Poesia, alteridade e memória em Narlan Matos: Diálogos Interculturais

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the categories of Lyrics, Otherness and Memory in the poems of Narlan Matos, a Brazilian contemporary poet acknowledged by the international literary criticism, but that is still rising in the national territory.

The following questions guide the analysis: What makes Narlan’s readers able to understand his production, regardless of the territorial divisions in which they are found? In what manner the concepts of memory and otherness pass through his poetry? Which echoes are produced by his poetical voice considering memory and otherness? Parting from these questions, the general objective is: To analyze fragments of the poetical composition of Narlan Matos’s work, identifying memorial images of his childhood in relation with the otherness. This work becomes relevant in a manner that knowing, researching and advertising Matos’s work is the same as giving voice to a contemporary poet that lives abroad (USA), yet carries with himself in his verses the images of a Brazil full of nostalgia and a sense of nation. To make this study viable were of the poems of Matos that are related to the categories of Lyrics, Otherness and Memory, such as Senhoras e senhores: o amanhecer! (1997); No acampamento das sombras (2001); Elegia ao novo mundo e outros poemas (2012); Um alaúde, A Península e teus olhos negros (2017); Canto aos homens de boa vontade (2018); and Eu e tu, caminheiros dessa vida (2019). This research is grounded in Paz (1982), Kristeva (1994), Bosi (2000), Durand (2001), Bhabha (2001), Borges (2000), Maffesoli (2001), Cruz (2007), Adorno (2010) e Penalva (2017), among others. This research on Matos presents analysis that used the poetry as a medium to understand how the sensible language of the lyrical persona is finding space in the worldwide poetry, regardless of the territorial and cultural divisions. Conclusively, some poems (of many that deserve attention of further research), considering only the ones chosen to study the memory and otherness throughout the poet’s work, create echoes in the reader that sometimes listens from the outside, as a foreigner, and sometimes is inside the poem, as a writer, trying to find the self.