The New Gerbil III

“The children cheered wildly”

And the rat cried sadly

“Speak! We command ye to speak”

But it cannot utter a single word…

It just looks wide eyed, waiting.

“Well, if thou cannot speak, dance!”

But still the rat looked on.

“What are you good for?”

The girl pressed on and on.

                                                On.

Another boy, who sat in the corner,

Looked, also scared at this totalitarian,

He said, “Well, it’s only a little rat!”

“Shut up, Allen!”

“But it is. You cannot expect it to…”

“Shush!”

“Understand.”

He got closer, she got closer, it freezed.

“Someone has to do as I say!”

“Why?!”

The rat squeaked. They looked.

“Because, look it can do things.”

“Not what you want”

“Hmmm…”

They continued to argue. While I,

I was bored, waiting for an end.

Waiting for a sun, waiting for clarity.

But on they went, like maddening tradesman

Discussing prices of stock.

It’s a bloody rat.

                                                Just another rat.

Bárbara Campos

The New Gerbil II

The children cheered wildly. Sebastian was holding a cute little gerbil. He said that if they behaved properly and kept quiet, they could have it. That was worse. The children were beginning to get over-excited by the look of the cute gerbil in Sebastian's hand, almost agressivly. All of a sudden, one of those vile creatures started to bite Sebastian's leg, and the other children followed the example. When everything was falling apart on Sebastian's life, a man suddenly appeared. Literally out of nowhere, like out of the sky. 'Help me! - said poor Sebastian followed by the carnivorous children. 'What? - said the man that came from the sky, whose name was Billy. Sebastian couldn't answer because of his urge, he was only capable of getting near Billy's strange figure. Suddenly, Billy took a glimpse at the poor Gerbil in Sebastian's mutilated hand and felt alarmed. He took it from Sebastian's hand and thus the crazy children's attention moved to Pilgrim's innocent body. When they were almost reaching Billy with they're sharp teeth, leaving Sebastian's bloody hands and legs and feet behind, he disappeared. The gerbil disappeared too, but not in Billy Pilgrim's embrace. The New Gerbil was forever lost in time, destined to turn other "innocent" children into Satan's evil minions. 

Lourenço Veiga

The New Gerbil - I

The children cheered wildly. I could hear them across the yard, through my closed windows. In the silence of the book lined room, heavy and still, their cheers reverberated like pebbles made to skim and plop on the surface of a lake. I try to live in the now, to look on the new and the beautiful, to see and hear hope and life. Those infant sounds, so loud, so disruptive of my solitude, brought painful recollections. Suddenly everything was there again. The horror, the insanity of my cousin’s death. I am again lost in the images, in what I witnessed. Sebastian’s body torn, blood. I hear the chant of those other desperate children. I know that is not my present but the past follows me. People have tried to make me believe that what I know to be true isn’t. That my experiences are imaginings of a delirious mind. But the truth is what I saw, the truth is was I told. From the other side of the window glass I hear new sounds, louder, stronger. There is no way to avoid them, I want to know, to see what is going on. I go to the window and I see a group of young children jumping, clapping and cheering around a tree stump. As I open the window to better hear, to see more clearly, I notice the smallish animal, rodent like that stands on its hind legs and speaks to the children. I hear part of what he says: “maybe”, “that’s sound”, “done as a demonstration”. Because I no longer stand in awe of anything, because I have learned from Sebastian all that I can be, I am not shocked, not even surprised. I am telling this story because it is true, I am sure of it, I was a witness. People will doubt me, surely, but that is because they have lost the ability to believe and to wonder, to marvel. I will keep telling the things that I live, that I see. Isabel Baptista

Pussy Riot (2012): Santa Maria Livra-nos do Putin

Poema VI da Sequência "Sources" de Adrienne Rich (1986) em comparação com "Daddy's Li'l Girl" (1990)

proposta de Madalena e Lourenço:

Sources

VII

For years I struggled with you: your categories, your theories, your will, the cruelty which came inextricable from your love. For years all arguments I carried on in my head were with you. I saw myself, the eldest daughter raised as a son, taught to study but not to pray, taught to hold reading and writing sacred: the eldest daughter in a house with no son, she who must overthrow the father, take what he taught her and use it against him. All this in a castle of air, the floating world of the assimilated who know and deny they will always be aliens.

After your death I met you again as the face of patriarchy, could name at last precisely the principle you embodied, there was an ideology at last which let me dispose of you, identify the suffering you caused, hate you righteously as part of a system, the kingdom of the fathers. I saw the power and arrogance of the male as your true watermark; I did not see beneath it the suffering of the Jew, the alien stamp you bore, because you had deliberately arranged that it should be invisible to me. It is only, under a powerful, womanly lens, that I can decipher your suffering and deny no part of my own.

Daddy’s Li’l Girl

I have no desire
I can't feel a thing
I just want to make him happy
Daddy's little girl
Daddy's little girl
Daddy's girl don't wanna be
His whore no more
Food
Shelter
Love
I need to hold my tongue
I need to hold my tongue
Didn't know I'd have to lose so much
For Daddy's love
Didn't know I'd have to lost myself
For Daddy's touch
Listen!
Listen!
Listen!
Daddy has something to say
He has something for you to do
And he wants it done right now
And he wants you to do it his way

Some info on Women's Rights Movements in the US

Particularly here

Adrienne Rich, "Orion" (1969)

Far back when I went zig-zagging
through tamarack pastures
you were my genius, you
my cast-iron Viking, my helmed
lion-heart king in prison.
Years later now you're young

my fierce half-brother, staring
down from that simplified west
your breast open, your belt dragged down
by an oldfashioned thing, a sword
the last bravado you won't give over
though it weighs you down as you stride

and the stars in it are dim
and maybe have stopped burning.
But you burn, and I know it;
as I throw back my head to take you in
and old transfusion happens again:
divine astronomy is nothing to it.

Indoors I bruise and blunder
break faith, leave ill enough
alone, a dead child born in the dark.
Night cracks up over the chimney,
pieces of time, frozen geodes
come showering down in the grate.

A man reaches behind my eyes
and finds them empty
a woman's head turns away
from my head in the mirror
children are dying my death
and eating crumbs of my life.

Pity is not your forte.
Calmly you ache up there
pinned aloft in your crow's nest,
my speechless pirate!
You take it all for granted
and when I look you back

it's with a starlike eye
shooting its cold and egotistical spear
where it can do least damage.
Breath deep! No hurt, no pardon
out here in the cold with you
you with your back to the wall.