“A lança que o vento lascivo trilhou”

Wind and the Quasi-Thing in Luís Carlos Patraquim’s Mozambican City

Abstract

Luís Carlos Patraquim’s poetry often explores how bodily sensations blend with those of the natural world as they move throughout Mozambique, particularly the urban city of Maputo and the separate, rural Island of Mozambique. Rough winds breeze through both urban and rural spaces of the eastern coast of Africa, offering a fruitful area for atmospheric considerations of the poet’s work. Wind is an irregular and transformative part of the natural, urban, and poetic worlds. In Tonino Griffero’s conception, it is a “quasi-thing”: an affect challenging to apprehend that has often been a peripheral object of desire, capture, and exploitation. Using wind to trace representations of Mozambique and Maputo in the postrevolutionary and postcolonial contexts of Patraquim’s poetic oeuvre, I seek to elucidate how nature—wind in particular—broadens sensations within the body as it moves through Patraquim’s depiction of Mozambique and its cities as poetic sites of sensory appreciation and ancestral experience.