Brazilian Journal

A memory of Brazil and its natural beauty evokes calm, and a strange benediction, as poet P. K. Page recalls (for example) two coloured birds which alight on her husband, Arthur, at dusk, in Rio de Janeiro. Page's three years in Brazil, from 1957 to 1959, retain this luminous, slightly surreal quality in the poet's memory, 'baroque' she once called its landscape and culture.

It is hot. Siesta still. Not hot enough for Brazil but I think of Brazil and the small yellow bird that flew in and perched on the toe of Arthur''s crossed-over foot, puffed out its feathers, settled down for the night; and the hummingbird, ruby-throated, a glowing coal with the noise of a jet that landed cool and light on the crown of his head. -- P. K. Page, 'Domestic Poem for a Summer Afternoon'' (1977) A memory of Brazil and its natural beauty evokes calm, and a strange benediction, as Page recalls two coloured birds which light on her husband, Arthur, at dusk, in Brazil. Page''s three years in Brazil, from 1957 to 1959, retain this luminous, slightly surreal quality in the poet''s memory, 'baroque'' she once called its landscape and culture. Page travels to Brazil, but the country equally travels with her throughout her poetic career, whatever emotional, intellectual or aesthetic guise her recollections may assume. She often refers to this period in later interviews and in essays like 'Questions and Images,'' in which she famously asks, 'I wonder now if ''brazil'''' would have happened wherever I was?'' (188). At this point, ten years after her departure from Brazil, Page is still thinking about her struggle to write poetry at that time: 'Blank page after blank page. The thing I had feared most of all had happened at last'' (188). As she reconstructs the experience in her essay, the very 'thisness'' of Brazil in its sensuous immediacy returns to her: 'What was that tiny fret, that wordless dizzying vibration, the whole molecular dance? What was that golden shimmer, the bright pink shine on the anturias, the delicately and exactly drawn design of the macaw''s feathers?'' Out of this mute encounter with her environment in Brazil, 'each tile of each house, each leaf of each tree, each blade of grass, each mote of sunlight,'' she begins to draw 'as if my life depended on it'' (188). Brazilian Journalis Page''s edited version of a series of journals she kept in the 1950s and 60s, and the only substantial travel narrative published during her lifetime. Both the public and private Brazilian journals are extraordinary documents. They are marked by intense sense-based descriptions of natural environments, encounters with individual Brazilians and with cultural practices like the powerful and disturbing macumbaceremony. The time Page spends in Brazil and her many journeys within the country mark a turning point in her career. For reasons which aren''t fully explained in the published journal, Page experiences mood-swings during this period and finds herself largely unable to write poetry. Unexpectedly, she discovers a passion for painting -- and Page becomes as prolific an artist as she is poet and essayist. Page was forty-one when she arrived in Brazil in early 1957. She had met and married journalist and diplomat Arthur Irwin in 1950, when Irwin left Maclean''sto become Commissioner of the National Film Board of Canada, where Page worked as a scriptwriter. Irwin was posted to Australia in 1953 and, following the posting to Brazil in 1957, to Mexico and Guatemala in 1960. Irwin, the 'A.'' of Brazilian Journal, had been the driving force behind the ascendancy of Maclean''smagazine, which he had begun working for as an associate editor in 1925 and of which he became editor in 1945, recruiting a raft of talented writers, from Pierre Berton and June Callwood, to Sydney Katz and Clyde Gilmour. Page was well-grounded in her career when she met Irwin, and found a highly supportive and thoughtful life-partner in him: 'He gave me full freedom to do my thing, and a safe and sheltered place to do it from.'' Page arrived in Brazil at an interesting moment in its history, as Brazil was being positioned by politicians and its artists as a country of the future and as distinctively modern. Modernismoin the literary and visual arts was well-established by this time, several decades after the Semana de Arte Modernaof 1922, the festival which is traditionally seen as marking the emergence of Brazilian modernism. In a present-day context in which modernism is being reconfigured in global terms, with attention to its meanings and manifestations in non-European and American contexts, the encounter of this Canadian writer with Brazil and with Brazilian culture is particularly important. The act of travel itself, as Denise Heaps argues, 'entails the crossing of linguistic, paralinguistic, and cultural boundaries in addition to geographical and political ones'' (359). As a traveller, Page crosses geographical boundaries, from Australia, to New Guinea, to Brazil and later Mexico. She crosses the boundaries circumscribing gender roles, for while she performs the traditional role of hostess as ambassador''s wife, she does so as an independent figure, a female poet, professional screen-writer, and participant in avant-garde artistic and political milieux in Montreal in the 1940s. By 1957, Page is an established writer, with her Governor-General''s Award-winning collection The Metal and the Flower(1954) preceded by a novel, The Sun and the Moon(1944) and two collections of poems, As Ten as Twenty(1946) and the jointly-authored Unit of Five(1944). Page is intensely aware of what she sees, to the extent that early reviewers of Brazilian Journalnote her tendency to present descriptive detail at the expense of the personal. What takes Page''s travel writing far beyond the level of documentation or reporting is the way in which visual panorama -- particularly natural phenomena -- are abstracted into something strikingly other than realist description. What is 'the flying creature'' in her bedroom 'about two inches long ... [b]lack lace wings and a green brocade head and a noise like a DC-3 revving up'' (15)? Extraordinary birds appear and vanish in the embassy garden: 'Last evening a bird like a ballerina -- tiny, black, dressed in a white tutu -- ... did a fabulous tour en l''air, and disappeared'' (18). On a visit to the German embassy, Page is distracted by 'a toucan with an electric blue eye, a bill like an idealized banana, a body of sculpted soot set off by a white onyx collar and gorgeous red drawers. Splendid fellow!'' (31). At the church of Nossa Senhora, swallows fly in and out of the building 'as if they were darning the threadbare air'' (86). In the language of the Journal, the natural world becomes a study in abstraction, in colour, form and motion. This merging of the natural and artificial in visual description marks not only a distinctive narrative style but also Page''s own immersion in Canadian modernist culture, which persists into the 1960s in the visual and verbal arts. Many of Page''s close Canadian friends were visual artists. And if Page''s verbal representations are marked by this aesthetic sensibility, so too are the sketches and paintings she starts producing for the first time in Brazil, many of which are characterized by meticulous detail. Page seeks out Brazilian artists, including one willing to coach her, and reads intensively about the work of modernist painters Klee, Dufy, and Chagall. Page''s compulsion to make pictures catches her by surprise. It begins as she scribbles nervously while firing one of the many problematic servants in her massive residence and discovers she can''t stop drawing. The desire to make images possesses her. In her words, it is an 'illness'': 'anything beyond its radius is blurred'' (63). In one section of her journal omitted from the published version she writes: 'this painting thing has got me so completely that I begrudge time not spent at it'' (27 Feb. 1959). When her drawing master tells her to give up her coloured pens for another medium, she describes it as an 'amputation'' (158). Elsewhere, she writes: 'I paint like a fool, without