Conceição Lima, Maria Alexandre Dáskalos and Vera Duart

: the appropriation and the projection of the locus in the process of self-knowledge

Abstract

This exhibition entitled “Conceição Lima, Maria Alexandre Dáskalos and Vera Duarte: the appropriation of the locus in the process of self-knowledge” intends to present and analyze the poetic work of these three African poets, focusing on the question of collective identity and the affirmation of gender identity in these three different contexts, in San Tome, Angola and Cape Verde. To this end, we will understand how the authors search deep in the past of their countries and in their individual and collective memories to recover a national identity and to better understand themselves in it as women and as beings shaped by various oppressions. In this process, the three poets choose poetry as a theoretical language for reflection and presentation. We will choose bell hooks's concept of the margin as a strategic place to understand the use of this theorization carried out aesthetically, as well as the way in which the margin becomes a place of struggle, through the development of a strategy of affirmation that overcomes fear and complex. We will add Gloria Anzaldúa's conception of “La facultad” that explains how fear acts in this marginal place and the capacities and characteristics it develops in the being that lives in the margin. We will conclude by understanding these productions of the margin as resistance and creation opposing it to the “surfemme” described by Julia Kristeva.