Natasha Felix's poetry on escape: the book as a platform for the spoken word

Abstract

This article aims to analyze how the poet and performer Natasha Felix tensions the boundaries of the literary field by placing the spoken word as the origin and destination of her poetry. Her latest book, Inferninho (Felix, 2024b), is written based on an experience with performances in the Apupú project, in which Felix performs poems on stage, as sound, rhythm, and dance. Throughout the article, therefore, it will be demonstrated how this creative procedure, in which the body and the sound participate in writing and reading practices, causes interferences that expand the possibilities of literary institutions, from their production to circulation and critical reception. Thus, the theoretical thinking of authors such as Leda Maria Martins and Édouard Glissant will be used to argue that Felix's poetry promotes a kind of escape that concerns not only the institutions specific to the literary field but the Western perspective of a worldview that, by sometimes, it erases other cultural values and expressions, especially Afro-diasporic and indigenous ones, in the case of Brazilian territory. Therefore, in her attempt to escape the established limits of what is considered literary, Natasha Felix's aesthetic project also presents itself as political, restoring values typical of Afro- diasporic cultures, such as orality, musicality, and corporeality.