HIV/aids e poesia contemporânea brasileira na antologia “Tente entender o que tento dizer”, organizada por Ramon Nunes Mello

Abstract

As we follow humanity during countless historical periods, diseases and epidemics were portrayed widely in the literature. Exactly from specific social, religious, cultural also specific political contexts of societies. Based on the studies of potentialities between “epidemics” and “literature”, HIV/AIDS is considered a fundamental issue of this thesis. In academic studies, we identified a certain predominance of the theme of HIV/AIDS into prose literary books such as novels, short stories, novellas, etc., which also directs us to the understanding of this thematic in the poetic genre. Thus, we aim to comprehend the representations of HIV/AIDS in Brazilian contemporary poetry from the first poetic anthology published in Brazil specially focused on this issue called “Tente entender o que tento dizer: poesia + hiv/aids”. Published in 2018, the work has 101 poems by 96 Brazilian poets, and it was organized by the poet and journalist Ramon Nunes Mello from Rio de Janeiro. We elaborate a brief overview from non-unpublished texts of this anthology, exactly from books focused on the homoerotic universe and surveys on the Internet, and they are from the 1980 to 2021 period time. Its structural elements, its formal and semantic aspects were analyzed with the theoretical-critical contribution of Theory of Poetry, following the examples of Antonio Candido (1970; 1999; 2004; 2006; 2006b; 2017), Octavio Paz (1982; 1994; 2009), Alfredo Bosi (1977; 2015), among others. The panoramic path is followed by reflection on the history and configurations of poetic anthologies, also the critical and authorial function performed by the anthologist in the organization of anthological literary works. We also investigated the paratextual elements of the poem “Tente entender o que tento dizer”, and its repercussions on national literature and culture, furthering a discussion about the Brazilian anthology in comparison with the foreign anthologies “Poets for Life” (1992), “Unending Dialogue” (1993), “POESÍdA” (1995) and “Still Here” (2008). Lastly, it is analyzed in greater depth three poems of Tente entender o que tento dizer: “Ponto de corte”, by Bruna Mitrano, “Célio no céu, com toda a sorte de pedras preciosas”, by Angélica Freitas, and “Cego amor”, by Armando Freitas Filho. The study is structured in the following sections: 1) Introduction; 2) “Literary infections: an overview of HIV/AIDS in contemporary Brazilian poetry”; 3) “Poetic anthologies and HIV/AIDS: the flowers of ‘Tente entender o que tento dizer’”; 4) “The representations of HIV/AIDS in three poems of ‘Tente entender o que tento dizer’”; and 5) Conclusion. In general, the three poems analyzed before elaborating meanings about HIV/AIDS differences from the stigmatizing discourses, which are strongly present in the first decades of the epidemic. By approaching the theme of uncertainties and dualities not only of sex but of life itself, those poems, each in its way, humanize a thematic still marked by prejudice and discrimination.