The Locus Eroticus in the Poetry of Gilka Machado‪.‬

IN 1922, the year of the Semana de Arte Moderna in Sao Paulo, Gilka Machado published her fifth volume of poetry with the simple but provocative title, Mulher nua. Following the appearance of two more volumes, O meu glorioso pecado (1928) and the anthology Carne e alma (1931), the Brazilian literary review O malho asked 200 intellectuals to cast their vote for the most important female poet in Brazil. Gilka Machado received the most votes, surpassing such noted contemporaries as Henriqueta Lisboa, Francisca Julia, and Cecilia Meireles. Yet despite her considerable literary output in the first three decades of the 20th century, and despite the attention and acclaim she received as a poet during that period, Gilka Machado is curiously absent from the pantheon of modern Brazilian writers. Although she was hardly the first writer to be ignored in the process of canon formation, Gilka Machado's exclusion seems directly linked to the erotic content of her verses, a content that transgressed the rules of what was considered to be good literary taste--especially for a woman writer. In assessing Gilka Machado's place in Brazilian literature it is important to bear in mind that the originality of her poetry derives not just from its representations of physical love, but also from a more generalized feminist critique that made her work every bit as radical and transgressive as the anti-bourgeois poems of her more famous Semana de Arte Moderna contemporaries. Nonetheless, when mentioned in reference works, she is either classified as a symbolist or grouped along with other women writers under the generic rubric "poetisa." Although she published poetry in Festa, the literary review of Catholic "spiritualist" writers Andrade Muricy, Tasso da Silveira and Cecilia Meireles, there is nothing overly symbolist about Gilka Machado's work. In fact, several of her poems are about the working class, poverty and social injustice while many more poems describe a liberated female sexuality that, not surprisingly, gained her a substantial readership. But writing about erotic love also got her into trouble early on with a few very prominent members of the older literary establishment, who publicly derided her work.