Joana Ruas

Fiction writer and poetess. She published poems in the magazine Nova 2 and fiction texts in the newspapers Diário Popular, Mirante, and Sporting. In Guinea, she edited the page on Portuguese-language African literature in the Guinea-Bissau newspaper, Nô Pintcha, in 1975, translated unpublished texts by Amílcar Cabral, written in French, and collected the legend of the origin of straw skirts in the village of Eticoga, Bijagós. In 1979, she collaborated in the poetry collection Formactos, with a poem later interpreted by soprano Maria João Serrão at the 5th Contemporary Music Encounters of the Gulbenkian Foundation. She has delivered lectures on the East Timor issue. In 2000, she presented the paper «A Guerra Colonial e a Memória do Futuro» at the International Congress on the Colonial War in Lisbon. Her fiction, revealed in 1979 at the Portuguese Writers' Association with a Jury recommendation, questions on one hand the colonial body of the Homeland («their laws don't reach here») and on the other hand the body of the urban areas of the great metropolis («in the city, days and nights do not exist»). The great maladies of solitude and emptiness run through her texts so intensely that the city is transfigured into a large hospital frequented by people who live in the same building but inhabit different galaxies and express themselves not through thoughts, but through simple opinions.