The stranger and the shell: spaces of exile in Adriana Lisboa

Abstract

The work of Adriana Lisboa, who is herself an immigrant in the United States, is remarkably influenced by exile. The author’s narrative is characterized by the melancholy, by the mourning – personal and cultural – and by the affections of intimacy. This paper aims to investigate how the exiling experience is represented spatially, particularly in the novel Azul corvo. This experience is depicted as an association with the image of a shell. In Poetics of space, this image is defined by Bachelard as a house which grows as the body inhabiting it does the same. This simultaneous growth takes place in a dialectical movement of the “hidden” and of the “shown” in which the softest being constitutes the hardest shell and, at the same time, produces a turmoil and a way out. In this context, the stranger/foreigner builds the strength of his dwelling out of weakness and death, signalling an exit which, either symptom or cure, is accomplished not as much in actual spaces as in the level of the imagination.