Resistance and denunciation against racism/male chauvinism in the voice of black women poets

Abstract

This article focuses on Afro-Brazilian poetry written by the poets Conceição Evaristo and Esmeralda Ribeiro as a tool of resistance against structural racism that, historically, sustains Brazilian society, to the point of camouflaging the extermination of black youth, silencing, erasure and murders of black men and women, almost considered as natural. In addition to these ailments, there are those of misogyny and male chauvinism that plagues the lives of Brazilian women in general, with a particular grievance for the black woman, considered as the other's other, who can then be the object of mistreatment or mere animal laborans. In these conditions, the poor visibility of these two poets, who carry out resistance and denunciation in a lyrical voice, is exposed and faced discursively. As a method, we will make use of comparative literature, and the analysis and interpretation of the chosen poems will have a theoretical scope in Adorno (2003); Goldstein (1985), Martins (2000) among others, and in studies that deal with the black trajectory in the national literature, such as Proença Filho (2004) and Duarte (2018). The poetic work carried out by the poets brought here presents, in addition to all the beauty of their aesthetics, a unique historical perspective, which starts from the look of the black woman nourished by verses overflowing with strength and resistance as true political acts of denunciation and exposure against centuries of discrimination against blacks and black women.