Compose with:

crossing voices in the body of writing

Abstract

The recently released O Canto Dela (2021) is a work signed by two women, one Brazilian and one Togolese, which is why it bears the plural mark of a unique co-authorship, triggering, fragmentarily, voices and memories of many others, another way of narrating. To think about this co-authorial dimension, we start from the assumption that voice is a body in contact with, and for the writers Ana Kiffer and Marie-Aude Alia it is, therefore, the creation of a joint song, a duet, a desire to share a female writing in the conformation of a text that slides in its restricted categorization as a literary genre. It is a work that questions the shackles of the conventionality of modern (Western) authorship, problematizing it doubly: decentered from a self (unique, singular) and decentered from man (masculine). It is by listening to their singing that we aim to approach, therefore, the poetics of bodies in their movements through different places/corners and potentialities and, therefore, make us think about other forms of writing, via speech/voice/body, other forms of sing that go beyond the individual dimension.