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Abstract
Although there are many, mostly male, contemporary writers in Brazil whose narratives of urban violence and social inequality implicitly reflect the impact and legacy of slavery on contemporary society, it is interesting that this shameful period, and shockingly brutal events which seem to prove wrong the myths of gentle colonization and harmonious racial democracy, should be chosen as subject matter by four women writers. While very different novels, Adriana Lisboa’s Os Fios da Memória [The Threads of Memory] (1999), Conceição Evaristo's Ponciá Vicêncio (2003), Ana Maria Gonçalves's Um Defeito de Cor [A Defect in Colour] (2006) and Tatiana Salem Levy's Paraíso [Paradise] (2014) all deal frankly with the horrors of slavery and its aftermaths from the point of view of the most vulnerable member of colonial society: the enslaved African woman. This article analyses the ways in which these writers claim justice for their characters and remind readers that those excluded from official histories had names, faces and voices.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Nicolas Bourcier, “Brazil Comes to Terms with its Slave Trading Past,” Guardian Weekly 23 Oct. 2012, available <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/23/brazil-struggle-ethnic-racial-identity> (accessed 5 Sept. 2016). The remains have been integrated into an African Culture and Heritage Route around Rio.
2 Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination [1995] (London: Verso, 2002) 2.
3 For ease of reference, I shall refer to the first three novels in abbreviated form as: Fios, Ponciá and Defeito. Note: all translations from Portuguese are my own.
4 “Palimpsest narratives,” in the words of Ashraf H.A. Rushdy, are texts that
ask questions about cultural and family secrets, explore the idea of a memory repetitively haunted by a historical event [in this case, slavery], and meditate on what the past means, can mean, should mean, for a present […] subject tortured by a recollection of the past in an ahistorical society. (Remembering Generations: Race and Family in Contemporary African American Fiction (Chapel Hill and London: U of South Carolina P, 2001) 5)
5 Rushdy argues that what palimpsest narratives insistently suggest “is that the family secret of an individual family is symptomatic of the family secret of the nation – slavery itself” (ibid. 10).
6 Ibid. 5, 27.
7 According to a research project conducted by the University of Brasília between 2003 and 2005, which analysed all the novels (258) published by Brazil's three largest publishing houses between 1990 and 2004, 23.8 per cent of the authors were women, 37.8 per cent of the characters were female, and only 7.9 per cent of characters were Afro-Brazilian, 5.8 per cent protagonists and 2.7 per cent narrators. And there were only three Afro-Brazilian female protagonists and one Afro-Brazilian female narrator. See Regina Dalcastagnè, “A personagem do romance brasileiro contemporâneo, 1990–2004,” Estudos de Literatura Brasileira Contemporânea 26 (2005): 13–71, 45, 46; Regina Dalcastagnè, “Quando o preconceito se faz silêncio: relações raciais na literatura brasileira contemporânea,” Gragoatá 24 (2008): 203–19.
8 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, eds. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana UP, 1991) 34–35.
9 Dawn Duke, Literary Passion, Ideological Commitment: Toward a Legacy of Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian Women Writers (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2008) 17.
10 Leila Lehnen notes that the story of Kehinde, the protagonist of Defeito, is “composed of many smaller acts of bravery, rather than grand gestures – though these are also present” (“Growing Up to Human Rights: The Bildungsroman and the Discourse of Human Rights in Um Defeito de Cor” in Literature and Ethics in Contemporary Brazil, eds. Vinícius de Carvalho and Nicola Gavioli (Abingdon: Routledge, in press) 88–105.
11 See Herbert S. Klein and Francisco Vidal Luna, Slavery in Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010) 121; bell hooks, “Sexism and the Black Female Slave Experience” in Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism [1982] (London: Pluto, 1990) chapter 1.
12 <http://www.adrianalisboa.com>. The homepage of the author's website includes a quotation by the Nobel Prize winning Portuguese author José Saramago that “Adriana Lisboa é uma autora para o presente e para o futuro” (Adriana Lisboa is an author for the present and the future).
13 <http://nossaescrevivencia.blogspot.co.uk>. The publication of Ponciá Vicêncio was part funded by the author herself and despite being on several university syllabi, part of the Vestibular (university entrance exam), and translated into English (by Paloma Martínez-Cruz (Austin: Host, 2007)) and French (by Paula Anacaona (Paris: Anacaona, 2015)), it is poorly distributed in Brazil and very difficult to find in bookshops there.
14 José Riço Direitinho, interview with Tatiana Salem Levy, “O Brasil tem dificuldade em escrever a própria história” [Brazil finds it hard to write its own history], Público online 7 May 2016, available <https://www.publico.pt/culturaipsilon/noticia/o-brasil-tem-dificuldade-em-escrever-a-propria-historia-1730288> (accessed 9 Aug. 2016).
15 Since her race is not mentioned (and that of some other characters is), the reader assumes that Ana and her family are white because of the lifestyle that is described, as well as physiological features. However, her racial heritage becomes more complicated as the novel progresses, perhaps in order to make a comment about the mixed-race past of those who identify as white – in other words, many Brazilians.
16 See Paula Queiroz Dutra, “O paraíso não é aqui: a violência contra a mulher em Tatiana Salem Levy,” Estudos de Literatura Brasileira Contemporânea 48 (2016): 209–28.
17 In 1989 Deborah McDowell noted that whereas the majority of slave narratives in the United States were authored by black men, black women had written most of the contemporary novels about slavery. The same appears to be the case in twenty-first-century Brazil. See “Negotiating Between Tenses: Witnessing Slavery After Freedom – Dessa Rose” in Slavery and the Literary Imagination, eds. Deborah McDowell and Arnold Rampersad (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989) 144–63, 150.
18 In 1850 the Maritime Slave Trade was abolished in Brazil. In 1871, the Rio Branco Law (also known as the Law of the Free Womb) was passed, freeing all children born to slave women. In 1885 the government passed the Saraiva-Cotegipe Law (also known as the Sexagenarian Law), which freed all slaves over the age of sixty and created a state-administered Manumissions Fund. Finally, in 1888, abolition was proclaimed with the passing of the “Golden Law.”
19 It was in this state that the Portuguese fleet first touched Brazilian soil, in 1500. The first settlement was built there shortly after, and Salvador, the state capital, became the port through which the greatest numbers of slaves were imported into the country. Today it is seen as the state where Afro-Brazilian culture is most visible.
20 David Brookshaw, Race and Color in Brazilian Literature (Metuchen and London: Scarecrow, 1986) 122.
21 Duke, Literary Passion 19.
22 For example, Luiz Ruffato, Paulo Lins, Ferréz, Marcelino Freire, and Fernando Molica.
23 In Defeito I consider the author, Ana Maria Gonçalves, who signs the introduction of the novel, to be the spiritual, if not biological, descendant of Kehinde. Over the course of the text there are several female elders (living and dead) who influence Kehinde herself, but the impact of her narrative (no matter whether it is true or fiction) on the author and readers is just as important.
24 Duke, Literary Passion 18.
25 In Afro-Brazilian religions, guia also refers to the spirits who visit mediums in order to do good works, such as give advice.
26 The night after Kehinde is brutally raped by her owner, she dreams of her grandmother weaving a carpet featuring the symbol of a snake biting its tail. The next day, in the sub-chapter entitled “Vinganças” [Revenge], a poisonous serpent hiding in his bed bites Senhor Gama's genitals, which become infected, leading to a humiliating, malodorous and painful death.
27 Voodoo is still practised in Benin where it was acknowledged as a national religion in 1989 and is now followed by 17 per cent of the population. See “Benin Voodoo Festival,” The Guardian online 15 June 2012, available <https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2012/jun/15/benin-voodoo-festival-in-pictures> (accessed 9 Aug. 2016).
28 The originary couple in Ponciá Vicêncio are both slaves, referred to as Vó and Vô (Grandma and Grandpa) Vicêncio. We learn nothing about their forebears.
29 Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory” in What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction, ed. and introduction Carolyn C. Denard (Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2008) 65–80, 70.
30 See Doris Sommer's well-known study Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991).
31 The narrator almost always refers to her ancestor as “a escrava Joaquina” (Joaquina the slave), perhaps in allusion to the well-known abolitionist novel A Escrava Isaura (1875) by Bernardo Guimarães, later made into an internationally successful soap opera in 1976, about the fortunes of a beautiful and virtuous slave so pale she can pass for white, trying to escape the lecherous clutches of her owner.
32 There is not even a chapter named after her in the novel, although chapter 2 is entitled “Eustáquio Miranda,” after the Baron. This could be a conscious effort to replicate in subversive mimicry the lack of attention paid to the history of slavery from the female slave's point of view.
33 In the Yoruba belief system, Gelede was a secret religious sect which involved the worship of mother goddesses.
34 Literacy was “a way of assuming and proving the ‘humanity’ that the Constitution denied [North American slaves]. That is why [slave] narratives carry the subtitle ‘written by himself,’ or ‘herself’” (Morrison, “Site of Memory” 68).
35 This is sensitive territory. The extent to which master–slave sexual relationships were consensual is almost impossible to confirm. In Fios, Defeito and Paraíso there are a majority of slave women characters who submit rather than struggle but others who manage to benefit from their masters' desire for them.
36 There are, of course, exceptions, in novels such as Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) and Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986).
37 See hooks, Ain’t I a Woman chapter 1; Venetria Patton, Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women's Fiction (Albany: State U of New York P, 2000) chapter 2.
38 Brookshaw, Race and Color 122.
39 Maria Miranda (Fios) does give the baron a son and heir but, perhaps to subvert traditional history, his story goes untold, and the narrative follows the adventures of his illegitimate daughter instead. Mariana (Paraíso) has two daughters. Ana Felipa (Defeito) suffers a series of miscarriages and stillbirths caused, it is suggested, by herbs put in her food by the slave women.
40 In a combination of jealousy, fury and grief, having recently miscarried herself, the mistress explains that it is a very sad affair when a mother cannot see her own child, and that Verenciana is going to find out what that feels like (Defeito 106–07).
41 Ana Felipa gets her comeuppance: the kitchen slaves put herbs in her food to make her sterile (Defeito 114), then, years later, she is publicly humiliated when Kehinde arranges for her mistress to be discovered in bed with a male slave, by a priest.
42 Defeito begins with a horrific scene in which Kehinde and her sister and grandmother witness the gang rape of their mother by a group of warriors from a different tribe, and the murders of their mother and brother by the same men who force the five-year-old girls to perform sex acts on them. This shocking opening has recently been translated into English by Eric M.B. Becker as “Fateful Hour” and published in “Women Writing Brazil,” Glossolalia 2 (2016): 41–51. Ten years later, Kehinde is raped by her owner, and her lover raped and castrated before her eyes, in yet another example of the terrorization of slaves and exercise of power over their bodies and minds. Ponciá also opens with a distressing scene, but in this case between men. Ponciá's unnamed father is forced to be his young master's companion and follow his every command. The spoilt white boy rides him like a horse, and, in a form of violation, urinates in the black boy's mouth: “Sinhô-moço ria, ria. Ele chorava e não sabia o que mais lhe salgava, se o gosto da urina ou se o sabor de suas lágrimas” (Young Massa laughed and laughed. He cried and he didn’t know what was saltier, the tang of the urine or the taste of his tears) (14).
43 Evaristo admitted in an interview in 2007 that she chooses her characters’ names almost instinctively:
Sim, eu não sei por exemplo, de onde veio o nome Ponciá. O nome Nêngua foi intuitivo, sonoro […] Gosto também de inventar nomes. Fico procurando aqueles que me lembram a sonoridade das línguas africanas, como Ponciá, Nêngua e Luandi. O prazer que o som da palavra me dá, me ajuda na escolha dos nomes. (101)
(Yes, I don’t know, for example, where the name Ponciá came from. The name Nêngua I chose intuitively for its musicality […] I also like inventing names. I try to find ones that remind me of the music of African languages, like Ponciá, Nêngua and Luandi. The pleasure the word gives me helps me choose the names.) (Interview with Aline Alves Arruda included as an Appendix (101–04) in her Master's dissertation “Ponciá Vicêncio, de Conceição Evaristo: um Bildungsroman feminino e negro,” presented to the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in 2007, available <http://www.bibliotecadigital.ufmg.br/dspace/bitstream/handle/1843/ECAP-76RF2H/aline_alves_arruda_texto.pdf?sequence=1> (accessed 30 Aug. 2016))
44 Her despair echoes that of the colonized, as described by Albert Memmi:
He has been torn away from his past and cut off from his future, his traditions are dying and he loses the hope of acquiring a new culture. He has neither language, nor flag, nor technical knowledge, nor national or international existence, nor rights, nor duties. He possesses nothing, is no longer anything and no longer hopes for anything. (In The Colonizer and the Colonized [1957], trans. Howard Greenfeld (London: Earthscan, 2003) 172)
45 The term “coronel” (colonel) came to be used generically to refer to landowners and men of power.
46 Amy Chazkel, “History Out of the Ashes: Remembering Brazilian Slavery After Rui Barbosa's Burning of the Documents” in From the Ashes of History: Loss and Recovery of Archives and Libraries in Modern Latin America, eds. Carlos Aguirre and Javier Villa-Flores (e-publication: A Contracorriente, 2015) n. pag.
47 See Jane Marie Collins, “Intimacy and Inequality: Manumission and Miscegenation in Nineteenth-Century Bahia (1830–1888),” Ph.D. thesis submitted to University of Nottingham (2010), available <http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/11801/1/JMC_THESIS_APRIL_2010.pdf> (accessed 9 Aug. 2016). See also Robert Krueger, “Brazilian Slaves Represented in their Own Words,” Slavery and Abolition 23.2 (2010): 169–86; Sandra Lauderdale Graham, Caetana Says No: Women's Stories from a Brazilian Slave Society (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002).
48 Krueger, “Brazilian Slaves” 172.
49 The reader is encouraged to think that Luis Gama is the lost son to whom Kehinde's narrative is addressed. A remarkable figure, he managed to achieve free status through legal means, having discovered he had been enslaved illegally.
50 Born in West Africa, Baquaqua worked as a slave in Brazil and Haiti, and travelled to Canada, the United States, where his narrative was dictated and published, and the United Kingdom, where he appears to have settled. I have not been able to consult Francisco Marques's Ilê Aiê: Um Diário Imaginário (Belo Horizonte: Formato, 1994), the fictional diary of an Angolan slave transported to Brazil, covering the years 1845–1938. It is categorized as children's/young adult fiction, like much of the writing by Afro-Brazilians (e.g., recent editions of Quarto de Despejo [The Junk Room], published in English translation as Child of the Dark (1962), the diary of rubbish picker Carolina Maria de Jesus, which was a bestseller in 1960) and indigenous authors (like Daniel Munduruku, for example).
51 Some 6,000 accounts survive, according to Krueger, in comparison to 170 slave narratives in Brazil.
52 Morrison, “Site of Memory” 69.
53 Ibid. 69–70.
54 There is a family tree at the beginning of Fios to aid the reader in working out the relationships of the characters to one another.
55 Ponciá's “legacy” from her grandfather means in practice that she inherits many of his traits and could be the reason none of her seven pregnancies produces a healthy child. His act of murderous mercy, attempting to save his wife and children from further suffering, is somewhat reminiscent of Sethe's behaviour in Toni Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved, inspired by a true story.
56 By the end of the novel, Kehinde is elderly and blind, so she dictates, rather than actually writes, the letter herself.
57 The Law decrees that the curriculum must include
o estudo da História da África e dos Africanos, a luta dos negros no Brasil, a cultura negra brasileira e o negro na formação da sociedade nacional, resgatando a contribuição do povo negro nas áreas social, econômica e política pertinentes à História do Brasil.
(study of the history of Africa and the Africans, the blacks’ struggle in Brazil, black Brazilian culture and the role of blacks in the formation of Brazilian society, thus rescuing the contribution of the black peoples towards the areas of society, economics and politics relevant to Brazilian history.) (<http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/leis/2003/L10.639.htm> (accessed 24 Aug. 2016))
58
No law in Brazil made slave literacy illegal or threatened punishment for others – whites or blacks – who taught slaves to read or write, and so far I have found no instance of violent retribution against any Brazilian slave for knowing how to read or write. (Sandra Lauderdale Graham, “Writing from the Margins: Brazilian Slaves and Written Culture,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 49.3 (2007): 611–36, 615)
59 The law was passed by President Dilma Rousseff on 29 August 2012. See <http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_ato2011-2014/2012/lei/l12711.htm> (accessed 24 Aug. 2016). See also H.J., “Affirmative Action in Brazil: Slavery's Legacy,” The Economist (online) 26 Apr. 2013, available <http://www.economist.com/blogs/americasview/2013/04/affirmative-action-brazil> (accessed 24 Aug. 2016).
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