saudade do que deveria ter sido

 

 

Utopia da Memória (2019), photo by Fernando Solidade.

In the final part of Utopia da Memória, by the Brazilian theater group Estudo de Cena, a chorus repeats the phrase "saudade do que deveria ter sido."

According to the dictionary, saudade is a "Sentimento nostálgico e melancólico associado à recordação de pessoa ou coisa ausente, distante ou extinta, ou à ausência de coisas, prazeres e emoções experimentadas e já passadas, consideradas bens positivos e desejáveis."

Still according to the dictionary, saudade is also a type of song, a "Cantiga entoada por marinheiros em alto-mar." Perhaps an example is the song "Marinheiro Só," "uma cantiga de roda tradicional brasileira, que era cantada pelos pescadores e marinheiros, antes de deixarem suas casas e famílias para trás para embarcarem em seus ofícios pelos mares," which has been interpreted by artists such as Clementina de Jesus and Caetano Veloso.

In Utopia da Memória, the phrase "saudade do que deveria ter sido" is uttered by the chorus like a song (see 01:07:26), the word saudade pronounced slowly, marking its three syllables, followed by a brief pause before the rest of the phrase -- which derives its (perhaps melancholy) power from the sudden joining in of voices and the alliteration of the "d" sound (saudade do que deveria ter sido).

I can't stop thinking of this phrase. How can we feel saudade not of something that was (and no longer is) but of something that (could and) should have been but was not?

I'm reminded of a passage from Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch (to which I keep returning over and over again): "Capitalism was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle -- possibilities, which, if realized, might have spared us the immense destruction of lives and the natural environment that has marked the advance of capitalist relations worldwide" (21). When I read this passage I feel saudade of these possibilities and what their realization "might have spared us."

"Saudade do que deveria ter sido;" saudade (like the utopia of the play's title) "made of" or "originated from" our memory of past unrealized possibilities? If we can feel "saudade do que deveria ter sido," can we feel "saudade do que não existiu [ainda]," a saudade made of or originated from our "memória do futuro"? "Qual a sua saudade do que não existiu? Qual a sua memória do futuro?," which perhaps are different ways of asking "Qual a sua Utopia?," the word utopia synonymous with "memory of the future" and the feeling of saudade (for what hasn't existed yet) it gives rise to. 

At one point in Utopia da Memória, one of the actors looks at a photograph (of a protest) and recalls "janeiro de 2119, quando a gente comemorou nas ruas os primeiros 100 dias da Revolução Popular." The actor could be a representative of "os que virão" after us, someone who inhabits our future (the same way that we, for Maria Bonita, are the ones "que habitam o meu futuro") and is remembering the celebration of the first hundred days of the Popular Revolution in January 2119, a hundred years after "janeiro de 2019," when "o atual presidente assinou o decreto que facilita a posse de armas no Brasil." For this comrade of a future generation, the celebration of the first hundred days of the revolution (and the revolution itself) is a memory of the past, but for us it's a memory of the future, of a "passado que virá." The actor gives us one answer to the question "Qual a sua Utopia," your "memória do futuro?" It's a popular revolution that would abolish "As cercas, os latifúndios, as muralhas, as propriedades, as fortunas, o dinheiro..."

I feel saudade of January 2119 when we'll fill the streets to celebrate the first hundred days of the Revolução Popular. Will this one day be someone else's "saudade do que deveria ter sido" and was not?