“Todos os rios levam a sua boca”

migration and poetry in José Leonilson

Abstract

In an invitation to travel, this essay seeks to think the José Leonilson’s restless nomadism, and how his rooted relations or displacements with space produced meanings of belonging and inhabited his poetic works in constant movement between inside and outside, affective geographies and bodily effects, realities and fictions. For this, the north will be thinking about why his only work in the open and in tessera is in his hometown, the south the movements of people and languages, in an attempt to understand the Northeast as a place of lack, revolt or longing, and geographies as personal and bodily cartographies, until you reach the east, where the “sewing room” will be seen as a paradigm and, to the west, a jumble of travel notebooks that carry aesthetic impulses and life experiments, people, impressions and dreams that make Leonilson want to carry the world on his back, or at least in his works. Citizen of the world, he made his art his baggage.