Flawed Lundu: Luiz Gama’s poem-chanson Uma Orquestra

Abstract

Established upon the life and works of the lawyer, journalist and poet Luiz Gama (1830-1882), a black man, enslaved in its youth, who became familiar with the institutional spaces of the Brazilian Empire, and the origins of lundu as an assorted genre of European and Afro-Brazilian aesthetic conceptions, our research explores the thematic, formal and ideological configuration of “Uma orquestra”, poem-chanson included in Primeiras trovas burlescas de Getulino (1859). The poem, which reconciles the dual entrelugar (SANTIAGO, 2000) inhabited by its poet and literary genre, also express their commitment in historically permanent clashes, contradictions, resistances and assimilations that define Brazilian art and society. Assisted by José Ramos Tinhorão’s (2013) and Edilson Vicente de Lima’s (2010) historical researches on the creative arrangements and performances of lundu, and Dominique Combe’s (2010) broad concept of the “lyrical subject”, which exceeds the literary text, our analysis perceives “Uma orquestra” as a manifestation of lundu’s scope and value – regarding its repudiated and marginalized XIXth Century embodiment –, which Luiz Gama not only registered literarily, but deemed it relevant and beautiful in its alleged imperfections, and affirmed its validity as an idealized element of romantic engagement.