Maria F. Nicolau’s Para os olhos que não enxergaram a humanidade em mim is not merely a book but an act of defiance, tenderness, and reclamation. It stands as a poetic manifesto written from the edge where the body meets the word, where silence gives way to speech, and where erasure is met with the persistence of existence. Every page breathes the pain and resilience of a life lived at the intersection of rejection and self-affirmation. The title itself, which translates as For the Eyes That Didn’t See the Humanity in Me, challenges the reader before the first line is even read. It dares those who have refused to recognize the author’s humanity to confront the weight of their blindness.
This work is structured into four sections: Gênese Amorosa da Travestilidade, Incisão da Necessidade, Anatomia da Humanidade Negada, and Geografia do Afeto. Each part moves through the layered landscape of travesti experience, one that combines memory, trauma, and revelation in a rhythm that feels both intimate and revolutionary. Nicolau’s writing resists the neat boundaries of genre; it is poetry and testimony, philosophy and cry. Her words are cut from the raw material of life itself, stitched together by the necessity of survival and the hunger for love.
