LUNDUZINHO threads the complexities of the formation of Brazil and the uncapturable African ancestrality of lundu.
Part of the South American Series, Senal.
The title of this chapbook comes from lundu, an iteration of music and dance brought to what is now Brazil by enslaved Bantu people. LUNDUZINHO is a selection of poems from tatiana nascimento's full-length Lundu (published in Brazil in 2016). Through her elaborate syntax, bending and breaking standard Brazilian Portuguese, nascimento threads the complexities of the formation of Brazil and the uncapturable African ancestrality of lundu. She creates neologisms and uses elements of Pretugu's (Black Portuguese), Spanish, English, pajubá (an Afro, Indigenous, Cuír Brazilian dialect), and Afro-Brazilian cosmologies to conjure poetry that is deeply rhythmical, spiritual and ancestral. lunduzinho presents us with the contradictions of big urban centers and how Black, queer bodies move across those landscapes. A sea of transnational, Afro-diasporic, sexual dissident affection in the ebb and flow between original and translation, and all the tongues in between.
Poetry. Translation.