‘Troca de calçada’: feminist sertanejo and the ‘poor whore’

A few years ago, I went to Superagui, on Paraná’s coast, to spend New Year’s. At that time, the island was full of funny people. Every one of those times has its stories. But one that has come back quite strongly now is that of the woman with blue hair.

We were in the community’s main square, an area no bigger than the living room of most rich people I have met in my life. We drank beer and cataia (a horrible cane liquor reputed to be hallucinogenic — but it is hallucinogenic more for being cane liquor than for the leaves added to the recipe).

A stronghold of artists, journalists and people who are not bothered by the very simple lodging and food conditions, not infrequently present were someone who wrote with Paulo Leminski, another who composed with Ivo Rodrigues, an infinity of domestic poets, always someone on guitar. That was when, talking to strangers, again, of course, I said I did not like sertanejo music. “The new ones,” I trimmed.

A tall, thin woman, thirty-something, with very short blue hair, answered, laughing out loud: “did you know that the ‘strand of hair’ on the jacket was a pubic hair?” We laughed a lot. Then, very festively, she told me that sertanejo music, in her opinion, has an exclusively male framing. “The man is the protagonist all the time. If the woman rejects him, he does not respect it, he goes after her anyway.”

Feminist sertanejo

For the woman with blue hair, women making music in the space that was exclusively men’s was a good thing, even if, granted, the lyrics are not an ideal of beauty.

I kept it to myself. I needed to think about the subject.

Years later, these days, it dawned on me how much women’s music does me enormous good, for my emotions, for my perceptions of the world. When I heard “Troca de calçada” by Marília Mendonça, I remembered two things.

First, the prostitutes of Visconde de Guarapuava street in Curitiba, who work on one sidewalk. Then, the book A ralé brasileira (Souza, 2009), which deals with the “poor whore.”

‘Troca de calçada’