Decolonial experiences: Graça Graúna, Mel Duarte, Gabz and Stephanie Borges

Abstract

New speech spaces are new listening spaces. Contemporary poetry is a poetic-political and democratic space, which has as its main concept freedom of expression and free dialogue as a tool for the construction of new horizons. This possibility of dialogue, associated with the reconfiguration of crystallized spaces of speech (colonizing) and listening (colonized), traverses discussions about the empowerment of subalternized groups in their processes of self-affirmation, self-valorization, self-recognition and voicing of suffocated social demands. By perceiving the contemporary scenario as a space of contention, it is important that we pay attention to which voices have been silenced over time and what we can do, how we can act so that they become truly vocal, and not just visual, no longer treated as an object of study of those who, throughout history, have dominated the cultural debate to try to explain the world from a European, or an allegedly European, point of view. In this sense, the indigenous poetry of Graça Graúna, characterized by its indigeneity and the cut-bond metaphor, and the poetry slam of Mel Duarte, Gabz and Stephanie Borges, full of writing-experiences, ancestral references and corporalities, mark the insurrection of a body — individual and collective — that seeks the word as an instrument of struggle and empowerment in the path of decoloniality. For such aesthetic analyses, we used poems from the books Tear da palavra (2007), Querem nos calar: poemas para serem lidos em voz alta (2019), As 29 poetas hoje (2021) and Slam Grito's YouTube channel.