escrevinhanças & scribbles

Yesterday I attended one of the Slam Poetry workshops, at Litteraturhuset, led by the artist and curator Michael W. Opara, also known as Doriansgrave.  As usual, I do not have the intention of saying what the workshop was, but simply how I experienced it. If you want to know more about it, you can check this out . For me, it was a reminder that although it is hard, it is also important to challenge my writing process.  I write almost every day. It has been like that for the last 23 years. By now my writing process has its rituals and a kind of chaotic structure. I read philosophy, poetry, biographies, novels, plays, and books that I do not know how to label… I read and I write. What I am reading tends to influence somehow the content of what I have to say in my own writing. Writing for me is also a conversation, with what I read, see, and listen to. Writing is also a huge part of my thinking process. There are times that I need to write in order to be able to think.  I am the type of p

As usual, I do not have the pretension of saying what this text is. Instead, I share how it resonated with me, what woke up or shook in me, which traces it left in my body, and what made me remember.  For me, one of the recurrent images in  Rainbow Palace  is “in-between”. Maike, when she first addresses us, is in-between. In between a past home, her first home perhaps, and a home for coming. A place to which she is moving, to be with her lover, who is already there. In-between, in an airplane, she reflects on her desire to be in two places at the same time.  “My current suspension, being in the air and in-between-places, is marked by my desire to be in two places at once, with lover and loved ones. This feeling is a missing that sits with me”.  Maike’s beautiful sentence carried me back to something Maria Zambrano once wrote that also stayed with me. As far as I remember, and I might be inventing my memories, as so often is the case with memory, Zambrano once wrote that those in exile

Last Sunday, despite my exhaustion, I grabbed my red bike and went to Palmera to watch Afterlife by Louis Shou-Hansen & Karoline Bakken Lund.  It has been a while since I experienced a live dance storytelling event. I know that not everyone would describe Afterlife with these words. But that was it for me. Storytelling through dance, alive. Walter Benjamin's words about the aura of a piece of art being unreproducible caught me, while I was sitting on my pillow, fighting my tiredness. Trying to stay awake to witness what was happening in front of me.  I had a chance to experience something unique happening. Three women, with and in their bodies were telling a story. A story without a clear beginning or an end. A story constantly flirting with "what if". An invention that was born from a return to the past. Classical ballet is dead. What if?  I do not have the pretension of being able to tell you which story/stories they told. Instead, what I will be sharing here is how

e o mar continua a velha dança  ondas vem e vão  não explicam-se nem a mim nem a ninguém  exausta, desiludida ela encara o mar  despe-se das máscaras todas  nua, ela fita o mar como quem implora por um último segredo 'amar a vida' alguém sussurra  'é tarefa de loucos'  ela ri, veste-se de conchas, pedras e folhas e retorna à um passado esquecido  onde vive aquela versão menina dela  que ainda sabe fazer a loucura que é amar a vida  ela lembra das tardes sem fim  regadas a café, pão de queijo e as estórias de Lygia  tem vontade de abrir um caderno velho em que a menina vomitava verdades passageiras e copiava pedaços de estórias  "não cortaremos os pulsos, ao contrário, costuraremos com linha dupla todas as feridas abertas" Ligya mais uma vez lembrava a menina que vivia dentro dela de que sim, é preciso amar a vida

I want to challenge categories  and the border between the private and the public what do I say when I put 'almost' in front of poems?  I write almost poems what do you hear when you listen to me saying that?  recently I realized that I went back to poetry because of my current struggle with categories  each word is somehow a category  some more narrow than others  at the same time that they are what we have in place to try to explain who we are in this world, they are always so limited  when I try to say something in a poetic way I feel that there is less constraint  I feel that maybe perhaps you will be able to listen to at least the traces of what I actually have to say but is it true that words are all that we have to try to explain ourselves to one another? how about the feelings? the gestures? the colors? the sea? the mountains? the rain? and the power of our dance? 

Quem tem o direito de tomar espaço pra dizer quem é?  Ouço “this is a man’s world” (esse é um mundo de homens) no fundo enquanto escrevo sobre esse livro, que terminei de ler faz uns dias. Mais de uns dias agora. Dois meses ou mais. Na correria da vida há pouco tempo pra digerir o que consumimos.  Retornando à Cartas para minha avó de Djamila.  Estaria mentindo se dissesse que li tal narrativa sem incômodo. Vi-me incomodada diversas vezes. Quando tento entender de onde vem essa sensação de desconforto esbarro na história vendida a mim e a tantes outres sobre quais histórias valem a pena ser contadas e quem tem o direito de aparecer.  Mais do que isso, quem tem o direito de falar sobre o que.  Djamila Ribeiro, para alguns, a filósofa pop que fala de feminismo e racismo, tem constantemente insistido no seu direito de ser humano. Na sua coluna em um jornal de grande circulação ela escreve sobre diversos temas, não limita-se a falar sobre os tópicos pelos quais ficou conhecida. Além do mai