Last May, Greek-Brazilian singer-songwriter Jef Maarawi released his excellent sophomore full-length, TERRA PAPAGALLI (Land of Parrots). The title was one of the first names given to the land now known as Brazil – “It is an album about trying to understand what “home” is, and a meditation on the choice/desire we have to carry it within us.”
“TERRA PAPAGALLI is an album about Brazil, a broken protest record, an unrelatable meme, an account of a childhood…It is the Not-So-Great American Folk Album sung in a foreign tongue. But what is foreign after all? And how convincing are the parrot reveries?”
Today he follows up with a new video for the LP’s emotional track, “Senna” which he talks about below. The video is a short film directed by Danilo Arenas, a photographer and filmmaker whose extensive work on Brazil has covered corruption, exploitation and the erosion of the rights of indigenous tribes whose land is under constant threat from mining and farming.
Arenas has an incredible eye and awareness for capturing the true spirit of a land and its people, something that lends itself perfectly to the songwriting of Maarawi. Here, they are the perfect match…sound and vision united in purpose.
Jef Maarawi on Senna:
Legend has it that when Ayrton Senna died on May 1st, 1994, a million people flooded the streets of São Paulo in mourning. There were talks of people hurting themselves, mental images of inconsolable fans crying their hearts out in the middle of the street. It was like a part of Brazil had died with him in that fatal crash at San Marino, or worse, a part of themselves. Looking back, however, watching the reports, reading the articles, one cannot help but notice the elusive weight that legend imposes on such events. There was a very human distance between Ayrton Senna’s death and the people. You see recent witnesses of his human presence, people that are not yet used to his absence, not yet grasping its incalculable permanence. They were mourning the driver, not the legend. It is only when you see Ayrton Senna’s mother silhouetted by the windows of a car, crying into her palms, that you can attempt to grasp the pain of his loss, what it really meant to someone. What most Brazilians probably didn’t realize at that time was that it would take many years for the wound of Ayrton Senna’s death to turn into that familiar, almost existential pain.
It would take all those years of us growing older, watching that hopeful, post-dictatorial Brazil succumb to further corruption, inequality and divisiveness to make us miss really miss Ayrton Senna, not simply as an icon, but as a promise to our future selves that we could do better.
“Senna” is a song inspired by Dona Maria, my uncle’s mother-in-law, who was diagnosed with dementia a few years ago. Donna Maria was a strong woman, a hot-headed matriarch who would take absolutely nothing in terms of shit, and who had raised her family by herself, somewhere in lower-middle-class Santo André, São Paulo. There was always an inherent poignancy and kindness in her eyes. Three years ago she started communicating again, not quite healed yet, but contradicting the irreversibility of that original diagnosis. They associated what had happened to years of severe depression. In my heart, I always want to think that she had found a way to let go, that she didn’t mind letting her loved ones down, for once. “Senna” is a song about Brazil, but mostly it’s about abandoning all those mythical promises made to our future selves, an open road brimming with possibility.
The music video was shot by Danilo Arenas in Dois Riachos, Alagoas, Brazil, birthplace to one of Brazil’s most celebrated athletes, soccer legend Marta.
Buy the album here: https://orcd.co/jefmaarawi_terrapapagalli
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Photo Credit: Eftyhia Vlahou