Hello world

Hey there!

I'm Ele. I've decided to start this blog for a number of reasons.

First and most importantly, I'm intending it as a space for me to share my favourite writing from the English-, Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds. I suppose the easiest way for me to express my feelings about poetry and other literature is to say that I feel the same way about it as many people my age feel about music. I want to get inside it, have it surround me, feel it shake and pulse in me. Reading a good poem makes me feel, for want of a better word, high; it is my drug. I'm lucky enough to be able to study some wonderful literature at University, but I have nobody with whom to share it, mainly because none of my poetry-enthused friends speak Spanish or Portuguese. Moreover, the literature I am most interest in - that of postcolonial Portuguese-speaking Africa (Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, São Tomé e Principé, and Guinea-Bissau) - has very little exposure on the internet, which is a terrible shame as it is, in my opinion, some of the most beautiful and insightful postcolonial literature out there. I hope to complete a master's and, eventually, a doctorate in these literatures, and so it's useful for me to get my thoughts out about them. I do also love a good deal of English-language literature and I will share that here, too.

Another reason for this blog is that I am trying to recover from anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. The one thing these diseases have in common is that they are singularly dull. So rather than boring the people around me with the details...I'm going to bore my blog with them instead. But don't worry, skip through those posts if you like - they are mainly intended as catharsis.

Finally, I think a lot about modern society and, particularly, its perceptions of women. I'm going to write my thoughts here in order to try to develop them, which will hopefully help me to understand myself more fully.

Going to get things started with one of my favourite Mozambican poems and the namesake of this blog.