Literature 2021

If 2021 remains as a year of great losses in so many sectors of individual and collective life, the same cannot be said about queer Brazilian literary production. If 2021 remains as a year of great losses in so many sectors of individual and collective life, the same cannot be said about queer Brazilian literary production. From poetry and fiction to historical, memoir and autobiographical accounts, our community seems to be guaranteeing its space in the Brazilian publishing environment, talking about experiences aimed at our dissident existences, or casting a queer look at a more comprehensive collectivity. The presence of young and established authors this year is strong, bringing a wider look at the social chaos that has swallowed up even the most privileged, proving in original narratives the popular wisdom that “those who see from the outside see better”. Or will it be that we are well inserted in all the bubbles already? Would we be apocalyptic AND integrated? It’s not by chance our provocative fusion between these two apparently irreconcilable cultural poles, as conceived by Umberto Eco. We turn errors into triumph and failures into successes, as Jack Halberstam suggests, and even in a country that is the “million-dollar contribution of all mistakes” according to the almost centenary modernist lesson. The Brazilian and international queer community has revealed writers and works that teach the entire publishing environment a renewing implosion of the concepts of literary genre, canon, style, unity, identity, in a kind of reanthropophagy, as suggested by a work by the indigenous painter Denilson Baniwa. They are books that fuse previously irreconcilable trends, such as high literature and popular genres, putting erudition at the service of the lower abdomen and laughter in the research of transcendence, uniting body-performance and poetry-paper, founding hybridism as ethics-aesthetics, the mix of styles as a way of building bridges and imaginary cities in a so divided and hyper-specialized world. We don’t talk just to ghettos anymore. It is diversity unfolding its wandering essences against agonizing totalitarianisms.