“I will not be myself, I will be us”

Jacinta Passos’s imagined community

Abstract

Jacinta Passos (1914 - 1973) was a Bahian writer, teacher, journalist, political activist, and feminist. In this article, we read poems published in the books Momentos de poesia (1942), Canção de partida (1945) and Poemas políticos (1951), gathered in the volume organized by her daughter, Janaína Amado, entitled Jacinta Passos, coração militante (2010). Our analysis is based on the perspective of “contemporary” by Agamben (2009), Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities” (2008), and decolonial studies. The utopia on the horizon of Jacinta Passos’s work reveals the double gesture of the contemporary writer mentioned by Agamben to adhere to her/his own time and, at the same time, to keep a distance from it in order to better see it. The treatment given by the writer to inequalities of race, gender, and class, as well as the plunge into the time of existence, of experience, in her poems, allow us to interrogate the linear time of the great narratives that gave meaning to the project of modernity and open space for other temporalities, for the active construction of our own present.