São Luís: Naturíssima Trindade – Representation, Space, and Resistance in Dinacy Corrêa’s Poetry

Abstract

This article analyzes the poem “São Luís: Naturíssima Trindade – trioleto poético”, by Dinacy Mendonça Corrêa, published in the anthology Novos Poetas do Maranhão (1981). It investigates how the representation of the city articulates memory, space, and identity, placing the work within the context of Brazilian poetic resistance produced between the 1950s and 1980s, a period marked by censorship, repression, and insurgent literary creation. Drawing from the tradition of women’s writing and their practices of symbolic contestation, this study examines how the author mobilizes the body, space, memory, and politics to construct a sensory representation of the capital of Maranhão. The tripartite structure of the poem, in video, in audio, and in sentio, organizes an affective cartography that reinscribes São Luís as a living locus of resistance and belonging. The theoretical framework articulates contributions from Bachelard, Tuan, Bergson, Ricoeur, Pesavento, Brandão, among others, enabling an understanding of the relationship between poetry, urban experience, and the production of meaning. The study concludes that Dinacy Corrêa’s writing reactualizes the insurgent gestures of her generation and transforms the city into a landscape of memory, affect, and critique, reaffirming the power of the poetic word as a means to reinvent both place and subject.