Teolinda Gersão

Teolinda Gersão was born in Coimbra, Portugal, in 1940 and studied German, Romance and English Studies in Coimbra, Tübingen and Berlin. She worked as an Assistant Lecturer at Berlin’s Technical University and lectured in German Literature and Comparative Studies at Lisbon’s New University. Since 1995 she has dedicated herself exclusively to writing. Her time in Berlin, as well as the two years she spent living in São Paulo and a stay in Mozambique’s capital Maputo (then Lourenço Marques), greatly influenced the writer and feature in some of her work: ‘Encontro no S-Bahn’ [Encounter on the S-Bahn] (Berlin); some text excerpts from Os Guarda-Chuvas Cinitilantes [The Glittering Umbrellas] (São Paulo); A Árvore das Palavras [The Word Tree] (set in Lourenço Marques/Maputo) and ‘A Mulher Que Prendeu a Chuva’ [The Woman Who Stole the Rain] (set in Lisbon, juxtaposing European and African cultures). Teolinda Gersão represented Portugal at the 1997 book fair in Frankfurt and was the writer-in- residence at the University of Berkeley, California, in 2004.

Gersão sees herself mainly as a novelist, and certainly the early part of her career as a writer is dominated by the genre. Her first novel O Silêncio [Silence] was published in 1981 to great critical acclaim and won the Prémio de Ficção do Pen Club that year. The silence of O Silêncio is founded in a patriarchal system that denied women a voice in public, in marriage, and as writers. The novel’s heroine Lídia tries to break the silence imposed on her by a male-dominated society through acts of resistance (the most controversial is the implied abortion in the closing sections of the novel), just as a whole new generation of Portuguese women writers (Teolinda Gersão amongst them) were trying to break the male hold over literary production in the 1980s. Gersão declares in an interview with the Frankfurter Rundschau in 1987 that censorship under the Salazar regime was one of the main impediments to the publication of her texts, but it is not simply the political silencing that many of her novels thematise. Most of her heroines, like Lídia, resist the impositions of male hegemony, demanding a new language and a new society that would grant women the same rights as men.

After the publication of her second novel Paisagem com Mulher e Mar ao Fundo [Landscape with Woman and Sea], which depicts Hortense’s reckoning and coming to terms with the trauma of Salazar’s dictatorship after the Carnation Revolution on 25 April 1974, and a children’s book História do Homem na Gaiola e do Pássaro Encarnado [The Story of the Man in the Bird Cage and the Red Bird] (1982), Gersão turned to the more experimental fiction of Os Guarda-Chuvas Cintilantes [The Glittering Umbrellas] (1984). The text could be described as an ‘anti-diary’ that features short excerpts of dialogue between human protagonists and talking animals as well as stories of metamorphosis, such as that of the woman who turns into a fox, later published first in English translation as ‘The Red Fox Fur Coat’ (2004) in the Threepenny Review and then included as a short story in Portuguese as ‘Um Casaco de Raposa Vermelha’ in the collection A Mulher Que Prendeu a Chuva in 2007.

Three more novels followed, O Cavalo do Sol [The Sun Horse] (1989), A Casa da Cabeça de Cavalo [The House of the Horse’s Head] (1995) and A Árvore das Palavras [The Word Tree] (1997). O Cavalo do Sol and A Árvore das Palavras describe the coming-of-age of Vitória and Gita, who free themselves from the constrictions of a bourgeois marriage (Vitória) and the conventions of a white European upbringing (Gita). While for Vitória it is a tempestuous love affair that allows her to break free from conventions, it is the African sensuality, expressed in the mothering of her ‘othermother’ Lóia that sets Gita on a path to adulthood that is incompatible with her European roots. In A Casa da Cabeça de Cavalo, Gersão returns to the aristocratic family home in which O Cavalo do Sol was set. While O Cavalo do Sol depicts Portuguese society at the turn of the 20th century, A Casa da Cabeça de Cavalo delves further into the past, recounting events from the early and mid-19th century. In this novel Gersão’s astute criticism of societal conventions takes a wider sweep than merely critiquing political and ideological realities. A Casa da Cabeça de Cavalo questions our understanding of (male) historicity and the importance of the written word against the (female) oral traditions of storytelling and memorising in the ghostly voices of her characters, who from ‘the first plane of death’ see the past and its events in a timeliness outside time and being. This provides an ‘outside’ view of historical developments and bears an urgent message of change to future generations.

A focus on short fiction and translation marks Gersão's work between 2000 and 2010. Her novellas Os Teclados [The Clavier] (1999) and Os Anjos [Angels] (2000) already mark a turning towards shorter forms of fiction, and led in 2002 to the publication of her first volume of short stories: Histórias de Ver e Andar [Stories of Seeing and Walking]. In an interview with the Portuguese cultural magazine Jornal de Letras in 2011, Gersão concedes that ‘short stories are, for me, a destination, contrary to what happens with most writers who see it as a point of departure’ (Nunes, 2011: 9). The collaboration with British translator Margaret Jull Costa has made her short stories available to an English-speaking audience and many of them – ‘The Old Lady’, ‘The Letter’, ‘Grandmother and Grandson Against Wind and Sand’, ‘The Red Fox Fur Coat’, ‘The Reader’, ‘Encounter on the S-Bahn’, ‘The Umbrella’, ‘The Woman Who Stole the Rain’, ‘Four Children, Two Dogs and Some Birds’, and ‘The Mimosas’ – were published in cultural magazines (The Threepenny Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review and Strange Harbours) or internet fora dedicated to translated literatures (such as WordsWithoutBorders). The online publication of ‘The Woman Who Stole the Rain’, especially, created wide interest in the author in the blogosphere. Meanwhile, ‘The Red Fox Fur Coat’ was performed on stage (Symphony Space Theatre, NY, 2005) and in radio broadcasts (BBC and New York Public Radio, 2008). Robert Shapard and James Thomas included ‘The Red Fox Fur Coat’ in their anthology New Sudden Fiction that brings together texts and authors from around the world who experiment with short-short fictions, so-called ‘suddens’. In 2010 The Word Tree was published in its English translation by Margaret Jull Costa and in 2016 Jull Costa’s latest translation of Gersão’s novels, The City of Ulysses, will reach the English-speaking market.

After 2010 Gersão’s focus returned to the novel with the publication of A Cidade de Ulysses [The City of Ulysses] (2011), As Águas Livres [Free Flowing Waters] (2013) and Passagens [Passings] (2014). A Cidade de Ulysses and As Águas Livres are, to a certain extent, a return to her earlier novelistic oeuvre. After the republication of Os Guarda-chuvas Cintilantes, subtitled as Cadernos I, in 2014, As Águas Livres, Cadernos II, takes up the experimental tone of the anti-diary of 1984, featuring short texts and dialogues, as well as ‘short-short stories’. In A Cidade de Ulysses it is the thematic approach that brings together the written word and visual art to evoke echoes of first novel O Silêncio. The novel is told in the voice of Paulo, who returns to Lisbon to organise an exhibition of his work in the Gulbenkian Museum, but it is the voice of his ex-lover, the painter Cecília, that echoes Lídia’s struggle for a relationship that grants equality to both partners. Then as now, both heroines cannot find a resolution and leave, as the dominance of their partners makes the new life inside them an impossibility, though Cecília does not end her pregnancy. Passagens is dedicated to themes of old age and death: Ana guides the memorising of her own life through a ‘death in life’, which simulates Alzheimer’s disease, making for a painful reading of realities that are so often negated in contemporary society.

Compiled by Suzan Bozkurt (Manchester)