by Aurora dos Campos and Joana Passi de Moraes
Abstract
Crossed by the reading of "A room that is yours" by Virginia Woolf, two friends, artists, and researchers, set out to speculate on - Where are the women? They put themselves on the stage as if to say: - we are here! At the same time, they look to the past and imagine a future.
The essay is constructed from fragments written in various voices - sometimes consonant, sometimes dissonant - composed of critical reflections, speculations, and poetic insertions to think about the place of women. Fruit of investigative drifts, imbricated in the daily life of the two friends, the text proposes writing that is, at the same time, reflection and matter of the bodies and circumstances of those who write. It does not define a place, a woman, and a specific time, but rather evokes a multiplicity of temporalities, places, bodies, and voices. The speculations unfold from three moments: the affections provoked by Woolf's book; appropriations of Josefina Ludmer's concepts "specular" and "realityfiction"; and reflections on the representation of women from a visit to the Biblioteca Joanina at the University of Coimbra. Thus, the essay presents a kind of poetic and speculative testimonial record of the place of women
Keywords: women; collective writing; realityfiction; fragments; essay-poetry; everyday life; speculation;
Convocation
I was on "Instagram" when Lina summoned me:
- "where are the women?"
I remembered you, us, and them.
I remembered you again, friend,
I thought Lina was looking for you too.
We thought we wanted to exist in that place,
And we wanted to go together.
What if we talked about our investigative writing?
What voice can we have? What voice is indicated to us?
What if we talked about Virginia Woolf's "A Room That's Yours?"
What it runs through us a hundred years later...
About how the little-idea-fish metaphor she fishes echoes in us.
What if we talked about the frescoes in the Joanine Library,
where on the ceiling women are allegories of knowledge,
while the male authors populated the bookshelves
And the women in flesh and blood, where were they?
Who "discreet, honest and under their sex"[1] , like Domitila de Carvalho, occupied the corridors of the University of Coimbra.
What if we talked about our adventures in the parish of Bonfim?
The new routes, the encounters, the mismatches.
About moving, immigration, maternity, adaptation in times of pandemic...
About our investigations and friendship.
And so we go on imagining what we could talk-write about,
speculate.
Telephone, message, street, park, dinner, wine, computer, notebook.
And if ...
Reread open call:
"Contributions should be submitted in the period between October 16, 2020 and January 16, 2020." Would that be a clue? The date instead of going forward went backwards.
*
A shoal of ideas, fish caught
"Thought – to call it by a prouder name than it deserve – had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift and sink it until – you know the little tug – the sudden conglomeration of na idea at the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? (Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 1928, p. 19).
A researcher, a writer reflects on a question – where are the women in fiction? –, she is sitting at the edge of a river, watching the water's flow with the reflections of branches and plants on the surface. Suddenly, a fish, an idea pulls the fishing line - the line of thought. It is a restless little fish that is so small and insignificant that it must return to the water to fatten up and grow. But the uneasy fish brought a whirlwind of ideas... And then it disappeared into the grass, interrupted by an encounter with reality: the incipient idea, the little fish was gone. The reality is a woman at the beginning of the 20th century, transiting where she should not, investigating a question outside the place assigned to her by the social hierarchy of knowledge. At the university, men moved freely between libraries, corridors, and through the grass, while women followed on the "pathways", the gravel paths marked off to control their presence.
Therefore, Virginia Woolf describes an encounter with an idea while researching for a conference that she would give on women and fiction. Her fictional essay is grounded on the author's experiences, from which unfolds issues such as the material conditions necessary for writing fiction, the presence of women in scientific books and novels, and the intellectual stigma of women.
Enthused by Woolf's poetic image of 'fishing for ideas', we let loose the line of thought, provoked by the question: where are the women? We fished for ideas that emerged at the meeting of the waters of two rivers - two researcher friends, artists, and mothers, full of restless fish. We shared reflections that we caught, and we returned these fish to the great flow of the river to follow in other currents and find other lines and thoughts.
With the reflections fished, we have constructed this essay: we have collected fragments of speculations and poetic insertions, which complement each other, build meanings, and are sometimes dissonant. We have assembled a writing architecture that encompasses the multiplicity of voices that arise from the central question of the text: where are the women? We turn our eyes to what goes through our experiences, in our walks through the "lawns" and the "pathways" of the city we inhabit as immigrants, the universities we attend, and our homes. Thus, we frame a text that encompasses our particular and collective restlessness; our words and other words. We dilute authorship, mix the waters and observe their flows.
*
Speculate
"The public imagination, in its movement, de-privatizes and changes the private experience. The public is what is outside and inside, as intimate-public. In speculation, there is nothing left inside; secrecy, intimacy, and memory become public. The public imagination produces reality, but it has no reality index; it makes no distinction between reality and fiction. Its regime is "realityfiction", its logic, the movement, the connectivity, and the superposition, overprinting, and fusion of everything that has been seen and heard. This reality-creating force, the matter of its speculation, functions according to various regimes of meaning and is ambivalent: it can turn back or take any direction." (Ludmer, 2003).[2]
*
Entretemps
The sound of the machines stopped, and now there was only a dog. The idea of writing, having in mind what is going on in parallel. To everything that goes by. To what he learns, to what he apprehends, to what runs through his fingers. His life intertwines in parallel dimensions, the 19th-century novel he reads at night, practical problems of the Association he takes part in, big, good, strange problems he has taken on. The work returns, and the dog is a little nervous. His stomach also knows this and tries to calm him down with Rooibos tea.
The dog's barking is heard in another house. It reminds the boys –who live there – of the coziness of lying on the belly of a Labrador.
*
Voices
I talked for a few hours with Jorge Justo, who has worked for decades in the Biblioteca Joanina. Jorge is a kind of janitor of curiosity about the university and the library. He told me, with the vivacity of someone who recounts a recent event, about the entrance of the first woman in the corridors of the University of Coimbra. The first on record, who officially enrolled and obtained a degree at the university: Domitila de Carvalho. As I ramble about the ghosts present in the corridors of the university, about all the women who before Domitila occupied the institutional spaces of knowledge, and about the echoes of their voices, I imagine that we, today, follow the song of these sirens, our ancestors, and our voices, somehow, join theirs.
*
Friendship at Bonfim
We landed back in Porto and thought how important it is to count on a network of affection and support when raising our children. Perhaps, not by chance, we became neighbors. Listening to the siren songs, the ancestors' wisdom, we intuited that being close to each other would be a good choice. And from this choice, we are here - between book exchanges, conversations going to and from the children's schools, late-night messages after everyone is in bed - seeking other ways of studying, writing, and exchanging.
*
Structural Allegories
Two things immediately catch the eye when we enter the rooms of the Biblioteca Joanina at the University of Coimbra: the gold and wood finishes; and the frescoes on the ceilings of the main rooms. The gold and wood, considering the date of its construction, we know are derived from the riches extracted, stolen, and plundered from the Brazilian forests, with the force of enslaved people - also looted, pillaged, and deprived of their African lands. The frescoes, in turn, have women as their central figures:
In the first room, the allegory of Wisdom (university) takes center stage on the ceiling, resting on soft clouds and surrounded by winged figures (angels) who hand her books. The surrounding sanca (cymatium) features four female images whose representation evokes the four continents: Europe, America, Africa, and Asia.
On the ceiling of the second room, its protagonist, Wisdom, holds a jewel tree in her hand, symbolizing care in research, accompanied by a molding that embraces four female figures, now: Honor, Virtue, Fortune, and Fame.
The third room has Wisdom on its ceiling, with a ribbon containing a quote from Virgil's Aeneid ("It is impossible to penetrate the secrets of the Earth before picking the branches with golden foliage from the tree [of science]"). Four muses surround it: Theology and Canons; Justice; Natural Sciences; and the Arts.[3]
From this agile approach on the Biblioteca Joanina, it is possible to speculate on how the "treasures of knowledge" are literally supported by the pillars of women, as allegories of the bases of knowledge, and by the architecture built with raw material from the work of slaves. Faced with bookshelves populated with European authors, on a temporal spectrum beginning in the Middle Ages, the presence of women on the shelves, we suppose, resembles that described by Virginia when searching for women authors on the shelves of the British Museum library (Woolf 1928, 40). This women's author presence is almost insignificant. They appear mostly in a spectral form, in books about women, rarely written by women themselves.
What about the women of flesh and blood? Where are they?
*
Web
"I wondered about the conditions under which the women had been living, for fiction, in its imaginative quality, does not fall like a stone on the ground, like science; fiction seems like a spider's web, connected, though by thin threads, with life. Sometimes this connection becomes imperceptible. Shakespeare's works, for example, seem to be suspended. However, whenever one pulls the web, attached at one end, and, however, routed it may be in the middle, it comes to mind that these webs are not woven in the air by incorporeal creatures but result from the work of suffering human beings, and are intertwined with extremely material things, such as health, money, and the houses in which we live." [4]
*
Overflows
The "quotidian," as we write in Brazil, was thus being "quotidianized," and the places visited were gradually being renamed. That is, they acquired the possibility of having two names: sidewalk-walk; sign-semaphore; pedestrian-pedestrian; crosswalk-walk; lawn-grass, and so on. We start to live another day by day, as if we had plunged into another story, reflecting on the scope of the construction of reality and fiction in everyday life.
*
Build
Josefina Ludmer calls us to speculate on "a new world," another configuration of capitalism, and another era in the history of empires. To understand this new world, we will need other words and concepts, because not only has the world changed but also its models - genres and species – in which it was divided and differentiated. Thus, he defines that "the meaning of speculation is the search for words and forms, modes of signification and regimes of meaning, that allow us to see how the factory of reality works to find its reverse. The secret purpose, the pursued gain, and benefit, of speculation, is to think the world!" (Ludmer 2013, 10).
In this "new world" different from the known, inaugural one, invented by speculation, there are no boundaries between inside and outside. It is a universe of "images and words, speeches and narrations.". Therefore, a universe is established that "flows in a perpetual and ephemeral movement.". This movement is called "public imagination or reality factory; it is everything that circulates, the air that breathes, the web, and the destiny.". All of us, as Ludmer states, can imagine, create, contribute to the "reality factory" and the "public imagination" in a "social, anonymous, collective work of reality construction" (Ludmer, 2013, 7).
*
Approach scales
Strange the urge to move away and closer to you, you feel in first person, but you like to put yourself in third. Like in a movie, she sees herself sometimes in a close-up and sometimes at a certain height. Like a helicopter flying over the city, you fly over yourself. It is more or less that distance that you use to see yourself from the outside.
*
Message Exchange
14:03 (2:08) > "- Another thing, which I think is a key point, that we could put in the essay, in the conclusion, if you think, or somewhere else... that we observed and discussed at the time... That reading "A Room of One's Own" was liberating, thinking about writing formats. When we start writing a text obeying some format, sometimes we get neutered, it's harder than writing in a certain flow. Although, this "inflow" text, that we are doing together, is not exactly easy, right? But what I meant was that we have observed and been inspired by Virginia's writing, by the way, she involves all the questions she investigates in her daily life. So she's in the library looking at books...; she's having dinner with a friend and thinking about how the quality of the environment and the food influences the way they think; she's walking on the grass... And if she didn't talk about her everyday life, which seems banal when you're living it, a hundred years later we wouldn't have a clue about the details. And today, we can perceive those details in a detached way, and the text gains complexity and richness in its dimension. If she didn't do this in the continuum, everything mixed, we would lose the complexity of the text... (1:04) > ... As if scientific writing itself were a fictional construction, somehow a web, right? And this web connects writing to everyday life. When we give clues to what it connects to, we offer an opportunity for the reader, in another moment, to perceive the text with more complexity, with other dimensions. What you said at some point: how much does this way of writing denounce an era? It helps to build a more complex imaginary...".
*
Echos
Everyday time, time for writing, time for studying, time for caring, time for concentrating: fragmented, interrupted, imbricated. Without boundaries. Dressing, eating, playing, reading, writing, stretching, sleeping, stretching, writing. Food, stove, cleaning, looking out the window, walking, writing, researching, thinking. (There are marks of the everyday life in intellectual and literary creation, that pierce through the pores of writing and point to the circumstances of its time, like the ends of the web of fiction, like the relentless materiality of everyday life). The gestures and tracks, which carry the marks of our everyday lives, are like the echoes of our circumstances, and it denotes a tone of voice and writing. We consequently evoke a tone. A tone of our voices in which other voices echo. Not the "good tone", discreet and accepted that was once reserved for women. But the tone that reconciles the voice that enunciates a knowledge with the corporeality of who writes. Writing is like an echo of our experiences. Echoes that at the same time plot and reveal the ends of the web of our daily fiction, our thoughts, our cities, objects, houses, clothes…
*
Comeback
Speculating about "where are the women?" without a defined end, transiting between the particular and the collective, runs into the problem of specific territorial and temporal delimitations. We come up against the impossibility of thinking about women today, here and now, without looking at the places occupied, open, and closed to women in the past.
By looking at our everyday lives, at the private and social places we occupy, we connect to the voices that have thought about and claimed other places for women. The women we evoke, besides ourselves, are also writers and scholars. Voices and bodies that have thought about and opened up other ways of being in the world. By entering into the "realityfiction" of the images and narratives that surround us, we speculate on urgent issues of our present; we seek a language and a writing, which are at the same time "line" and "plot" of what they propose to talk about - where women are.
We drifted over our investigations, readings, and conversations. We find ourselves in a moment that coincides with the circumstances of immigration and adaptations to the radical situation of new confinement by COVID-19. There is no "room of our own" for the exercise of concentrated production, free from the distractions and daily urgencies that break down any boundary one might create between the different spheres of life. The divided attention and the instability of intensities between writing, creation, study, reflection, motherhood, housework, social and intellectual concerns, when amalgamated as a time-space continuum, provoke a particular mode of the creative dynamic present among our words.
We are here, with our bodies, voices, and words traversing the halls of the universities, marking blank sheets of paper with our gestures, echoing the blows of history and the future. Supported by the pillars of the specters of our ancestors, and our ancestors, we dismantle, reassemble, destroy and build, the foundations of our ceilings and rooms.
It is late, the house is quiet. Another dog barks, a seagull cries. It is raining. The children play, still, the children are hardly tired. I hear their thoughts. It is time to end.
Footnotes
[1] - "Discreet, honest, and under their sex, one has demanded from the first women who dared to enter university," Irene Vaquinhas said – she was a student at the University of Letters of the University of Coimbra – on the occasion of the lecture cycle "Raras e Discretas", organized by the Center for History of Society and Culture (CHSC) of the UC, inserted in the 19th Cultural Week of the UC. 2017.
[2] - Josefina Ludmer, in Aqui America latina: uma especulação(2003), works on the concepts of "speculation", "realityfiction", "reality factory" and "public imagination" (pg. 7- 10). According to Ludmer, speculation is an imaginative and critical activity that gives us subsidies to glimpse other worlds. For the construction of this essay, we appropriated the concept "speculate", which unfolds from the play on words pointed out by the author: "speculate" as an adjective from the Latin specularis, with its images, doubles, symmetries, transparencies, and reflections; as a verb, from the Latin speculari, to think and theorize (with and without a basis in reality), "to think with images and pursue a secret end". And speculation as a literary genre: the "speculative fiction" that "invents a universe different from the known, founding it from scratch. It proposes another mode of knowledge. It does not claim to be true or false; it revolves around the as if, we imagine, we suppose: in the conception of a pure possibility."
[3] - Cardoso de Mello, J. (Jul-Dez, 2017.) Arquitetura e mobiliário como história na biblioteca Joanina de Coimbra, Portugal. CLIO: Revista de Pesquisa Histórica, n. 35, 4-23. Retrieved from: http://dx.doi.org/10.22264/clio.issn2525-5649.2017.35.2.do.01
[4] - Woolf, Virginia. [(1928) 2017]. “A room of One's Own”. Macmillan Collector's Library. Londres.
Bibliographic References:
Ludmer, J. (2013). Aqui América Latina: uma especulação. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG.
Cardoso de Mello, J. (Jul-Dez, 2017.) Arquitetura e mobiliário como história na biblioteca Joanina de Coimbra, Portugal. CLIO: Revista de Pesquisa Histórica, n. 35, 4-23. Recuperado em: http://dx.doi.org/10.22264/clio.issn2525-5649.2017.35.2.do.01
Woolf, V. [(1928) 2017]. A Room of One's Own.
Speech by Irene Vaquinhas, a student at the University of Letters of the University of Coimbra (2017), on the occasion of the lecture cycle "Raras e Discretas", organized by the Center for History of Society and Culture (CHSC) of the UC, inserted in the 19th Cultural Week of the UC.
Authors: Aurora dos Campos is a scenographer and Ph.D. student in Fine Arts at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto, Master in Art and Design for Public Space, by the University of Porto. She has a scholarship from the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCTinvestigator integrated in the Instituto de Investigação em Arte, Design e Sociedade (I2ADS).
Joana Passi de Moraes is an artist-researcher, doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program in Literature, Culture, and Contemporaneity at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, with a master's degree in Visual Arts from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Scholarship from Cnpq-Brazil, a visiting researcher at the College of Arts, the University of Coimbra by CAPES/ Print, BR.
Brazilians, currently live in the city of Porto - Portugal.
Comentarios