-people" (Goldensohn 203). Bishop was impressed with an Indian girl, Rima. According to Hudson, Rima's "native language resembles birdsong" (Goldensohn 204). The little Indian women speaking like birds in " Brazil, January 1, 1502" are definitely based on her impression of Rima.
This poem is historical. The title, " Brazil, January 1, 1502," indicates to the invasion of Portuguese colonists in 1502. They entered the Guannabara Bay and named their future city, Rio de Janeiro that means " River of January " (Goldenshon 196). The speaker, especially in the first and second stanza, speaks like the Portuguese colonialists. Both the speaker and the colonialists are attracted, but at the same time afraid of the mysterious rain forest and strange creatures.
This poem begins with an epigraph from Sir Kenneth Clark's Landscape into Art that was published in 1949 when Clark was a professor of Fine Art in Oxford University. Tapestry, for Clark, is "decorative" and "stylized." Clark emphasizes that paintings of landscapes are in fact representations influenced by artists' ideology and personal experiences. Landscapes are "tapestried" and become "symbols" created by artists (Goldenshon 200). Adapting the epigraph, "…embroidered nature … tapestried landscape," from Clark's book, Bishop suggests at the beginning of the poem that the Christians' descriptions about Brazil, therefore, must be problematic. |
