Considerations on the afrofeminine poetics by Mel Adún: Affection, eroticism, feminine emancipation and mysticism

Abstract

Mel Adún is a young black writer who has published her works in newspapers, blogs and, chiefly, in the magazine Cadernos Negros, specialized in the literary productions of Afro-Brazilian writers and in which Adún has already published some short stories and poems. This work will approach Mel Adún’s poetry with the intention of analyzing some lines of force which seem to be central in her poems, giving emphasis to the subversive potential of the given poetics through some of the elements it explores, such as feminism – and, more specifically, black feminism –, eroticism, guided by the search for autonomy of female pleasure and the sexual-social emancipation of black women, also the syncretic dialogue it establishes between Christian references (in profane key) and figures and divinities of the religious imaginary of African matrix. In order to explore these thematic lines, we will use as theoretical reference the reflections and concepts by Edmilson de Almeida Pereira (2010), Rogério Prandi (2010), Gaston Bachelard (1997), Giorgio Agamben (2007), Mircea Eliade (2010), as the more prominent names.