We can think, if we stick to a superficial level of analysis, that the female body has been one of the great issues debated in the public space in recent years, due to the new feminist movements, to #metoo, to the struggles for gender. identity. However, if we read the anthology of feminine poetry that the poet Jorge Sousa Braga has just published in Língua Morta, When the Moon Comes Down to Earth, we realize that the discussion about the female body is much broader, more complex and deeper than what the manifestos say. After all, women’s bodies have been the subject of political, ideological, artistic, and tribal struggles for millennia. The ancestry and viscerality that emanate from these struggles, in the way in which the feminine and the maternal enter into individual and collective archetypes, are the greatest strength of this anthology and what makes it a unique and somewhat relevant book.
Knowing women is delving into the particularities of those creatures that are born with a uterus, an organ that bleeds monthly, which can house a child for nine months, which itself has the possibility of becoming a lake prepared for metamorphosis, creatures whose body allows a cell to become a human being, in an ontogenetic journey that repeats the phylogenetic journey: from the unicellular to the multicellular, from the tadpole to the baby mammal. And if, on the one hand, the bodies of women were and are politicized, enslaved, raped, they have also been, for thousands of years, adored, celebrated, invested with symbols and meanings that give their flesh a cosmic meaning —like the many ” Venus”, created, sculpted by our ancestors, witnesses of a time when the gods lived in the female body.
Jorge Sousa Braga, gynecologist, obstetrician, poet, translated, for two years, poets from various countries, various languages, various cultural and artistic genealogies, creating a unique book, a publishing rarity, closer to the essays by Mircea Eliade, Ernst Cassirer , or Levi Strauss than any political or ideological agenda. Without straying from his path of indiscipline, the poet gives us a book that all those who want to be feminists should read, but also all those who fear women, and already fear the feminine power they see on the horizon world.
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Source: Observadora
