Trauma and Testimony in Contemporary Brazilian Poetry Written by Women

Abstract

The article, in its first part, addresses the conceptualization of literary representations of catastrophe, trauma, and testimony, usually applied to literature within two major fields of discourse: a European and North American one, and a Latin American one, based on the historical and literary experiences of these two geopolitical regions. In the first field, the work of memory is centered on World War II and the Shoah, while in the second field, it focuses mainly on dictatorial experiences, economic exploitation, and repression of minorities. The second part brings the poetic works of two contemporary poets – Miriam Alves and Ellen Lima Wassu – to analyze how they address material and symbolic griefs and traumas related to slavery, territorial expropriation, and the subjugation of Black and Indigenous women's bodies. Alves, a Black woman, uses the device of eroticism and the free Black body; Lima, an Indigenous woman, brings the body-territory concept.