Rites of passage, by Paula Tavares: the place of (re)memory in the construction of a female poetic diction in Angola

Abstract

Rites of passage, Paula Tavares’ debut book, inaugurates a new poetic diction in an Angola that is recently free from colonial domain (SECCO, 2011). In writing verse about the female body, Tavares visits tradition through peasant elements and the poetics of oral discourse, while inaugurating an erotic feminine speech, which rejects colonial silence (MATA, 2009). In her poetry, memory is articulated as a tool for the (re)construction of meaning (NOA, 2015). There is a weaving of fragments where the poet invents meaning to fill in the ruptures produced by colonialism, in an exercise of articulating a poetic rememory (MORRISON, 2019). In building poetry stemming from the body, fruits and rites, gender affects the perspective and poetic voice presented in the texts. The feminine is treated as knowledge and the erotic (LORDE, 2007) as a path to understanding the self and the creativity which rules poetry and life. In poems that establish dialogues with simple unfinished-looking drawings of little colors, the parts and the whole connect producing, poem and image, textual unities which translate the Angolan identity, the feminine and a unique epistemology through which one can understand the body, gender, culture and society.