Cuíer: Queer Brazil, published in 2021 by Two Lines Press, is part of the Calico series, compact (both in page count and in physical size) themed anthologies of literature in translation. as its title indicates, Cuíer collects a mix of (a few) classic and (more) contemporary queer writers from Brazil, mostly short fiction but a few poems as well (including a prose poem by Cristina Judar), in a bilingual format, with English translations on the right and the original Portuguese on the facing page. as usual for anthologies of this kind, there were some things I enjoyed and some things I thought were, you know, fine.
the highlight for me was unquestionably Tatiana Nascimento’s poetry. Nascimento is the founder of padê editorial, which published two of other books by Brazilian writers that I’ve reviewed — Juliana Motter’s desculpa por ainda escrever poemas de amor and Esteban Rodrigues’s sal a gosto — but this was my first time reading her own work, and it ruled. I particularly loved the long poem “cuíer paradiso”, which opens her section, both a celebration of the (superficial) simplicity of queer love and a utopian polemic towards the titular paradise:
pra mim o paraíso cuíer podia ser menos burocrático que
casamento igualitário regulado pelo estado
(porque é o mesmo estado que paga
a policía pra matar a gente,
lembra?)[...]
podia ser menos tudo que dá esse cansaço,
essa desesperança, essa desconfiança
pra mim um paraíso cuíer podia ser
mais tranquilo, mais respirado
podia ser eu y você num dia ensolarado(mesmo que daqui a pouco fosse cada uma pra um lado;
eu ia gostar. ah, e a parte do pecado, essa parte
eu ia gostar também)[to me, a cuíer paradise could be less bureaucratic than
marriage equality regulated by the state
(’cos it’s the same state that pays
the police to kills [sic] us, remember?)[...]
it could be less of all that makes us listless,
hopeless, trustless
to me, a cuíer paradise could be
calmer, airier
it could be you + me on a sunny day(even if in a minute we parted ways;
I’d like that. ah, and the sinful part,
that part
I’d like that too)
(tr. Natalia Affonso)
I love that way Nascimento hints at the speculative as she draws together queer, Black pasts, presents, and futures (“‘gente é pra brilhar / não pra morrer’ / sem nome” [people shall shine / not die / nameless], concludes her final poem, “manifesta queerlombola, ou tecnologia / ancestral / de cura / amor / y de / prazer:” — and you all know I love an extremely long title).
the other highlight — tonally very different — was, I think, Raimundo Neto’s two short stories, and particularly “A tia de Lalinha”, a harrowing and moving story about a trans woman walking her niece to school. Neto (who goes by masculine pronouns but whose bio references “growing up femme in Brazil’s largely rural and working-class Northeast region”) does a particularly good job both here and in his other story, “A noiva”, of balancing adult and child perspectives — the way Lalinha recognizes but does not fully understand the hostile attention focused on her aunt; the way the boy(?) in “A noiva” is still coming to understand the weight of gendered expectation and transmisogyny/homophobia in a way that lets him(?) cross their boundaries, even if only for a moment.
some of the other selections I enjoyed were Carol Bensimon’s wry short story “Uma casa nova”, about a Brazilian woman in Boston observing her rich white neighbor; João Gilberto Noll’s “Acenos e afagos”, a meditation on adolescent sexual awakening; and Ricardo Domeneck’s poems, the last part of the anthology, which are very sweet. the tonal shifts and contrasts across the pieces collected here are, I think, the anthology’s greatest strength, even if not every piece moved me: Cuíer does not shy away from hetero- and cisnormativity in Brazil, but it also does not limit itself to documenting homophobia and transphobia, making room not only for grief and anger but also for horniness and exasperation and joy and glimpses of just a normal day. it is, I would say, a whole greater than the sum of its parts, one of the marks of a good anthology. definitely worth a read.
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