Ana Luísa Amaral Marinela FreitasDo corpo: outras habitações: identidade e desejos outros em alguma poesia portuguesa

Abstract

Reviews 292 known song (“Sedia-m’eu na ermida de Sam Simion”)’ (p. 169). In a recent text, published in the magazine A Virada — Literatura e Crítica , I discuss the annotation in poetry (cf. ‘O ar lisbonudo e a poesia’). I believe that Sofia de Sousa Silva wisely knew how to transform the exercise of annotating Adília Lopes into a final essay, and that her lesson can be followed by future editors and translators. Here’s my balance is, in short, an anthology that reveals a part of almost all the books of a great author and that elegantly illuminates her verses. Ana Luísa Amaral and Marinela Freitas (eds), Do corpo: outras habitações: identidade e desejos outros em alguma poesia portuguesa (Porto: Assírio & Alvim, 2018). 344 pages. Print. Reviewed by Ana Filipa Prata (Universidad de los Andes, Colombia) Do corpo: outras habitações: identidade e desejos outros em alguma poesia portuguesa brings an entirely new perspective on Portuguese poetry of the twentieth century (and the first two decades of the twenty-first). Published by Assírio & Alvim, this anthology is organized and presented by Ana Luísa Amaral and Marinela Freitas, who have selected more than one hundred poems, by more than forty authors, all about the representation of non-normative identities. It invites us therefore to consider new interpretations for well-known poems and to read recent compositions within this specific framework and in dialogue with the tradition. This book goes beyond the traditional reception of poetic topoi such as love and desire, and stands out for its commitment to subaltern identities and alternative gender performances, as Amaral and Freitas emphasize in their introduction. This is a very significant issue indeed, and it can be considered one of the virtues of the publication, but it is not totally new. This book appeared in 2018 in the wake of the censored editorial project Antologia de Poesia Portuguesa Erótica e Satírica, organized by Natália Correia and published in 1966. We are clearly dealing here with different temporal and critical scopes: notions of identity, love and eroticism have changed over time. However, it is very interesting to note that both anthologies share similar social, political and poetic concerns. If identifying deviant experiences of love or groundbreaking discourses on the representation of the self in literature was revolutionary in the 1960s, it is nowadays still urgent and mandatory. Do corpo: outras habitações opens with Mário de Sá Carneiro’s ‘Feminina’ and closes with Golgona Anghel’s ‘Vocês até podem não concordar com tudo isto’ [You may not even agree with all of this]. Time and space between both poems become the stage for poetical expressions that release identities and bodies from subservience and domination. The first poem, ‘Feminina’, introduces main topics such as gender role play, identity as performance, eroticism and the female body; these are enunciated by a male subject who desires to be a woman: ‘Eu queria ser mulher...’ [I wanted to be a woman...]. One century later, Anghel’s Reviews 293 poem testifies to a contemporary generation of women who, not without violence, subverted conventions and raised their voices intending to be treated as equals. Good stories are for sale where reality is insufficient. This anthology draws on the creation of a female poetic tradition and, at the same time, on the need to resist conventions. It creates a place for enunciation, while emphasizing the process and not necessarily the product, since subjects continuously strive to be subjects, as suggested in Ana Hatherly’s verses, quoted in the introduction: ‘A gente | só é dominada por essa gente | quando não sabe que é gente’ [We people, | we are only dominated by those people | when we don’t recognize ourselves as people]. There are also several male poets or male fictional voices who contribute to place ‘num plano justo | e claro | uma razão’ [this demand in a fair and clear disposition] (p. 33). António Botto, Pedro Homem de Melo, Mário Cesariny, Armando Silva Carvalho or even Boaventura Sousa Santos, among others, all defy conventional masculinity and/or sexuality. Nevertheless, we still can count (fortunately) many more women than men within...