“«Trans» is ever more my prefix”. Some “tours” in “god’s hands” on “our joy has arrived” by Alexandra Lucas Coelho

Abstract

Through a varied number of fictional works, journalist and writer Alexandra Lucas Coelho has created an original register in Portuguese contemporary literature with a strong political intervention upon dominant discourses on national identity and collective memory. Coelho develops circulations in space and time that question frontiers, differences and hierarchies, and builds lucid utopias of new “trans” existences, mestizos, intertwined and sliding, based upon signs and constellations that reveal the reverse of History and of dominant narratives. Her deconstructive multiperspectivism gives new substance to the adjectives post-modern, post-colonial, feminist and queer. This article analyses her most recent novel “Our Joy has Arrived”, crossed with insights from the trilogy that the author dedicated to Brazil, in order to ascertain the aesthetic political and ethical possibilities of looking for social justice through writing from the more central than marginal standpoint of a Portuguese, white cis-woman. How can she write (about) the world?