FAZ MAL!

Faz Diferença – a poem by Nadja Abt

In a large supermarket in Lisbon, we discovered a cod can whose motif caught our attention. A housewife with a cooking apron holding the dried fish in her hands.

You are not a fish, you are a UFO, a rock guitar, you are Christ on the cross in the hands of Mary, you are a supposedly stinking vagina, you are the emblem of bloody seafaring, you are tradition in Portugal, in Greece, in Norway, in Germany, you are a weapon and we are now using this weapon. Against patriarchy. We don’t need an apron for that, but thanks anyway for the Mother’s Day gift.

BACALHAU BACURAU

You are carried in the hands of the happy beaming woman. Yet we know how heavy this dried thing weighs in the arms. And how it stinks.

Não faz mal.

Anything matters.

FAZ MAL!

Fass mal nicht an.

Don`t touch it.

We’re going to do what Man tells us NOT to do.

Nothing bad. Just not nothing.

This is an anti-seafaring voyage. We don’t go around in circles, we turn around.

We are turning around ourselves.

We stay on land, because we don’t want to discover.

We discover ourselves.

To the journeywoman pieces of myself. (Audre Lorde)

* Não faz mal is a Portuguese expression meaning: It`s okay, never mind, it doesn`t matter. Faz Mal means: it`s bad, it does harm. Faz Mal! can also mean: Make something bad!

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