Rina Santos
In 1972, José Mário Branco, a revolutionary songwriter, released his second album, Margem de Certa Maneira, a work that reflects the general sentiment in Portugal during the dictatorship: the desire for change, freedom and companionship among those who could no longer stand a life of oppression and fascism. However, among the many songs included, there is one that stands out: Aqui Dentro de Casa. In this song, José Mário Branco takes on the role of “Marta”, a woman who is in love with a left-wing activist; a love so overwhelming that it makes her believe, at times, that this man can extinguish “the light of day or the class struggle” all by himself.
As the song progresses, one stanza remains essentially the same; however, its meaning and message do not.
Mariazinha fui / Little Maria I was
Em Marta me tornei / Marta I became
Vou daquilo que fui / I’m going from what I was
Pr’àquilo que serei / To what I will become
At this moment in time, we’re presented to Marta’s lover. A self-declared left-wing man to whom she surrenders herself in an enamoured way. Her love for him is even compared to the figure of Christ, another entity worthy of worship and who marks the transition between childhood – Mariazinha – and womanhood – Marta – one triggered by this immense love she has for this nameless comrade. As we go along, we’ll see how Marta was always just Mariazinha under this man’s control.
What we know from Marta’s relationship with this communist man is described firsthand by José Mário Branco. We know they had children and that they were put in her care, thus alienating her from herself and from her condition. Although seemingly fictitious, Marta’s experience is anything but that. The introduction of women to the labour market, away from their homes, isn’t a twentieth-century event – working-class women have always done it – but the workload at home has not diminished. In many households, the domestic labour still falls upon a female figure – an unpaid, oftentimes unrecognised job. Marta certainly did not have the time to read Marx or to participate in lectures and panels with her comrades while at her ears rang the cries of children, arms heavy with laundry, or her hands full of spoons and plates to serve soup.
And she stays as a hostage to this situation, tending to household chores, only to be greeted by her husband’s complaints about his boss when he gets home. His lack of awareness of the situation he’s replicating is very telling of how his political consciousness seems limited to the notion of class, which then leads him to transform into the boss he is so critical of, except in this case he is not paying her a measly salary, instead he is treating Marta as a servant, as someone whose labour is always at his service, at no cost.
But Marta begins to recognise how terribly unjust this situation is.
Pegas-me na mão e falas do patrão / You take my hand and talk to me about your boss
Que te paga um salário de fome / That pays you a wage of hunger
Do teu patrão que te rouba o que come / Of your boss who steals from you what he eats
Falas contigo sozinho p’ra desabafar / You talk to yourself to vent
Meus olhos parados, mudos e cansados / My still eyes, mute and tired
Não podem ouvir o que dizes / Cannot listen to you anymore
E fico à espera que me socializes / And I wait for you to socialise me
Meus olhos verdes, boneca privada do teu bem estar / My green eyes, private doll of your wellbeing
There is an awakening of consciousness of herself. That this self-identification as a communist, as a fighter for the freedom of the working class, does not inhibit him from replicating the same behaviours he swore to fight against. In the same manner, his boss did not pay him enough to eat, this nameless husband also stole Marta’s ability to live a free life – she will always carry the burden of having a house to clean, children to tend to and a husband to welcome home. The cry for freedom isn’t a mere response to the repression of the dictatorship; it’s an attack against the patriarchy.
A tua vontade, justiça, igualdade / Your will, justice and equality
Não chega aqui dentro de casa / Doesn’t enter this house
Eu só te sirvo para a maré vaza / I’m only good for you when the tide is low
Mas eu já sinto a minha maré cheia a subir / But I already feel my tide rising
Meus olhos cansados abrem-se espantados / My tired eyes, open up amazed
P’rá vida de que me falavas / To the life you spoke to me about
P’ra combater contra os donos de escravas / To fight back against the owners of slaves
Meus olhos verdes que te vão falar e que tu vais ouvir / My green eyes that will talk to you and that you will listen
In this last part, Marta becomes aware of her condition as an oppressed woman, but she does this with a declaration of war on the “slave owners” – those who use patriarchy and perpetuate it to maintain their comfortable status quo, which goes unnoticed under the radar of other male comrades. As it is part of ‘the nature of women’ to be mothers, wives, servants – but never autonomous human beings. How can we cry out to the heavens that we want the liberation of the oppressed if we then reproduce the very mechanisms of oppression that we swear to overthrow?
Although written more than half a century ago, Aqui Dentro de Casa continues to carry a very important message for the political spectrum’s left. It is in Marxism that we find the struggle against capitalism and, consequently, the struggle against all other forms of oppression that feed off it, but we can’t be fooled into an ‘utopianisation’ of the left-wing arena. The idea of “safe spaces” is misguided; just because we are surrounded by left-wing people does not mean that we will not witness – or be targets of – behaviour that we would be quick to condemn in public. In this respect, sexism and misogyny are no exception.
Marta realised first-hand that her liberation as a worker could not be separated from her liberation as a woman. Patriarchy was not born with capitalism; it predates it, and the destruction of capitalism can never be dissociated from the end of patriarchy. This is a belief that we must take as fact in our struggle if we aim to build a free world, without classes, without oppression.
For one last time, we hear the opening verse, but there is a new feeling attached to it. It is the realisation of who Marta has been all along – she was never Marta – she was always Mariazinha. She was always a hostage to her smallness, sometimes a real one, sometimes one manufactured by her husband’s domination over her and her subordinate position in a patriarchal world. But now, fully aware of her potential and her emancipation, she can affirm herself as Marta – what she always was, a woman in her own right, as deserving of liberation as her male comrades.
When José Mário Branco wrote the song, it was the target of countless criticisms from the left, most of them coming precisely from men who were openly left-wing – he clearly struck a nerve.
Mariazinha fui, em Marta me tornei / Little Maria I was, Marta I became
Sei aquilo que fui e que jamais serei / I know what I was and what I will no longer be
from Dackekuriren Vol 3/25: Dackes’s Inferno, originally published 2025-11-28