"De mi cuerpo a tu cuerpo": el ímpetu del amor oscuro en la poesía de Ana María Martínez Sagi

The “dark love” in our title inevitably refers to Federico García Lorca. In his poetry as in the verses of our author, the homosexual desire that causes suffering is a fundamental axiom of the lyrical subject. Moreover, as in Luis Cernuda, in Martínes Sagi’s works, the search for love is part of a hard struggle for self-affirmation. In her first collection of poems, Caminos (1929), Martínez Sagi writes about a male beloved who seems to be an ideal rather than a man, but we already find her revulsion towards real men. Since Inquietud (1932), a dark, ambiguous and harmful –for impossible– love reveals the problem of an identity not fixed within the oppressive and traditional sexual identity.
Influenced by Sigmund Freud’s theories, throughout Martínez Sagi’s poetic production, the experiences of desire, pains and sexual ambiguity are connected to the body, since sensory perception is the means by which the complex emotions of the self pass and reach the surface of the verse. In this sense, we will analyze poems from different moments in her creative career, in which the body and its parts are a central vehicles of desire and the sensations it provokes, as well as a means of knowing and recognizing oneself.