Poems of political prisoners

Abstract

Inscribed in the broad framework of resistance literature to the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship, the poetry of ex-political prisoners still occupies a marginal place in primary bibliographies and critical studies on the literary production of testimonial content. We aim to compile a significant sample of poetic elaborations written by the "political prisoners" of the dictatorship, situating the field of impasses that this corpus related to the experience of arbitrary imprisonment condenses and enacts. As it is an effort to systematize this production, this article is descriptive and does not aim to present an analysis (aesthetic or sociological) of the authors, works, or poems mentioned. Based on the field opened by the debate of Heloisa Buarque de Hollanda, we use the expressions "prison poetry" and "prisoner poetry" to designate the poetic productions of ex-political prisoners, written during or after the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship. We do not ignore the multiplicity and heterogeneity of this "genre" and the inaccuracies and impasses that such provisional designations may engender. Every effort to gather, classify and inventory is susceptible to deletions and mistakes. Finally, we do not intend to make a totalizing presentation, which includes all prisoner poets, but list a significant "sampling" found in the research process. To organize this review work, we divided the article into three sections: edited works; prison poetry and the resistance press; the poetry of political prisoners in the archive.