IBIRI-ki: gesto-costura para outras imaginações

Abstract

What I name IBIRI-ki here is a method, procedure, a poetic, literary gesture of return to memory (living and ancestral) and also of breaking, to the extent that as the movement of return itself generates other folds, in language and senses. I start from the poetics of my own confessions and my grandparents' lines, relating the initiation into Vodun Nanã to a search for other notions of healing, which arise from other ways of existing and systems of interpretation and can generate other connections to life. I learned to write together the anti-asylum mental health community, so think about language and creation within the illness x mental health paradigm, from other perspectives of the world, is urgent for me. The poetic artlife of Stella do Patrocínio and Dona Zôi, two black women who had their lives intercepted – in different ways, respectively, in the asylum and in care in freedom – due to mental suffering and social stigma of the mind, provide theoretical support, the foundation of this search. In the proposed meeting between the transits from the ground on which I was planted, with the embodied poetry of Stella and Dona Zôi and with the mythopoetics of Nanã, her instrument, the Ibiri, merges with Oriki, a literary genre of the Yoruba people, instrumentalizing us in the sewing paths of this research and, establishing, in the form itself, other reliefs, geographies, landscapes and imaginations. Oriki gives verse to names, people and things, to what is alive and life produces. They are simple verses, as a poetic gestures, small narratives, which, bringing together their descriptive fragments and their larger stories behind the short words, act together with the ancestry of the poem, the unsaid, the imponderable. The Ibiri is the instrument that gestures Nanã's domains and dance, the return, break, decantation and resignification of the movements of language, as well as of life, in contradiction with the mortification imposed by the stigma of madness. Ibiri-ki as a theoretical-conceptual operator, weaving encounters, in multiple lines, which here start from the visual and audiovisual creation present in the thesis, as the birthplace of writing, and which also establishes in itself what I understand. as Crossroads Methodology, a mode of investigation given by research and woven not only by the meeting of these lines, but by the chimeras – the processes of poetic hybridization between them. The research is born from the study of languages as a fertile ground, crosses and is crossed by a sociogenic and countercolonial analysis and recognizes as part of the radical imagination. Other fundamental notions are also launched, like arrows, such as uplift performance or theoretical pulls. We start from the question, whether it would be possible to deal with mental suffering, thinking about it from culture, from other forms of imagination and we end up managing a network of possibilities that intertwine to point us back to the land, to the gourd, to planting, to the diversity of forms and modes, to the expansion of life, in a counterflow movement to the world as an asylum.