Sociedade dos poetas tortos: a primavera periférica

Abstract

The dissertation presented here starts from an experiment we had been doing since the graduation course (degree in Geography): always linking curricular contents to literary expressions. This concern arose from our affection for the literary arts – poetry, short story, novel, chronicle, prose – and from our impression that the schools we passed through (either as graduation students or teachers) in many cases repressed the literary urge of the students who expressed themselves in a more lyrical way, especially those from ghettos and who carried ghettos in their bodies. Geographicities (geographic spirit of presence in the world) intertwined in the school space, often inclined to a poetic annunciation – poetic geographies – are often brutally buried with the outdated conception of pedagogical practicing. But the seeds of resistance have their own regrowth structures: insistent, poetry blossoms. While the hegemonic discourse confines the cultures from ghetto to epistemicide, to the waste of experiences, people do not expect license to make literature: they simply do it. And if it cannot be in school, it is going to be on the streets. While we were in this stage of finishing the degree and entering the masters in education, we had the first contact with marginal literature – the one written in the ghettos, by and for marginal people. One of the ramifications of the literary marginal movement in Brazil was the advent of Poetic Slams – battles of spoken poetry. Born in the rough areas of Chicago in the late 1980s, slam is a performative genre of literature featuring subjects who do not have to leave their neighborhoods and go downtown to participate in the intellectual life of the city. Since 2008, the literary modality of slams has grown in Brazilian cities, sowing the culture of poetry spoken in the ghettos, which are treated by the dominant elites as a source of cheap and affordable labor. The present work consists of an effort to map some literary movements and sociocultural contexts that contributed to the consolidation of a literary genre of the Brazilian ghettos, leading to a presentation of the roots and actors responsible for the emergence of the Slam de Perifa, poetic slam that was born in Santa Cândida – a neighborhood in the eastern zone of the city of Juiz de Fora. The messages spread by the poets in Slam de Perifa (and in the culture of slams in general) unveil information and events that do not circulate in the hegemonic media, or circulate totally distorted and manipulated to favor dominant logics. "Perifa é voz, perifa é nóis. Slam de Perifa!".