On many of my nocturnal outings around the bars of Recife Antigo, Bairro de São José and Boa Vista, I have always found a poet on his daily pilgrimage, trying to sell his poetry booklets. While moving from table to table along Rua da Moeda or at Burburinho, other people also move from table to table, circulating among bar customers offering their products: some men trying to sell peanuts and chestnuts, a little old lady broths and boys gum and lozenges. But the poet is selling and publishing his poetry in an alternative way and this is an issue that excites (intrigues) me every time I see him. This poet makes me think not only about the role of poetry and poets in society, but especially about alternative production and an attitude: the “do it yourself,” the desire of uttering ideas (alternative productions), of not complying with the lack of space for publication, of standing up against immobility and capture.
I started with the crossings of an urban and anonymous poet of the nights and streets of Recife, thinking about the possibilities that could be created to convey the alternate universe. Thus, I take the fanzines and the attitude that pervade these productions as practices that constitute micro-resistance in everyday life.
A set of several fanzines can create a circuit, where ideas are free and varied, regardless of the content or form of each. Mobile, fluid architecture, geographies drawn to the taste of the fanziner, that is, the guy who produces the fanzine. Thus, these geographies, composed of choices, guide their existential paths and obstacles to produce a material that expresses what you think. Regardless of the “Grand Boulevards”, fanzines travel in “paths”, creating their own maps, their own itineraries.
So, the most important thing that fanzines carry in their backpacks is their creative and expression freedom, as well as the passion that amateurism preserves. These publications resist immobility and silence. They articulate to produce spaces for dialogue through cunning and trickery, displacing the conventional conceptions of copyright, publishing and distribution of the material itself. Which can be realized through the Área da Mancha fanzine: “The worst of all is that Brazilian artists don’t have the means to publish their comics with dignity, many of them adhering to the fanzines that resist the North-American and Japanese invasion of our newsstands”. In order to complement this discussion, the Balaio de Gato editorial adds: “The issues become more sophisticated, ranging from the off-set to the computer, or even some major publishing house, since the content and the traffic of ideas are seen as more important than the vehicle, provided that there are no cuts or changes in the texts. But many poets still prefer a cheap edition and hand to hand sales.” A particularly strong feature presented in these quotes is the invention of their own possibilities of action, a movement that triggers events and meetings, forming a network of relationships and crossings.
Given these issues, I believe these publications present a very different example of the great instruments of conventional coding, because they desacralize the spaces of formal meanings, building their own codes and meanings. The contract that they establish among themselves is one of friendship, loyalty and honesty against the institutions. Consistent with fanzines, “I´ll give it to you or swap it, and you do what you want with it”. On their circuit, the authors are not slaves to the editors, because they are not even authors, in the literal sense. Moreover, regardless of the position occupied, the production of their material occurs autonomously and is transferred to the reader, in most cases, without profit. However, there are instances of many poets and illustrators who work with the world of fanzines to sell their work.
Another important point concerns the authorship and the modern idea of work. A good example appears in the editorial of d’O Idealista, which totally deconstructs the employment of the culture of equity, especially with regard to the modern conception of work and authorship: “Let´s help to spread idealism. If you liked this zine, recommend it to someone, divulge this address, lend or copy this zine for whoever you want. As usual, this zine is 100% free of copyright. Copy it, the whole thing or parts of it, everything you find useful or interesting”.
Thinking about the composition of fanzines through assemblages with collages, drawings and text overlays, their practice and those who produce them is an infamous practice, in other words, a means of getting to where you are not allowed, of stealing information and images and of building a hybrid body, illegal mapping containing a singular subjectivity.
In some cases these works become a shared production made by many hands, with people from many different places participating as collaborators, sending images and texts. As an example, we may mention Tom Zine, which is constituted through a large network of readers and contributors. We can see what is being said in the Tom Zine editorial: “I thought it was easy: just get together a load of comics, some talented writers, some references, add a handful of native people and that would be that! That was a mistake. Our newsroom was crammed with dozens of contributions, all of the best quality. So much good stuff that not even TZ, which boasts of having a reasonable number of pages, would be able to fit them in.”
Zigzagging through the halls of culture, the fanzines are presented as (an element) able to see a set of interlocking practices for several existences, practices that travel through micro-spaces. Thus, wherever watchful eyes are looking for big events, the fanzines roam through daily street life, at rock concerts, at get-togethers of friends at bars and poetry readings. Where the domesticated look does not reach the nuances of details and loses itself in the dispersion of the multiple, are the sliding practices of subjects that multiply themselves inventing microscopic worlds. Aligned with what is being discussed, the Balaio de Gato editorial mounts the following landscape: “With marginal poets, what will happen is a dip into daily life, life itself, with all its ferocity. In colloquial language. In some kind of anti-art. In aesthetic non-hierarchyzation. In explicit eroticism. The courage to expose the guts of the human condition, naked. Hence, many flashes of day-to-day life, flirting with lyrics, notes on insight; and the work, a record of the life process”.
This passage of Balaio de Gato is very enlightening, because it expresses well what usually circulates in fanzines regarding subject and approach. Covering not only the world of those who work with poetry, but also the universe of the lyrics of many of the bands who use these spaces for publishing their work, as well as the world of comics. It is true that the everyday is the raw material for the production of many people from the underground and alternative world, especially through the field of inventions by means of language and the attitude to produce shifts in what is formal or established. Daily life is appropriate for these people, to be reframed.
Dealing with several heterogeneous elements, the fanzines are presented as multi-referential. Influences include Dadaism, with its proposed anti-art, the Beat Generation and especially Bukowski and his colloquial and foul language. The productions of the 70s, in Brazil, are another reference for fanziners, marked by production on mimeographed sheets, small booklets and an irreverent and ironic poetry, such as the writing of Chacal and Cacaso. However, one of the strongest influences on the existential constitution of the fanzines is punk with its “do it yourself” attitude and its aesthetics of the grotesque and absurd, deconstructing formalities and editorial standards.
Thus, fanzines do not occupy a fixed place of speech, the accumulation of gains and emission of speech through conventional media such as periodic magazines and weekly newspapers. In most cases fanziners consume this press to take cuttings and make collages. A consumption that deforms and reframes, in the condition of making a difference. Moreover, by not working from a stable notion of accumulating data, as is the case of conventional publications in the market, records and files generated from these publications are always personal, belonging to collectors. Thus, places in the memory are not reserved for fixtures, like public places that everyone from a community may access. In other words, this material is absent from the circuit of public records. Simply because they do not belong to the universe of monuments, of big brand names or great narratives. However, fanzines are where things happen and feelings are produced, as a way of coming into the world and interpreting it.
Fanzines cited:
Área de Mancha. São Luis-MA, sd.
Balaio de Gato. Recife-PE, nº 12, 1999.
O Idealista. Belo Horizonte-MG, sd.
Tom Zine. Frei Gaspar-MG, sd.
