First-person eroticism: the poetics of the black body in Miriam Alves

Abstract

This article examines how Miriam Alves’s poetry destabilizes the colonial images that have historically confined the Black female body, reinscribing it as a subject of desire, eroticism, and insubordination. Drawing on poems published in Cadernos Negros, it demonstrates how the author transforms the erotic into a gesture of rupture and self-recognition, rejecting the notion of the violable and available body imposed by the national literary canon. In dialogue with bell hooks (2019), Audre Lorde (1984), Grada Kilomba (2020), Carla Akotirene (2019), Conceição Evaristo (2009), Abdias do Nascimento (2016), Luiz Silva (Cuti) (2011), and Lélia Gonzalez (2020), this article argues that Alves’s writing fosters an internal decolonization in which the body ceases to be the object of the narrative and becomes the agent of its own history. Within these poetics, eroticism sheds its ornamental character to emerge as a political tool that opens new paths, confronts silencing, reconfigures memory, and dismantles the “specter” that seeks to control Black subjectivity.