One self becomes autofictional in the archive: “igual como?” by Ricardo Aleixo and the self-performances

Abstract

The poet and performer Ricardo Aleixo, holding chair No. 31 at the Minas Gerais Academy of Letters and receiving the title of Notorious Knowledge from Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) in 2022, has taken the Brazilian poetry scene by storm with the concrete influences, as well as the blend of music and prose. Acknowledging the versatility of the poet’s work, this article presents an analysis of the form and content of the poem “Igual como?” by Aleixo, featured in the book Extraquadro (2021). It aims to explore how the notion of autofiction as performance, proposed by Klinger (2006), appears in this poem and how it tensions the lyrical self’s quest for recovering the archives of Black families, constructing an epistemological performance as suggested by Martins (2021). This work also highlights a relationship between the fictionalization of the poetic self and the concept of the archive, as discussed by Taylor (2013). To this end, we seek a parallel between this poem and artists who share the same quest for the archive, such as Gilberto Gil in his song “Babá Alapalá” (1977) and Aline Motta in her visual art “Filha Natural” (2022), identifying how the notions of autofiction, performance, and archive appear in these projections.