Naidna de Souza: The Word Mis-aligns, Crosses the Edge and Plays on the Crossroads

Abstract

Through the poem “Linhas”, by Naidna de Souza (2015), our reading is guided to think about its poetry and discourse production, intersected by exclusions of gender, race, class, and, above all, by the experience of mental suffering. Naidna is a poet, performer and painter, and attends the Centro de Convivência da Rede de Saúde Mental that replaces mental hospitals, which is established as a public policy in the city of Belo Horizonte-MG. Even after the Psychiatric Reform Law and the consolidation of the National Anti-Asylum Movement, important setbacks have been imposed on the guarantees of national rights in the mental health area. We think of poetry as production of becoming, as an agency of lives (DELEUZE, 1977) and narratives that are historically vulnerable from eugenic ideology, from necropolitics (MBEMBE, 2016) and biopowers (FOUCAULT, 1979), which are systematically reorganized as a state project. The experience of art and language is made in an attempt to eradicate violence and violations. Naidna de Souza's poetry is established as an enunciation portal, which operates through reexistence (SOUZA, 2009), in the collective and community discursive sense, affirming the life of a narrative group that finds itself in the redefinition of the crossroads (PONTES, 2019).