There are weeks when literature merely accompanies the world, and there are weeks when literature becomes necessary to its survival. Today, Filamentos — Arts & Letters in the Azorean Diaspora begins one of those necessary journeys.
Over the next seven days, Words Against Darkness — Seven Azorean Women Poets Honored by the Cátedra Natália Correia will bring readers into the luminous presence of seven women whose poetry emerged from the Atlantic islands yet spoke always to the wider human condition. Their words crossed solitude, exile, memory, rebellion, tenderness, and freedom with the rare courage of those who understood that poetry is not an escape from history, but a way of confronting it.
At a moment when the world again trembles beneath intolerance, war, cultural amnesia, and the exhaustion of public language, these Azorean voices return with renewed urgency. They remind us that literature can still serve as conscience, refuge, resistance, and moral imagination. Their islands were never prisons of geography, but observatories of humanity.
Presented by the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute at California State University, Fresno, through the Cátedra Natália Correia, this series also continues the enduring belief that culture must travel beyond borders, beyond nostalgia, and beyond silence itself. Through these seven poets, Filamentos invites readers into what might be called an Atlantic republic of words — a space where poetry becomes a bridge between generations, continents, and fragile human hopes.
For even in difficult times, language still carries light.
TODAY WE HONOR THE POET MADALENA FÉRIN
Excerto do Prefácio escrito pela poeta Ângela Almeida para o livro Dripping Worlds de Madalena Férin em tradução.
“This poetic itinerary starts from the island of birth — prison — ‘an island is no longer made of walls of water / to get rid of it I have wings / I got rid of the island / in my body / but I have it trapped in my soul’ —, enabling the emersion of the other island — ‘…/… the island / promised…’, a symbol of the Tellus Mater… ‘symbol of Tellus Mater, to which he will ascend through an alchemical flight; he also departs from the ‘vegetable city’, not with ‘walls of water’, but with an ‘unopened gate’…/City/where/the blind are glued to the corners/…/City accordion of the night without dawn ever/…’; it also starts from a world in agony — ‘… I put my bow/over the clouds/and I smelled the odor of the/holocaust/…’, ‘…/…world/where I am trapped/and I cry/…’. This itinerary, this liberating flight, supported by an ascending symbolic universe — ‘ladder’, ‘winged’, ‘gods’, ‘angels’, ‘wings’ — starts from this antithetical and dystopian reality, to meet the previous Absolute — ‘the essence of the gaze / is before time/…’.”
“There is a whole summons, which goes through myths, beliefs, legends, mysteries, and feelings, to bring together goddesses and gods, ‘fairies’, ‘mermaids’, ‘Atlanteans’, ‘Love’, the ‘cauldron’ of the Holy Grail, ‘Jerusalem’, the ‘Great Mother’, in the tireless and definite flight from being to non-being, from everything to nothing, from order to the previous chaos to the indecipherable: ‘… in the beginning was chaos/…/…we slept in the abyss/in waters that float/where everything was the same/indistinct from nothingness/…’. But in this winged itinerary, women are also summoned, all the ostracized women — ‘…/woman excluded/…’, ‘the women of Lamec/who hear his voice/water and fire/mixed in the bowl/we have unveiled the sixth/chandelier/…’, ‘a woman of fire/with the moon as her footstool/crying out the pains of childbirth/under her dress/carrying the great sword/…/…/has opened the way for us’.”
“The author of eschatological, apocalyptic, intimate, mystical poetry denouncing inner exile and the consequent exodus — ‘let’s flee’ — Madalena Férin is the author of poetic maturity, the logos of initiatory and therefore inner flight — ‘On the night I /die/ I will spread my /multicolored/ wings…’ —, to find alchemical gold or human perfection. There is an embryonic regression, which in her poetry is brought to us by the incessant desire to return to the primordial sea: ‘O come mermaids/ I’m tired/…/come soon/ to fetch me/ I’ve been waiting/to return to the sea for a long time’; ‘…/but if I write you water/water freed/spelling out your name/ drinking your glow/ here on this page/ the sea rises/ flooding me/ dissolving me/ in its fury’. Once the initiatory flight has taken place, it is possible to reach the other island — the island symbolizing Mother Earth — and (re)integrate the liquid origin of life.”
Filamentos (artes e letras) 