Without Land or Language: Portuñol as an Affective Memory. Noite un Norte by Fabián Severo

Abstract

"Artigas has a language with no owner", says the poem "Nine" of Noite nu Norte by Fabián Severo, a book of poetry written in Portuguese, the author's mother tongue. It is interesting to note that there are already two editions and that both have different subtitles: Poems in Portuñol and Border Poetry, from 2010 and 2011 respectively. Severo defines himself as a border person, between two countries, from here and there, a mixture that thinks and feels in an intertwined way. The choice of Portuñol would then respond to his own identity, to the way he sees himself. But also to the feeling, that is to say to the affective part: it seems that only in Buenos Aires Fabián Severo can recover the voice of childhood, that voice of a child with which he recreates his own childhood at the intersection with the Other, in the space of the border.