Poetics of Barraqueira
Brazil is thirteen years apart from me, which means that the Brazilian living in me is a memory. From this memory, I take what my body asks and cries for: it is not belonging that my body asks for, only the poetics of barraqueira to live by. Barraqueira is a female term with no male counterpart in Brazilian Portuguese, and it refers to the woman who doesn’t return home after taking desaforo. Desaforo is when someone feels outraged, so the barraqueira speaks up, acts out, because she doesn’t hold back the words against her. Don’t hold back could be her motto. Barraqueira is a woman who comes from the barraco, and barraco can refer to a house built without an architect’s plan. A barraco can be made by anyone who puts together the will and the available resources to build a place to live. If someone says in Portuguese, “Look at the barraco she made!” it will not mean the house she built; it will mean the scene she made. So, the barraqueira improvises her speech and the places she inhabits. A proper woman plans and builds, the barraqueira feels and rises. Feel with your hands could be her meditation. The poetics of barraqueira didn’t come to me suddenly. As I said, twelve years apart from Brazil, now being a student in Women and Gender Studies in Canada, I became a sort of American. The American living in me is the kind of Canadian who knows that not all things in this world are American. I read that people and women from a Third World exist, and then I also learned big words like solidarity and more words. The Brazilian living me is a translation typed and published in texts. I learn this seated in a chair. By this time, I had forgotten that I myself come from the Third World. I remember in grade seven, through a geography book (red cover), when I learned the world was divided into the rich and the poor, I belonged to the poor picture, not the first world. We all agreed with the book and the teacher, there was no barraqueira in the room. Number two feels much better could be her whispering. Time fast-forwarded land, my body and decades and all, and then I was with my colleagues talking about intersectionality and what it really means. It was at that exact moment that I saw, for the second time in twelve years, the barraqueira entering the room. The first time I saw the barraqueira, years before, she emerged from my translated memory. She came to the room and ripped the velvet heavy curtains in a high-ceiling room at St. Michael's College. I was listening to the speech of a proud author, the proud son of a Portuguese immigrant; his pride was so great that the mother was depicted as a flat character whose biggest achievement was to give birth to him and suffer misery in Canada. I, myself, watched the speech, compulsively crying out of not uncommon anger; however, the barraqueira entered the room, outraged. She ripped the curtains and spoke out loud to the audience, “What is this palhaçada about?” possibly meaning, What is this circus about? The barraqueira shouted out loud to the author, "I bet you don’t even wash your underwear!” The guards took the barraqueira out of the room while the audience covered their mouths. That was not an acceptable speech, and nobody could confess out loud that the barraqueira was loved and hated altogether at that moment. “Share the love for and from who came before you and made you possible instead of denying them” can be one of her motifs. The barraqueira always acts alone, she doesn’t have followers and neither is she part of a community of barraqueiras, a movement of barraqueiras. She is a ritual herself, outraged, with an audience that mostly covers their mouths. They even laugh at the barraqueira, but she pays attention to her heart and not to an audience. The second time I saw the barraqueira was when we were talking e talking about intersectionality in the classroom — again: what it is and what it isn’t. Intersectionality really. The barraqueira entered the room as lightning shouting, “Que palhaçada é essa?” (Again, possibly meaning, “What is this circus?”) I am going to show you what intersectionality is: this. She showed a wound in her left arm. Are you going to pay for my eczema cream, my darling? It scratches the hell out of me, what the fuck is going on here? We all stood up from our chairs around the round table, and between solidarity and safety, we tried to talk to her while we all wondered whether we should call support from the front desk. The barraqueira couldn’t stop until a guard came; nobody went to the front desk, by the way. Don’t touch me! she screamed. Vocês tudo com essa cara de quem comeu e não gostou—you all look like someone who ate but didn’t like it. Talking about intimacies while having this tight ass face! Talk about parts of the human body and their capabilities of expression could be one of her aesthetics. We all went back to our chairs and we made notes and praised the barraqueira. Mine was: in between the raw emotions of a child fresh to this world, the poverty of the third world, the barraqueira uses her poetics as wound unafraid to be open, as Mierle Laderman Ukeles used her hands to wash the stairs of a museum. The barraqueira is herself a word in disguise.