Blue-eyed disobedience
Words: Cláudia Pinto
Photos: Sebastião Almeida
There’s a world that begins in Maria Teresa Horta’s gaze and never ends. The sea blue in her eyes is as intense as the Portuguese poet’s own work and life. In fact, you could credit her with many other jobs, including writer and journalist; but it’s poetry that saves her and her poetry that saves us.
We women who write, who have a voice, who have freedom of expression and a seat at the table, will always be indebted to Maria Teresa Horta. She didn’t just nudge open the door for us, she flung back the shutters, regardless of the possible consequences for herself. That’s why she is one of the biggest inspirations for this issue.
She is now 86 years old, with a whole life in her eyes, and always a poem at the tips of her ring-covered fingers. The words dream themselves into life and emerge from her in a free-form dance with no rules. They reach the paper and everything flows. And magic is made. She writes on her lap, on date-marked sheets. She has ideas for poems every day.
But life hasn’t all been roses for Maria Teresa Horta. Her inner freedom collided head-on with a country in the midst of a dictatorship. But that didn’t stop her. The irrepressible face of erotic poetry, of unfiltered journalism, of raw words, she has never let up in defence of women’s role in society, giving them a voice and, above all, giving them a body that desired what, until then, was a place of strangeness and taboo.
The body, the role of women, and sexual desire were some of the themes she wrote about most in the dozens of books, poems and short stories she has published. Maria Teresa’s work began to see the light of day in 1960, but she had always read and written a lot since she was a child, encouraged by her grandmother who took her by the hand to suffrage meetings. In fact, the women of her childhood were all very different from the women of her own time, and ended up playing a very important role in Maria Teresa’s journey.
She came much more into the spotlight with the publication of New Portuguese Letters, together with Maria Velho da Costa and Isabel Barreno, ‘The Three Marias’. Published in 1972, when Portugal was still under dictatorship, they were the subject of legal proceedings, and resulted in a host of international support campaigns for the writers, including from Simone Beauvoir. After the Carnation Revolution, they were cleared of their ‘crime’, but this was only the beginning of a struggle that is still going on, one which Maria Teresa Horta has still not given up.
She always regarded herself as a feminist, even when the name was a label, an insult, a kind of troubled destination. But she never relented. She has opened the doors of newsrooms to women, as magazine publishers, as opinion makers.
In an interview with Público newspaper this year, she stated: ‘I am a woman. It’s one of those words that are part of me. If I’m not thinking about being a woman in today’s society, however unconsciously, then I’m making very poor use of myself. When you’re a woman, you have to understand what that means. What comes next is up to each woman’.
The life of Maria Teresa Horta and of ‘little Teresa’ — the restless child that she was — can be explored and absorbed in detail in Desobediente, a biography published this year by Patrícia Reis.
She has written, writes and (we suppose) will write for the rest of her life. Pen and paper are her weapons of war, in a battle she has won and which allows us to continue fighting.
By Maria Teresa, in her own words:
There is in women
an absence in their sleep
like a knife
between the shoulders
to which the flesh clings
impatiently
healing while
they dream
There is within them too
impatience
the impatient silencing of
our whole body
Smiling not slowly
clearly
at imagined places beyond
what our eyes can see
And within us too
we endure the present
in our daily calm
and certainty
too many women
serene
in their houses
in their beds
in the streets
And as if all this burden
weren’t enough
as if we still wanted more of it
our weary arms give in
as if life
was only meant for dreaming up more
And if with sleep
comes oblivion
how many sleepless nights
might live inside us
