TESTAMENTS OF FINITUDE IN THE PLAY THE BIRDS OF THE NIGHT, BY HILDA HILST

Abstract

In the play, The birds of the night a set of characters is condemned to starve and thirst in the death bunker, in the concentration camp of Auschwitz. Hilda Hilst dialogues with History and creates a dramaturgical version of what happened to Franciscan priest Maximilian Kolbe, a victim of the Nazi persecution that mowed thousands of lives on the planet. Those condemned in the Hunger basement takes on speeches that interweave disenchantment and disgust with life. Each, in its own way, evokes thoughts that aim to rationalize the abandonment in which they are inserted. The speeches and interactions between the characters reverberate the whole of a complex web of subjectivities magnetized by conflicts. Speech is a kind of testament of the end, orchestrated by the drives of a carnal, poetic and spiritualistic order that runs through the characters. The essay aims to think about how prisoners face the confirmation of death and how they build themselves in the face of the existential ruins that spreads on their bodies and their actions, most of the time more centered on internal than on the external movement, since considering the action of resisting occurs through thought. Hilda Hilst's characters in this play are constantly fighting immobility, amplified in the basement of hunger.