O ruído, a voz e o ato: uma leitura das obras Cartas para a minha avó, Cartas para a minha mãe e Cartas a uma negra através da escrevivência como (re)construção da memória cultural

Abstract

This dissertation is the result of an analysis of the letters written by black women in Teresa Cárdenas' Letters to My Mother (2010), Djamila Ribeiro's Letters to My Grandmother (2021) and Françoise Ega's Letters to a Black Woman (2021). Writing letters is one of the ways these women have found to insert themselves into a world that shuns them, to echo a silenced voice and (re)construct the cultural memory of other women who will come after them. After all, they are black women writing to other black women in order to trace an ancestral dialog that unites the steps of the past, present and future. Based on the hypothesis that these women's writing is a transgressive act that breaks down the social barriers imposed on black women, in this work we seek to understand how they have found in writing a place of insertion into the world, a possible place to make their voices echo and reach other women so that they can have a different life, possible and subject to choices and steps outlined by themselves. To this end, this bibliographical research included a literature review of the works studied, as well as dialog with intellectuals such as Michel Foucault, Stuart Hall, Grada Kilomba, bell hooks, Katiuscia Ribeiro, Vilma Piedade, Paul Ricoeur, Muniz Sodré, Maya Angelou, Gloria Anzaldúa and crossing paths with Conceição Evaristo and Carolina Maria de Jesus to think about writing, the place that black women occupy in society and the importance of writing letters so that they can insert themselves into the world and thus change the imposed narrative that always places them in a place of subalternity. From reading the letters, it was possible to see that the writing of the black women who sent the letters studied has a social marker intrinsic to it, which we understand as “escrevivência”, the writing of women marked by their lives and experiences, not only personal, but collective. It was also found that the letters are a safe and welcoming space for black women's narratives and, from them, a network is created where they can observe the past, rethink the present and remake the future, reconstructing the cultural memory of an entire community that, by questioning imposed historiography, claims its place in the world and directly confronts oppressions such as racism, sexism and silencing.