and another one of mine....

(Ok, I have to admit that it's hard to post these
humble creations on the same pages that host poets
like Sandra Cisneros and Denise Duhamel, but
what the hell, it may be my only chance...)

Quilting
(for N and D)

though we use the same threads
and choose our patches from the same mound
there is still some need to
explain the design, make explicit
the meaning, the final picture.

so, i turn myself inside out for you, so
like a garment you can see my seams and my
rough edges, whatever there is to turn and
run from, whatever there is that can melt into
some small kindness

into the dusk,
there’s tapering, cutting –
here the snipped thread is already too short,
a story that can’t be finished, a version
nipped in the bud,
but there, you see, is another string
to be pulled from the underside
and we’ll just keep at it-
sewing and mending as if life
could go on forever, a bit of frayed
fabric like a warning: better
lift up your head and
get on with things, my girl!

"Barbie bicentenária"

Eis aqui, a nova tradução.
Consegui preparar rápido, graças às excelentes sugestões da Sabrina.
E como sempre, trata-se de trabalho em andamento, assim que aceitamos
sugestões e comentários.


BARBIE BICENTENÁRIA.

Por ser a boneca mais popular
do século XX, a Barbie é enterrada
numa cápsula do tempo na Filadélfia
no dia 4 de julho, 1976. Ela é espremida entre
uma embalagem vazia de Kentucky Fried Chicken
e uma lata cheia de Coca-Cola, pois virou
ícone cultural e agora tem que pagar o preço.
Ela se lembra de um tempo
em que ainda poucas meninas a conheciam
e não precisava fazer tanta pose.
Agora, sendo verdadeiro item para colecionador,
precisa garantir – cada cabelo no seu lugar!
Eu acabo de ser eleita
Garota Personalidade, uma categoria superlativa
do anuário escolar. Posso
posar para foto com o fofinho
do Garoto Personalidade, o primeiro
e único jogador do time de futebol
que quer sair comigo.
Ele diz querer namorar firme comigo
e com outra garota ao mesmo tempo.
Não acho justo, mas sendo Garota Personalidade
demoro demais para o conseguir dizer.
Veja, eu já passei da idade de brincar de boneca,
mas por algum motivo se implantaram no meu subconsciente.
Eu não me pareço nada com a Barbie,
então talvez nem mereça um namorado todo meu. Pior ainda, a meu ver,
minha rival lembra uma delas.
Quando finalmente, constrangida, escrevo um bilhete
para o Garoto Personalidade, o enfio na fresta do
armário errado. O garoto-ninguém que o encontra
não quer devolver, nem quando peço
muito educadamente. Logo todos vão saber
que não sou sempre bem-humorada.
Temendo um escândalo, peço conselhos
aos Mais Bem-vestidos e Os com Maior Probabilidade
de Sucesso na Vida. Estes dizem não se importar
com o que as massas pensam. Sinto que mentem –
mas podem retirar meu título Garota Personalidade,
nem ligo mais. Pelo menos estou melhor
que aquela Barbie Bicentenária que ficará
numa abafada cápsula até o ano 2076.
Talvez ao final, a pressão terá sido excessiva.
Talvez – como eu – , poderá se expressar.
Talvez venha a piscar para a lata de Coca-Cola
antes de sacudirem, explodirem, detonarem
com tudo.


Denise Duhamel
Tradução: Miriam Adelman
Revisão: Sabrina B. Lopes



Em 29 de junho de 2010 12:16, Miriam Adelman escreveu:

Preparo nova tradução...

Gente, aproveito o momento para postar mais um poema
de Denise Duhamel em versão original. Minha
versão ao português aparecerá por aqui em breve...


BICENTENNIAL BARBIE

Because she is the most popular doll
of the twentieth century, Barbie
is buried in a time capsule in Philadelphia
on July 4, 1976. She is scrunched between an empty Kentucky
Fried Chicken bucket and a full Coca- Cola can.
She’s become a cultural icon and now she has to pay
the price. She remembers a time
when just a few girls knew her
and she didn´t have to put on such airs.
Now a full-fledged collectible, she has to make sure
every hair is always in place. I’ve just been voted
Best Personality, a superlative category
in our junior high yearbook. I’m able to pose
for a picture with the cute Best Personality boy,
the first and only football player
to ever ask me on a date.
He says he wants to go steady with me
and another girl at the same time.
I don’t think it’s fair but being the Best Personality girl,
it takes me a long time to say that.
You see, it’s turned out that although I’m too old
to still play with fashion dolls, they’ve somehow become implanted
in my subconscious. I don’t look anything like Barbie so maybe I don’t deserve
a boyfriend of my own. And to make things worse, in my mind,
my rival resembles Barbie quite a bit
When I finally write the Best Personality boy
an angry note, flustered, I slip it between the slots
of the wrong locker. The nobody boy who finds it
won’t give it back, even when I ask him politely.
Soon everyone will know I’m not always in a good mood.
Fearing a scandal, I ask advice
of the Best Dressed and Most Likely to Succeed.
They say they don’t care what the masses think –
and though I sense they’re not telling the truth-
suddenly it doesn’t matter if my class
takes my Best Personality honor away or not.
At least I know I’m better off
than that one repressed Bicentennial Barbie
who’ll be stuck in that stuffy time capsule
until the year 2076. Maybe
when she finally comes out, the pressure
will have been too much. Maybe she’ll be able, like me,
to express herself. Maybe she’ll wink at the Coca-Cola can
before they both shake, explode, make a mess.


- Denise Duhamel, do livro KINKY

Part II of “Telling stories, connecting lives”

“Walls, veils and other social norms...” (Mounira Charrad)

In Brazil, where post-modern freedoms, highly unequal opportunity structures and much discursive ambivalence regarding feminism produce a complex scenario for gender politics and change, the horsewomen I have interviewed over the course of the years see themselves as unconventional, openly or covertly challenging customs and norms that attempt to impose meanings of womanhood on everyone.*

On the other hand, the riding women I interviewed in Spain (Barcelona and Andalucía), especially those of the younger generations, tended not to see their activities in this sporting field as anything that made them stand out from other countrywomen. The patriarchal past that threw innumerous obstacles in the path of women’s choices and public sphere roles and activities is portrayed as largely overcome or surpassed. In fact, when I asked them a question that usually elicited an assertion of “difference” from Brazilian equestriennes, my Spanish interviewees would look at me with perplexity and often ask me to explain what I meant. “Different from others?? Braver than others?? No, we are all like this today”** was the response I got from one quite successful young Andalusian horsewoman - herself the only woman on a prominent equestrian team – after I had had my chance to clarify my admittedly tendentious query.

In the history of Western modernity, the passage from the Victorian or romantic era in which women were viewed as sexless bearers of a natural “virtuous” proclivity toward abnegation, service and love (but not sex) to a “post-modernity” in which ambiguous messages about women’s bodies and sexualities abound, new forms of social control emerge which, we could argue, take advantage of such ambiguities. The most difficult and paradoxical aspect of this situation is that it involves, or tends to generate, considerable complicity from women themselves, who so often desire to be exactly what contemporary hegemonic discourses tell them they should (must) be.

Some non-Western histories, it seems, have quite a different point of departure. Mounira Charrad and Fatima Mernissi have written about how traditional Islamic notions of women as sexual and dangerous underlie the institutional constructions of the “walls and veils” that are meant as material and symbolic barriers to the spaces and places where they would come into contact with men outside the closest kin circles. Western discourse has thus seized the opportunity to construct a simplifying dichotomy of “western freedoms” vs. “non-western bondage”, which – for all I have stated above and many other things that I need not repeat here – is at best, highly contentious. At any rate, as women around the non-Western world struggle to build their own idioms of emancipation - which include elements shared with Western feminism as well as particular, contextual ones – it should come as no surprise that some continue to include headscarves and protectively modest forms of bodily exposure.

*In recent (forthcoming) work, I have tried to show some of the ways in which women involved in different arenas of equestrian sport construct discourses on the body, on subjectivity and identity that pose a challenge to conventional ‘technologies of gender’, de-emphasizing historical notions of delicate, maternal or otherwise “controllable” female bodies and emphasizing such elements as strength and courage in facing risk and adventure - in ways which are radical enough to take them beyond accepted normative paths. Coupled with my informants’ discourse of physical competence, skill and bravery, was a relative lack of (openly expressed) concern for bodily appearance/perfection.
** This coincides with anthropologist Sara Pink’s comments emerging from her work on Spanish women bullfighters: “… a woman’s performance represents a statement about female body-use and body-image. The performance must be seen as a ritual statement about these notions of the female body through which it is relocated in a new position in society and culture -both physically in the bullring and metaphorically. The new body use symbolizes a new body-relationship to the rest of society by which the female body stands for not a reproducing body, but a publicly proven, physically fit body, and a successful, ‘dominating’ body."