Since my first childhood ages, nearly seven, I have tried writing some little poems about things that make me feel better in days of difficulties dealing with this changing and desperate world and, above all, with humans that live in it.
One of my first "poems" was:
Will I encounter my death on earth or in the deepest sea?
Not on the lands, please, but in the ocean.
It was what I wanted to say, but only now, in this day of mine, can I understand what the sea is and not on grounds only if I was to be buried in the Hebrides. There I will feel great.
But if it is impossible, I prefer to die on the way to go.
The problem is the state. We do not own our liberty to choose.
Only God and the States. I need to pay my "passeur", which is a big task before I go. The first reaction of this little poem to my family, especially my mother, was to say: God, something is wrong with this innocent child. But I was not naive or innocent, and I never was. I understood many things before I could deal with them, which causes much trouble in one's life.
The fact that I had a Breton grandfather has played a significant role in my life and still does. His chamber had plenty of books and papers on the desk and the smoke of his pipe - the butum - for the Bretons.
It was a kind of Tolkien ambience that influenced my academic quest for literature and history. But before that, I choose to study theatre in the Belo Horizonte city capital of the Minas Gerais state of Brazil. I confess it was not the most desirable formation, but at that time was what was in disposition. Nevertheless, I am proud of the product of my ten years in this adventure. After that, I took the path of literary studies because the milieu differed from what I wanted as a professional. The least to say. At the same time, I imagined teaching was something I could do with some accuracy, so then I invested myself in academics grades, but what I wanted was studying and writing. Education is horrible. Especially nowadays. There is no more transmission. The intergenerational. And these days, I ask myself why I and I don't remember when exactly, began to write poems in French and English - prose poems, I must say, kind of Celtic bard inspiration. Every time I try to write in Portuguese, that causes something strange. But I have the answer now.
It is because it hurts less.
The otherness of the foreign language makes me feel more comfortable.
I was not from this country-world in childhood, and I am still not.
Oh! Like many others like me! But not much...in Brazil, they have the pattern of oblivion where they come from...I mean...the European descendants... which some called colonizers... and the thing goes until the woke culture, as if we can call it "culture", makes all that quest for the ancestors a bit of a dangerous topic if we recall Europeans routes... kind of thing I have not at all any interest on my writings. That is a context I am not part of in any way. Living among ruins is already sufficiently challenging to stand.
NOTE: "passeur" is the French word for the ancient Celtic myth for the one who will intermediate us between the world of the living and that one for the already gone. There is the Ankou which is also related to death but in another way. It is most the ghost that will come to visit you before you go with the "passeur".