“ Xing Ling Made in China (Solisluna, 2013), a novel by Victor Mascarenhas, is a regional science fiction comedy.
Yes, the adjectives are many, and the mixtures even more: there are Chinese who in the future dominate the city of São Salvador, renamed the Land of Happiness, with the same colonizing structure as the Portuguese in the past.
The first of these, Tomé de Souza, already appears in the epigraph with an appeal to King D. João III to leave, he who was serious and did not participate in any party in the tropics: “For the love of God, may Your Highness send me go, I don’t know any other words to ask for (…)”.
The new colonizers, who have already dominated several other parts of the planet, on the contrary want the noise at all times, the overflowing happiness, so that the city can be a tourist complex and the residents, entertainment extras.
It is not today, nor tomorrow, that every futurist work is said to be a vision of the present. Victor Mascarenhas votes and confirms. Your Salvador looks a lot like the one dismantled “at the beginning of the 21st century”. The natives live with implanted chips that transform “what was original about Bahians into a tedious and predictable simulacrum of the legendary 'Bahianness'”. The other part of the population, the majority, lives outside the complex and survives on small services or trading illegal products, like Raimundão, who joined a group of rebels called Caramurus to overthrow the “chinezada” on July 2nd. The leader's cry is the same as in the book: facing the walls of the ready-made imagination, messing up the symbols, recapturing the clichés.
The instrument? Eparrey , “[a synthetic drug, developed by the Chinese from Africa, the Chinegões], which acts directly in the region of the brain where the individual's atavistic memory, the collective unconscious and the most primitive instincts are stored”. A tablet is only capable of deactivating the controller chip, even of dangerous police officers who disguise themselves as Bahian women, like the “security guards of an old political leader”, while guarding the property. In effect, the user shouts “ eparrey , my father” and becomes free to fight the power.
Xing Ling 's mockery aims to have the same effect on us, hospitable citizens who are happy with life in principle. If he uses laughter to combat joy, it is because he suspects that it has become too serious, even for the resolute character of our first governor general. As the poet and walker of the Historic Center, James Martins, would say, “Salvador is a city devastated by joy”. All that remains is to release it from its tension of being happy and relax it so that it can create its new expressions, even if they are the same.
Mascarenhas' narrative continues so much in combat that I fear going beyond the limits of burlesque and sometimes I slow down the course with instructive data and enlightened repetitions, when I don't anticipate the ending too much and lose a slice of the intrigue so that the thesis shines, or the defense of his absence. An attempt is made to justify existence, to show that the joke is not in vain, when we already know that. Some grumbling, however, is motivated by the quality of the author who, as is evident from just a few summaries, has a Chinese imagination. The expectation, which has yet to materialize, is that she will take power together with the “Bora, Baêêêa” of the Caramurus, assisted by the Bahian police officer Ueslei, knowing that she is legitimate, inventive, even if she “doesn’t have the slightest idea” of what do with yourself. It is purely and simply necessary to create from the allegory of joy a chronicle for the future, or the future of a time that is insisted upon.
Excerpt from the work:
Raimundão and his men enter the scene, stuffing eparrey tablets into the mouths of everyone who had not yet received the divine hallucinogenic sacrament. There is a beginning of turmoil, with some people receiving saints and others somewhat stunned by what is happening. In the midst of the confusion, one of the old American ladies shouts:
- Michael, Michael! They do not care about Us!
The Yankee epiphany is different from the local one. They also hear the drums and come into contact with their Bahian ancestry, but in their case, the phenomenon occurs via Michael Jackson and is the white specter of the legendary king of pop who appears dancing among the benches of the old temple, wearing a Olodum t-shirt .
- Bahian brothers, you are free! Today is the day to expel this Chinese girl from Pelourinho and free our city!”
Review published on the Literature blog of the iBahia portal
