Reinata Sadimba, Paulina Chiziane, Isabela Figueiredo – resistant bodies that tell and multiply stories

Abstract

The objective of this article is to highlight certain artistic works which reflect on the female body. Specifically, it intends to examine how aggressions and constraints imposed on women’s bodies are revealed, namely, in the works of Mozambican writer Paulina Chiziane, Mozambican sculptor Reinata Sadimba, and Portuguese writer Isabela Figueiredo, who was born in Lourenço Marques. Their writing or modelling of clay presents itself as a territory for exposing wounds, denouncing abuse, and thinking about the female condition, whether in traditional African societies or the so-called modern world, both during and after Portuguese colonialism. The works of these artists can be seen, therefore, as catalysts of resistance and drivers of a new context, in which aggressions against the female body are at least named and exposed so that they may, one day, be overcome. The violence which has befallen Mozambique, in the past and the present, reverberates in the artworks of the women studied here. Felt in the body: the skin, the sex, the mouth and tongue they tried to silence, and the ears they filled with words addressed to them for being women; the personal experiences of the artists became rich material for the elaboration of their works. These works are replete with references to these target bodies in different hues and geopolitical scenarios, bodies which have been attacked by patriarchal, colonialist, and misogynistic society.