Afro-surrealism and the attainment of interiority in Adão Ventura’s debut poetry

Abstract

The modes of interaction among collective politics, poetic art, and the expression of interiority constituted a highly practical question that presented itself to Black poets in Brazilian Modernism. In this article, we examine the relationships between Surrealism and the racial and identity dynamics in the work of the Minas Gerais poet Adão Ventura. Ventura is one of several poets who produced work during the 1970s and 1980s and whose oeuvre has recently been reissued in Brazil. We will focus particularly on his first book, Abrir-se um abutre ou mesmo depois de deduzir dele o azul (1970), without neglecting the totality of his work, especially his best-known collection, A cor da pele (1980). Based on the premise that Black poetry in Brazil operates within a transgressive bias, both with respect to the literary system and to the canonical conception of the poem within the logic of the European/White cultural matrix, our proposal is to analyze the first phase of Ventura’s poetic work. We will correlate his search for subjectivity (or interiority) with the lyrical potential afforded by the Afro-Surrealism aesthetic (Miller 2013). The reading of the poems suggests that, stemming from the profusion of images, there is a discursive perception of the matrices of violence and subjugation that characterize the collective experience of Black artists.