MÁRCIA MEIRA BASTO
ENGLISH
BIOGRAPHY
BIOGRAPHY
MÁRCIA MEIRA BASTO was born in Recife. She is married, has two sons, and is graduated in law from the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE). Before retiring, she worked as a State Attorney for Pernambuco (now retired) and has a master degree in philosophy, also from UFPE. She has post-graduate degrees in Public Sector Economy from the National Institute of Public Administration in - Alcala de Henares in Spain, Urban Planning from the University School of London and Public Administration from the Fundação Getúlio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro. She also has a post-graduate degree in art therapy from the Clínica POMAR in Rio de Janeiro. She is also a storyteller and organizes cultural events. She was co-founder of the Literary Café of Pernambuco – a movement that sought to encourage Brazilian literature and placed special emphasis on writers from the state of Pernambucano. Currently she is developing voluntary work at the Organização de Auxílio Fraterno – (Organization of Fraternal Assistance) OAF.
SELF PORTRAIT
Throughout her biography, Márcia sets out to weave a self portrait in which she searches for herself within the “other” of creation. The theme of identity is one of the main foci of her work: seeking to understand what we are, where we come from and where we are going – making sense of our existence. She explains that, since we are beings of relationships, and subject to space-temporal dimensions, our subjectivity cannot be leashed to a fixed, immutable essence such as that of a thinking conscience: each one is “another”. Fiction, she says, contains the power of revealing the ‘othernesses’ of ourselves.
When we read and write we suspend our beliefs and identities, so that we may enter a textual world, where we experiment new forms of life and new ways of being. So much so, that any piece of work should not be explained through the author’s biography, but rather through the facts of our own lives.
Márcia states that writing is a process that not only demands reason, but indeed all the senses, requiring a complete emptying of oneself, a total surrender. Writing is not an author’s confession: it has to surpass one’s very own life and become transformed into the work of the moment. That’s why, the “face of the artist”, according to one of Márcia’s tales, “should only be revealed through the act of doing: so as not to break the spell and allow the mystery to evaporate. When creating, the very artist herself becomes negation, absence: a chrysalis from which the butterflies are born that will tattoo the souls of her readers. So do we need to know her, or know that this or that is presenting her within a fixed, frozen identity, composed of superimposed scenarios if, in order to create, she had to return to something faceless, without contours, to the original invisibility of the world?”
During the creative process, the artist removes herself from that which she always was, her name, history, body, destiny, thus becoming a mere passageway through which the reader may enter worlds produced by words, images, colors, lines, sounds, textures, sentiments.
Márcia sees being a writer as : A portal into a world built of words derived from the brute force of being. Words, which on occasion are clothed with the hardness of ancient rocks and come crashing down, splitting open craters of some infernal dwelling and, others, of scars: excavating the memory and sculpting life, speaking in rock and iron. But there may also be sweat: from the weariness of work carried out in a clearing provoked by fire stolen from the gods by woman. And that this, further ahead becomes transformed in an arrow, setting off the overwhelming impulse that, in an act and on an impetus, oppresses and imprints, on the very flesh itself, the nostalgic pain of missing something that never was – and is no more.
Márcia’s writing is an invitation. An invitation to stroll along a shady pathway made of words in black and white, draped in the tenuous luminosity of dusk. A pathway that, since it is just a pathway, has no signs, nor indications, no stops, nor destination. A pathway along which we are taken by the hands of imagination that prove the vital force of woman”. (fragments from the tale O rosto do artista (The face of the artist) published in Antologia dos Escritores Nordestinos, 2.000)
MÁRCIA MEIRA BASTO was born in Recife. She is married, has two sons, and is graduated in law from the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE). Before retiring, she worked as a State Attorney for Pernambuco (now retired) and has a master degree in philosophy, also from UFPE. She has post-graduate degrees in Public Sector Economy from the National Institute of Public Administration in - Alcala de Henares in Spain, Urban Planning from the University School of London and Public Administration from the Fundação Getúlio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro. She also has a post-graduate degree in art therapy from the Clínica POMAR in Rio de Janeiro. She is also a storyteller and organizes cultural events. She was co-founder of the Literary Café of Pernambuco – a movement that sought to encourage Brazilian literature and placed special emphasis on writers from the state of Pernambucano. Currently she is developing voluntary work at the Organização de Auxílio Fraterno – (Organization of Fraternal Assistance) OAF.
SELF PORTRAIT
Throughout her biography, Márcia sets out to weave a self portrait in which she searches for herself within the “other” of creation. The theme of identity is one of the main foci of her work: seeking to understand what we are, where we come from and where we are going – making sense of our existence. She explains that, since we are beings of relationships, and subject to space-temporal dimensions, our subjectivity cannot be leashed to a fixed, immutable essence such as that of a thinking conscience: each one is “another”. Fiction, she says, contains the power of revealing the ‘othernesses’ of ourselves.
When we read and write we suspend our beliefs and identities, so that we may enter a textual world, where we experiment new forms of life and new ways of being. So much so, that any piece of work should not be explained through the author’s biography, but rather through the facts of our own lives.
Márcia states that writing is a process that not only demands reason, but indeed all the senses, requiring a complete emptying of oneself, a total surrender. Writing is not an author’s confession: it has to surpass one’s very own life and become transformed into the work of the moment. That’s why, the “face of the artist”, according to one of Márcia’s tales, “should only be revealed through the act of doing: so as not to break the spell and allow the mystery to evaporate. When creating, the very artist herself becomes negation, absence: a chrysalis from which the butterflies are born that will tattoo the souls of her readers. So do we need to know her, or know that this or that is presenting her within a fixed, frozen identity, composed of superimposed scenarios if, in order to create, she had to return to something faceless, without contours, to the original invisibility of the world?”
During the creative process, the artist removes herself from that which she always was, her name, history, body, destiny, thus becoming a mere passageway through which the reader may enter worlds produced by words, images, colors, lines, sounds, textures, sentiments.
Márcia sees being a writer as : A portal into a world built of words derived from the brute force of being. Words, which on occasion are clothed with the hardness of ancient rocks and come crashing down, splitting open craters of some infernal dwelling and, others, of scars: excavating the memory and sculpting life, speaking in rock and iron. But there may also be sweat: from the weariness of work carried out in a clearing provoked by fire stolen from the gods by woman. And that this, further ahead becomes transformed in an arrow, setting off the overwhelming impulse that, in an act and on an impetus, oppresses and imprints, on the very flesh itself, the nostalgic pain of missing something that never was – and is no more.
Márcia’s writing is an invitation. An invitation to stroll along a shady pathway made of words in black and white, draped in the tenuous luminosity of dusk. A pathway that, since it is just a pathway, has no signs, nor indications, no stops, nor destination. A pathway along which we are taken by the hands of imagination that prove the vital force of woman”. (fragments from the tale O rosto do artista (The face of the artist) published in Antologia dos Escritores Nordestinos, 2.000)
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