I AM MY BODY: VIOLENCE, POETRY AND FINITUDE IN THE PLAY THE BIRDS OF THE NIGHT, BY HILDA HILST

Abstract

The play The birds of the night, by Hilda Hilst, proposes an aesthetic reading about what happened to a priest, Father Maximilian Kolbe, in Auschwitz. The text is crossed by numerous ontological questions. The group of characters locked up to die in the Basement of starvation, thinks about issues like God, death, freedom, hunger, degradation and so on. Violence is an intermittent presence in the death bunker and the body of the characters is a territory of profitable debate on the effects of the restriction of freedom and the difficulty of communication between the characters. In this sense, I propose in this essay a set of reflections that begins from the characters' gaze on their own bodies, on the other's, and the degradation processes on them. In Hilda Hilst’s dramaturgy, the body is a persistent territoriality. Among the characters trapped in the Basement of Hunger, the body acts as a rhizome to unite all in the same space for understanding the end. Violence, poetry and finitude sediment the action of those condemned to die of hunger and thirst. In the plot, thinking is a form of resistance in the face of the imminent end, however, this movement to rationalize the “banality of evil” generates symbolic side effects among prisoners. Therefore, I propose the analysis of the text seeking to understand how the body is inserted in the gears of violence and its effects on the mutual observation that the condemned does.