Pictures of erotic love in the Elisa Lucinda’s lyrics: a reading of “El deseo, a lira dos amantes”

Abstract

Elisa Lucinda is a poet, actress, and performer from Espírito Santo with a vast lyrical production, so much so that a large part of her poems is condensed in the anthology Vozes Guardadas, published by Editora Record in 2016. A recurring theme in many of Lucinda’s texts is a direction that speaks of a lyrical voice that shout (and invoke) distinctly black female voices, making it clear that this is also an aesthetic project of the author, as she herself is very active in the fight against the system of oppression perpetrated by the paradigms of colonization/coloniality and masculinity. Thus, the main objective of this work is to reflect on love as a form of erotic drive in the section of poems “El deseo, a lira dos amantes”, from Lucinda’s anthology, understanding these voices as constitutive forces of decolonization. In this particular section, there is a theme that permeates almost all the poems, which is precisely the game and/or erotic relationship between the lyrical subject and their interlocutor, in such a way that this relationship can also be understood as a full manifestation of the subjectivity of this woman (lyrical voice). In the texts in question, we can glimpse a Black female body that is configured as an instrument of erotic realization, so that the eroticism present in Lucinda’s lyrics goes against the idea of an objectified and stereotyped Black body. Our research is based on the reflections of Lorde (2021), Hooks (2010), Evaristo (2005), among others.