“those who are our enemies”

The Self and the Other in Ricardo Domeneck’s Cabeça de galinha no chão de cimento

Abstract

This paper proposes a reading of poems by Ricardo Domeneck, collected in Cabeça de galinha no chão de cimento (2023), exploring the relations of identity and alterity that emerge from the recovery, through memory, of childhood and family, and that involve the poet’s own self. To this end, in addition to engaging with part of the critical scholarship on the poet and his work, we draw primarily on the anthropological perspective of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2018), who conceives a “perspectivist hypothesis” grounded in Amerindian ontological regimes. In closing, we recognize that Domeneck’s well-known aversion to exclusionary dichotomies applies to the selected collection, as we identify the dissolution of rigid boundaries between the self and the other, stemming from the revelation of the constitutive violences of the spaces and communities the poems recover.