ABSTRACT
We propose an oceanic ecopoetics in the work of women poets writing in Portuguese. Our reading focuses on different contributions and examples of this ecopoetics in poems by Brazilian poets Mar Becker, Júlia Hansen, Letícia Novaes (Letrux), Ana Martins Marques, Beatriz RGB and Nina Rizzi and Portuguese poets Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão, Patrícia Lino and Inês Francisco Jacob. These works take the Atlantic Ocean both as elemental and as a site of cultural production, unveiling a history of heteropatriarchal projects of colonization and exploitation, and gendered and racialized constructions of bodies and of nature. They also propose alternative epistemologies and interdependent beings with(in) our terraqueous planet by evidencing and exploring the material conditions and linguistic expressions of interspecies encounters through and with the sea. We analyze in our selected corpus the different forms in which an oceanic ecopoetics brings submerged bodies and female voices to the surface; dissolves the “Portuguese sea” and exposes how it has been storied; (em)braces the waves, shaping other forms of language through listening and beckoning to aquatic lives and movements; and suggests re-compositions that engage with liquid toxicity. Proposing relations with the ocean that counter colonialism, heteropatriarchal exploitation and extractivism, our concept of oceanic ecopoetics is one of fluid interaction, care and attention to the agency of other(ed) bodies.
