Teaching Subjectivity. Travelling Selves for Feminist ... - MailChimp

Resorting to unarticulated cries, to moaning and sighing, to touch, is
another way of saying what cannot be said in words, and of involving the body
in a quest for that other way of expression. The mystical love poem of Sister
Maria do Céu “A esposa dos Cantares” [The Spouse of the Chants], which
echoes the Canticle of Canticles, fully expresses that rhetoric of the sighs, the
moans, the clamours:
Ternissimo suspiro
Rompe pelas prisões do silêncio
Diz-lhe que, amante, clamo
Si em este fino empenho
Não alcanço uma palavra
Quando, ai amor, suspiro por um verbo.
Diz-lhe que a seus aromas
Arrojo meus alentos
E ao buscar as fragrâncias
Bebo os ares, as cores perco. 28
Resorting to the rhetoric of the sighs and of the cry, experiencing a
syntax of fire, inscribing the body in the writing, these texts search for another
language, another articulation of speech.
With their powerful and joyful writing, their erotic dreams and visions,
the Sisters’ texts introduce fissures in the hegemonic speech on women.
With their openness to alterity, they configure a receptive, interrelational
subject that grows apart from the autonomous subject of the western tradition.
With their aesthetics of pleasure and suffering they point out to another way
of understanding the relationship between body and spirit, reason and the senses.
These are texts that search for another way to say the unspeakable, the
excess, the love, the desire. They configure a quest for another kind of word,
different from the institutionalised word; a word that disarticulates knowledge
and love. In that sense, these texts travel to the present time and still have
something to say.
With the Sisters’ writing I have learnt to look far.
I have also learnt to look afar, which allowed me, in turn, to understand
how transient and ephemeral things are and, therefore, to treasure the moment.
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[Oh tenderest of sighs/break the chains of silence/tell Him his lover is calling/since in this loving commitment/I
remain speechless//when, /when, my love, I sigh for just one word./Tell him that to his scents/I owe my breaths/and searching
for such perfumes/I drink the air, I loose my colours.] Soror Maria do Céu, Enganos do Bosque , Desenganos do
Rio, 273.
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