DELUCA, Naná. O sexo dos tubarões. São Paulo: Patuá, 2017.
Marcus Rodolfo Bringel de Oliveira
Illustrated by Marlova Aseff
Translated by Svea Morrell
In the vortex of references that construct reality as we know it, the 2017 novel by Naná DeLuca (Santos, SP, 1989) takes the paths through the cracks in this existential design, stressing elements considered fundamental to both everyday life and literary creation. Hereof, language, from the composition of the characters to the unusual plot, directs the reader to an unexpected world of lyricism, and confronts them with complex themes such as sexual identity, gender, and the various forms of violence associated with these types of life experiences.
The narrative starts with a declaration that the story told in the book, although individual, communicates with several others, thus assuming a collective spirit that will later be integrated into the events of the narrative as a whole. From a child in love with the force and mystery of the sea, the protagonist of the novel transforms into a shark amidst all of their incomprehension and fear, feelings they also experience in their daily life. Briefly identified as a girl in only an excerpt from the work, the child — a category which, in itself, highlights the lack of definition of sexual identity — takes off swimming into the sea, passing through areas each time more distant from the sandy shore of the beach, to places where they cannot touch the ground. Using their parents’ umbrella on the beach as a compass, one day they stumble upon the dead body of a whale, circled by a school of sharks, which causes the child, at the same time, fear and delight as the sharks emit a strange song while devouring the dead body of the cetacean. Already convinced of their destiny in front of the horde of fish considered to be murderers, the child starts to sink and, upon immersing, sees a type of mating between the animals, who nudge and bite each other, sketching maps of their touch on each other’s bodies, without any reproductive purpose. Suddenly, the character is thrown to the bottom of the sea where they are returned to the beach by two sharks, a moment in which the protagonist deeply identifies with the sharks when they realize that “a shark was swimming in their chest.”
In the following scenes, their relationship with the sea deepens through constant offerings to the sharks from the beach, until, faced with a storm, they try to control the sea so that the fish receive their offerings. They are attacked by a man by the water and, trying to escape to the waves, leave their body to transform into the shark that they carried in their chest, and at the very same time the man is killed by a shark. This event introduces the protagonist to a new reality, one under the sea, in which, transformed into a fish, they go through a process of recognition and reidentification, in a mixture of destiny and astonishment, with others just like them, once children who, for one reason or another, perceived themselves as sharks. Within this new existence as a shark, their journey is shaped primarily by learning about that new world through recognizing one’s own shark body, the loneliness of being a shark since leaving their life on the sand, and the animal’s idiosyncratic languages, like the sounds they use to navigate, their tears which tell the stories of each one of them. The sea becomes their world, “liquid homes,” a place that was at first confusing, but which gives rise to definitive identification when exploring its immensity, perceiving themself as a part of the whole, until finally meeting Bê, another shark who serves as a guide on their journey and who becomes their romantic partner.
During their intense relationship with Bê, he urges them to get to know and communicate with the sharks that he presents to them and accompanies them throughout the journey narrated in the novel. Little by little, the protagonist gets to know other’s stories, always communicated through tears. Thus, they come upon the story of the First Shark, a character whose body in agony was welcomed by the sea and who gave an origin to that vivid experience for all, marked by survival and resistance. This process of recognition, their journey through the seas and stories of other sharks, is called the crossing of belonging, during which they see a dead shark being devoured by other sharks, in a ritual that is destruction, transformation, and absorption of life and the feeling of the shark all at the same time. In the same stretch of their journey, they get acquainted with the Island of Dust, constructed by love between two sharks, whose sexual act is described as a constant undoing and redoing of their two bodies, until one of them is captured, ending their passionate relation, and the other lover builds the island, grain by grain, as a monument to their love.
At the end of the book, as Bê tries various tactics to make the protagonist and him dream together, they are able to fly, hovering over the ocean, falling and emerging in a dreamlike movement, Bê dies when he falls from the air, a moment in which the protagonist loses all their references due to the loss of the love and company of the one who understood them the most on this journey. Refusing to give in, resuming refusal, the “no” as the main characteristic of their personality as it has been since the time they lived on land. In the end, Bê’s body transmutes into a butterfly, levitating until finally being collected by the heavens. The narrator highlights the end of their dreams with this exit, leaving only the knowledge acquired through pain and the attempt to reach dreams again and glide like when they were with Bê.
It is really only in the middle of the fissures in the possibilities of being, beyond the cis-heteronormative model, that Naná DeLuca’s book moves, with the author themself identifying as nonbinary and transgender, in other words, they do not classify themselves within a dichotomous model of sexual identity. In this way, language is the tour de force of these productions, whose effects reverberate throughout the writing, which performs a lyricism whose effort to focus on the inability to represent oneself and others is the work’s greatest asset. With words riddled with potency and multi-meaning, aside from an obvious refusal to adhere to the gender markers of the Portuguese language (through the almost complete absence of articles and adjectives), the narrative tone collides every phrase with the borders of this language which is the vehicle of oppression, until it finally shatters, through a dreamlike and metaphoric narrative, into the journey of discovery of being in the face of a world of normative conformities that violate and attempt to limit subjectivities. It is in this context that the role of the protagonist’s body, in one moment a child, in another a shark, becomes central to the piece, escaping binary expectations of cisgendered performance identified primarily in the adult phase. In the ocean, whose capacity to shape itself is a refuge to those who resist such obedience, their new identity permits them to see with other eyes, the rest and themselves. The shark ceases to be a natural predator, a fearsome and abject being and becomes an equal, composing a set of beings that shelter, protect, and (with those with whom they identify) share their stories always shaped by pain— by tears —, formally tied to the immobility of the earth and the sand and now freed by the ability to mold oneself to the sea’s water.
The novel O sexo dos tubarões (The sex of sharks), in summary, focuses primarily on language and binary identities of the Western world as tools of domination, which are stretched to their limit through delirious expression and a plot that borders on the absurd. These strategies are a manner of distending borders of a language that does not encompass all realities, and for this, is incapable of representing and speaking for all of its subjects. Edited in the second decade of the twenty-first century, Naná DeLuca’s work, just like their persona, positions itself in a new literary and editorial context, in which more and more noncanonical literary productions — representing non-hegemonic subjects — have had space to be read and discussed, principally due to their rejection of both traditional narrative and lyrical structures and the most conservative values of the literary field. Therefore, the text amplifies a method of communicating stories hitherto unheard of through an expression that is not only of nonconformity, but also resistance and collapse through the rifts of a reality from which there emerge fragments, new subjectivities, and perspectives of existence.
Further Reading
ALBUQUERQUE, Patrícia Montenegro Matos (2020). Escrita-corpo e as fabulações de gênero em ambientes digitais. Dissertação (Mestrado em Comunicação e Semiótica) – Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, São Paulo.
CHAVES, Leocádia (2019). O sexo dos tubarões, de Naná DeLuca, ou uma escrita que faz delirar. Veredas: Revista da Associação Internacional de Lusitanistas,n. 30, p. 178-190. Disponível em: https://revistaveredas.org/index.php/ver/article/view/476. Acesso em: 28 fev. 2023.
DELUCA, Naná (2018). Quatro perguntas para a escritora Naná Deluca. Entrevista a Fernando Andrade. Ambrosia. Disponível em: https://ambrosia.com.br/literatura/quatro-perguntas-para-escritora-nana-deluca/. Acesso em: 28 fev. 2023.
Iconography
