Elizabeth Bishop: Nova Scotia in Brazil

Elizabeth Bishop lived Brazil more or less continuously from 1951 to 1966 and then intermittently to 1971. The country functioned as a necessary escape from deprived and anxious world her early Nova Scotia and Massachusetts. Yet her new life was haunted by her past. Although Brazil permitted her to think, to feel, and to experience ways that were novel for her, that very difference impelled her to reapproach old, to release from repression some memories that had seemed too painful to face North America. Moreover, Brazil represented a restoration comfort she had experienced only fleetingly as a child. The country therefore assumed a complex symbiotic relationship Bishop's imagination with its climatic, cultural, and psychological opposite, North Atlantic. In Brazil, Bishop began to construct, for virtually first time, literary texts that evoked scenes from her Nova Scotian past. Her physical journey south initiated a parallel aesthetic journey north. Although Bishop had alluded to Nova Scotia a handful texts written prior to her arrival Rio de Janeiro on November 30, 1951,[1] she recurrently and times obsessively reconstructed Nova Scotian landscape and memory texts written over next twenty years Brazil. These include some her most intense stories and poems. In tropical Rio Bishop found that summer mildew magically transformed itself into mildew books and old papers and old memories, and that such an atmosphere her long-lost Neddy might suddenly be here (Memories Uncle Neddy, Collected Prose 228-29). From places like Petropolis and Ouro Preto she could assert Nova Scotia so convincingly that we feel too: Heavens, I recognize place, I know it (Poem, Complete Poems 176). Freud argued that homelike and unhomelike have an eerie tendency to include each other (The 'Uncanny' 224-26). In Bishop's texts far and near similarly intertwine what Thomas Travisano has aptly termed the homely exoticism childhood (168). For home was never closer, never more familiar, and never more strange than Brazil. If Bishop's stay Brazil was colored by her Nova Scotian memories, memories were equally informed by ambiguities her Brazilian experience. Just as she was somewhat remote as a visitor Brazil, reluctant to speak Portuguese and to mingle with others (Fountain and Brazeau 178-79), so she was remote as a traveler to her Nova Scotian past, skittish about people, events, motives, and emotions. She wished to conduct her journey back into her psychic landscape as though behind a thick transparent pane, so that she might not see too much or feel too intensely. Renee Curry has suggested that Bishop wished to be in but not of Brazil,[2] and a similar way Bishop wished to visit past only on certain conditions mastery and safety. She maintained an almost Hemingwayesque reserve. She wanted to protect her present self--gifted, fragile, and egotistical--against encroachment all environments, geographical or recollected. Although might be argued that Bishop's lack intimacy with Brazil and its people reflected a late colonial strategy, must be noted that she withheld herself from her own personal past a very similar way. Homi Bhabha has stated that object colonial discourse is at once an object desire and derision, arising part out both phobia and fetish (67, 72). Bishop effect colonized her past, much as she attempted to colonize and to control her present. Her colonizing urge had less to do with nationality than with opportunity; was her acquired and habitual method to secure a self that was perpetually threatening to unravel. Although we can easily see that she made remembered people, places, and events into objects desire, phobia, and fetish, we may find more difficult to detect derision. …

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