My Poetry Corner June 2023 features the poem “For Your Hypocrisy With a Kiss” (Pra Sua Hipocrisia Com Um Beijo) by Brazilian poet, photographer, historian, and teacher Elisangela Martins, who self-identifies as Eli Macuxi or Elimacuxi. She teaches History and Art Criticism in the Visual Arts Course at the Federal University of Roraima with special interest in feminism and gender identity/orientation. As a historian and photographer, she has partnered with the Association of Transvestites and Transexuals of Roraima in fighting for human rights.

Born in 1973 in the City of São Paulo, she grew up in a favela on the periphery where, for the first ten years of her life, she faced hunger and begged on the streets. Her semi-illiterate father, from the Northeastern State of Ceará, taught her to read and write. With a childhood fascination for verse and encouraged by a teacher, she began writing poetry in fifth grade. At fifteen, she dreamed of having her work read and studied by others:

“But the desire was totally blunted by the pessimistic awareness of reality,” confides the poet on her blog. “I was a skinny teenager, without luck of getting a job, studying at night school on the periphery, ‘daughter of a drunkie,’ with lots of younger siblings. To be a writer? Poet? It was laughable.”

In 1990, as a seventeen-year-old night school student and receptionist at a pharmacy during the day, she married a much older man. Giving birth to triplets soon after did not bode well for their marriage. Before the triplet’s second birthday, her husband had had enough and left them. A divorcee and back home with her parents, she worked for two years at several part-time jobs before securing a steady job as a waitress at a high-end restaurant. 

      

Her future changed after a three-month stint in 1998 as a research assistant for a project in Boa Vista, the capital of the State of Roraima—Brazil’s most northern state which shares borders with Guyana and Venezuela. She discovered a better quality of life in the small, spatial city of less than 200,000 people. In January 2000, she and her partner moved with her three girls to Boa Vista.

For the first time, she saw the possibility of furthering her academic studies. After earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in history at the Federal University of Roraima in 2003, she never looked back. In 2007, she temporarily moved to Manaus to earn a Master’s Degree at the Federal University of Amazonas. On her return to Boa Vista, she taught history at the Federal Institution of Roraima from 2009 to 2013.

In her poem, “Ave Roraima,” published on her blog in 2009, Elimacuxi sings praise to the region that had transformed her life:

Ave Roraima that sings
like the mythical bird.
In the heart of those charmed
by its enchanting lyrics
flowing rivers, warm colors
blazing plowed land burn
howler monkeys in heat cry out.
Even those who come by asphalt
From the noise and the dust
When you see, it is Roraimeira
Pretoneuberliakin...
Ave Roraima that sings
Love that enters and replaces
All the evil in me!

While she pursued higher learning, her love for poetry never waned. She started her blog, Elimacuxi, Pure Poetry, in 2008 and began publishing her poetry in numerous anthologies of poetry, literary magazines, and newspapers. In 2013, she published her first and only book of poetry, Love For Those Who Hate (Amor Para Quem Odeia), which portrays love in its various forms of human experience. Inspiration for the title poem came from a classroom discussion about same-sex love. Because I don’t understand or accept the discourse of hatred against love, the poet notes at the end of the poem.

Her poem, “Abomination,” questions our “perfect world” in which violence, intolerance, exploitation, hatred, and misunderstanding rule the day against what some perceive as an abomination of deviant lifestyles.

We are skillful in survival
blacks, poor people, whores
transvestites, gays, daredevils
we move about dangerously free
becoming a risk
for you who don’t change,
who have no doubt,
for you who willingly live the script
and remain half giddy
to see how we reaffirm
in the crooked lines of marginalization
our existence and pride
our resistance against your humiliation.

In her poem, “Law of Life,” Elimacuxi speaks of hate that drips and spreads within our failed lives. It dirties the floor where [we] tread and blocks the way. Like a faulty razor blade, this hate causes pain to all involved. She concludes: A wise friend taught me: / life has no mercy / and if it’s just pain that you sow / only pain will be harvested.

In the featured seven-verse poem “For Your Hypocrisy With a Kiss,” published on her blog in 2018, Eli Macuxi calls out the hypocrisy of people who are horrified by gay love, but are blind to the abomination and injustices around us: war, environmental degradation, unemployment, hunger, childhood prostitution, and lack of healthcare. The following excerpt comprise verses 1, 2, 6, and 7:

did you see?
war is kissing the earth
exploding child, old, church, man, woman
did you see?

did you see?
greed kissing the environment
destroying river, plant, hill, mammal, snake
did you see?

[…]

did you see?
that in the hospital
the unfairness of the powerful kisses everyone
with their delay
and in full agony,
without beds or materials
the arrogant overflows with kisses of indifference
did you see?

did you see?
tell me if you saw those kisses?
or if you are one of those
who only sees, is horrified and upset
with gay love kisses
in soap operas?

To read the complete featured poem in English and the original Portuguese version, as well as learn more about the work of Eli Macuxi, go to my Poetry Corner June 2023.