SongWriter is a podcast that turns stories into songs, featuring Questlove, David Gilmour (Pink Floyd), Joyce Carol Oates, David Sedaris, Susan Orlean, and Steve Earle.
Brazilian poet and film editor Maria Rezende has been friends with songwriter Pedro Mann since she was a teenager. Pedro was in love with her younger sister then, and one day their father gave Pedro a poem. He challenged the young musician to transform the poem into a song. Pedro stayed up all night working on it.
“Oh my God,” Pedro recalled thinking, “I have to make something amazing, because I want to conquer this guy’s heart!”
It was only after he played the song for Maria’s father that he found out that the poem was actually Maria’s. Over the years since then Pedro has used many of Maria’s poems as inspiration, in a long and fruitful artistic collaboration.
Today’s episode of SongWriter features a poem Maria wrote about forgiveness. It was inspired by a moment when she badly hurt the feelings of a man she was in love with—she apologized, but he did not forgive her.
“I discovered that even if you acknowledge a mistake and ask for forgiveness, maybe that’s not enough,” Maria said. “The poem was my desperate measure to try to convince him to forgive me.”
Interestingly, when scientists Dr. Rita de Cacia Oenning da Silva and Kurt Shaw first read the poem, they thought it was about national Brazilian issues of reconciliation and justice.
“The history of Brazil is marked by a series of abuses in relation to the process of colonization,” Rita said. “And in that case, asking for forgiveness, it’s not enough.”
Kurt and Rita argue that human flourishing is connected not just with issues of reconciliation and forgiveness, but also philosophy, play, and dance. In fact, Kurt says that the Brazilian national dance of Samba contains a metaphor for forgiveness, as well as the possibility of rupture. He points out that the Brazilian word for “balance” is not a fixed state, but implies movement—the back and forth between steadiness and unsteadiness.
“That’s that swing. The Samba is: ‘I almost fall, and then I stand,’” Kurt said. “That moment of syncopation is also the moment of inviting the other person to come and dance with you.”
Pedro had a long conversation with Rita and Kurt before he began writing his song in response to Maria’s poem. A few days later while he was brushing his teeth, Pedro realized that he wanted to write a song about his father. Pedro’s father died many years ago, after a difficult life. He was bi-polar, and sometimes violent, having suffered violence many times himself.
“The first sentence that came to my mind was, ‘Forgive me, forgive me. The pain that I caused you was the same pain that I carried inside,’” Pedro said.
The song, Pedro explained, became a vehicle for connection and repair with his father. Art is often a representation of the emotional past, but it can also be a mechanism for reconceptualizing and reframing those emotions.
Maria, who translated Pedro’s words into English for the podcast, put it this way:
“The song is a conversation that you are having with him, even if he is not here.”
Season seven of SongWriter is made possible by a grant from Templeton World Charity Foundation.
