Maria Giulia Pinheiro
- Portugal -
Maria Giulia Pinheiro (São Paulo, 1990) is a poet, playwright and performer. An artist in residence at the Alcântara Library (Lisbon), she won the 2022 edition of the New Dramaturgy Award for Female Authorship with her text "Isso não é relevante". In 2020, she came 4th in the Poetry Slam World Cup in France, representing Portugal and, in 2018, she also came 4th in the National BNDS Slam at FLUP - Literary Festival of the Peripheries, in Cidade de Deus, Rio de Janeiro.
She created and coordinates the Feminist Dramaturgy Centre, which has been online since 2020 and through which more than 300 people from 8 countries (Angola, Australia, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, the Netherlands, Mozambique and Portugal) have participated. She is the author of ‘Da Poeta ao Inevitável’ by Editora Patuá (2013), ‘Alteridade’ by Selo do Burro (2016), ‘Avessamento’ (2017) and ‘30 (poemas de amor) para (os) 30 (anos de alguém que nunca amei tanto assim)’ (2020), both by Editora Urutau and ‘Isso não é relevante’ (2022) by Editora Douda Correria, as well as the playwright of the shows ‘Palimpsesto: o que se apagaga para escrever de novo? ’, ‘Mais um Hamlet’, ‘Bruta Flor do Querer’ and ‘A Palavra Mais Bonita’, the latter two also under her direction.
She is currently a PhD student on the ‘Discourses: Culture, History and Society’ programme at the University of Coimbra and winner of the 3rd Cycle Merit Scholarship for the 2022/2023 academic year.
The ‘Avessamento’ of the transcendence of the body in the work of Maria Giulia Pinheiro
Available online here
“Language is nakedness greater than skin.
Skin can be ripped off, not desire.
These people, these people who think that an open pussy is the last line,
hunf,
They don't know that the greatest line is that one the pen does.”
In this poem and even throughout the work ‘Avessamento’, we can find a transcendence between the act of writing and the imagery of female sexuality, demonstrating that somehow art will always be superior to the desires inculcated by men. One of the means of expressing the condition of desire comes precisely from the use of the force of ordinary words that take on a warlike dimension - open pussy is the record of a free woman. Language is an element that intertwines both ideas and its own mutation throughout the poem; partly to entertain us and then to make us aware of its revolutionary power.
*
"To write with an open pussy,
To read with a torn-open breast,
And to stitch with language the marks on our bodies.
This is what I desire from art: lines.”
The word risk/line[1] takes on a triple figurative dimension: it can be the image of a vagina, the risk/line(1) of a word or the possibility of crossing a boundary. Any one of these ideas extends limits to various orders of human means, considering that the body is itself a margin, that words can pull out a language that can always be cross-border and that limits can be both an invention to castrate and a possibility of redemption in human coexistence. It is in this irregular dance that art begins its own goal: to define a relationship between polarities and the risk/line(1) that separates them, even though it is difficult to define and realise what art is. From the outset, it is possible to visualise how obscenity and the sacred emerge as the mediation of a risk/line(1) that makes up this poem
*
"If she could choose, it would be time as her husband. It would be with him
that she’d spend sleepless nights, discussing the hours, seeking the mysteries.
If she could really decide, it would be him, time, the eternal lover.
It’s in his tangle that she would lose herself from Others. Her children would be his:
each one living until the exact moment to be born again."
There is a play on words that is also itself a play on affections, emphasising the poetic subject's desire to meddle in forbidden objects of desire: time is also someone else's husband. And for poetry, time will always be a distant notion that belongs to a dimension that can only be reached through symbolic adultery. Any child that emerges from the poet's experience with time will always be a reconstruction that also belongs little to her. Once the impetus to write is realised, the results will be a body that is between death and the ability to reconfigure a new imagistic possibility.
*
"To the reader
I won’t
give you the
meat, but
taste the
flavor."
Flesh is the symbol of fictions, which could be the body of a poem or the body that the poet invents for herself. It wanders between the possibility of formal construction, but also the sensuality with which it can prove its erotic nature. The reader of poetry is never a mere spectator and the reading is capable of proving some intimate fantasy of the poet.
*
“I wash the dishes
piece by piece,
I wash the plates and glasses,
and even the cups and bowls,
but the seeds stick
and germinate anyway.
What do I do now, if
giant trunks and leaves come out?”
This is a poem about household chores, which somehow belong to an old female imaginary of oppression. The poetic subject insists on cleaning, washing the dishes, in the hope of getting rid of the seeds that germinate and invade her domestic space. These seeds could be her own freedom breaking out and destroying the house that taught her her role in society. But the poetic subject also feels that this destruction is the ability to create vegetation that crosses its own boundaries and - even in fear - becomes its top, close to the sky, close to its most real nature.
*
“I go up high,
so high that
birds come to visit me
and flirt with me,
the snake plays
in my roots.
I grow green, so green,
full of juicy fruit,
the animals eat me,
I give myself completely.”
Like the poetic images created by Maria Giulia, the female body can become a large baobab- or what my imagination says of a distant, wild and rare tree. This is a body-nature that animals use, as a space that is also erotic and in which she fuses the idea that nature is feminine and that she offers her body to the pleasure of animals. It is through her orifices and her capacity for full sexuality that the poetic subject is realised and transformed into a new tree.
*
“Never is something without its
opposite counterpart.
The sheep also screams the fox’s pain.
Both hurt with every bite.
When the stars align,
Creature, there is no remnant
that can stand the pose”
In Avessamento it is also possible to foresee social paradigms that are born within animality itself. The hunter is intimately linked to the hunted. They are part of the same universe where the oppressors suffer in the same way as the oppressed - for the same dimension that is the same in both and that is the body space. We can see how physical pain is transversal to any animal. It is from this that we can recognise the fear of suffering and death. This is also a theme that starts from the single artistic object that is ‘Avessamento’, which incorporates images of its author, Maria Giulia, in a state of physical suffering and illness - pneumonia and four broken ribs form the beginning of an aesthetic ideal for this work. By starting from human suffering, we can somehow get closer as natural beings, and pain can itself be a motto for defining art.
*
“You can't be light with what comes out of your mouth
in these hateful times.
I, who never rain, never, am here drowning myself
from others,
shallow rain.
You can't be light with the salt in your mouth
in these times of sodium.
I, who never know how, never, am here asking myself
of others,
mute mermaid.”
This is another poem in which Maria Giulia once again plays with words, forming sets of ideas that draw their affirmation from the bodies of others, from the political and social designs of her time and also from the strength of her own emotional constructions. These are elements that together infer a creative process that drinks from its contemporaneity, turning poems like this into a reliable record of the current condition of the woman-artist.
*
"And that’s how my twenty fingers turned into cockroaches:"
This is perhaps the most narrative and quasi-fable poem in the work ‘Avessamento’ - crossing something of a children's tale on the one hand and the mystery of the dreamlike and surreal world on the other. The cockroach takes on various symbolic guises, among which are: the fear of what lives underground (and this underground can be the sewers of a big city, but also the individual and collective unconscious); or the representation of scabrous insects in literature (where we can draw directly from influences such as Kafka or La Fontaine). The embodiment and humanisation of the savage returns in this poem where the poetic subject mutilates her body in the hope of seeing a raw nature born in her. The skin seems to be a wall between an inner reality in solitude and the desire to be transposed even by what is repugnant. Even so, we find the affection of insects as the ultimate motto for the poetic subject to free herself from the oppression that is her own body. Because it can be an animal-body that suffers, a human-body that understands this suffering or a woman-body that plays the role of a suffering inculcated by society.
*
“The mouth
doesn’t say
what the
heart
feels, the
mouth says
what the
heart
wants to feel.
The mouth
doesn't feel
what the
heart
says, the mouth
feels what
the heart
wanted to say.
The mouth
feels, the heart
doesn't
say, the mouth
says, the heart
doesn't
feel.”
To close this text in which I've developed some ideas about Maria Giulia's poetry in her work ‘Avessamento’, I'd like to emphasise, finally, this poem - I think that through it we can get to one of the most read verses in Portuguese poetry, which is Fernando Pessoa Ortónimo and he writes as follows: "The poet is a pretender. He pretends so completely that he even pretends that it is pain the pain he really feels." Also in this poem, the poetic subject makes an allusion between what the poet perceives as his feeling, how he never agrees with what he demonstrates; or how what he demonstrates is so far from what he actually writes. Perhaps it is this duality that is proper to art and in its ultimate end, trying to objectify it and give it a definition will be like creating a distance from poetry itself - and as much as it may be a lie or pretence, this is also a place that arises from the humanity of the poet.
[1] In Portuguese, the word ‘risco’ means risk and linha. The ambiguity is lost with the translation
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