Escrevivência as a Theory of Diasporic Narrative Heritage

Abstract

This article studies a theoretical term for diasporic cultural production proposed by the contemporary Black Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo—escrevivência. Evaristo’s first novel, Becos da Memória ([2006] 2017)—semiautobiographical remembrances of a midcentury favela community during its eviction—exemplifies escrevivência as a theory of the transmission of a culture of resistance to imposed dispossession. The term has been cited in a proliferation of antiracist critiques and studies on marginal subjects in Brazil. My argument is that escrevivência is crucial for Brazilian decolonial thought, given the temporally recursive frame it enunciates, which opens the present and future to prior articulations of Black culture in Brazil. I make three approaches to Becos within escrevivência’s temporal frame, examining literary anteriority (the influence of Carolina Maria de Jesus’s works), narrated marginality (polyphony, embodiment, domestic labor, minor literature), and cultural heritage (the instantiation and circulation of Black language).

Resumo

Este artigo estuda um termo teórico para a produção cultural diaspórica proposta pela escritora negra brasileira contemporânea, Conceição Evaristo—escrevivência. O primeiro romance de Evaristo, Becos da Memória ([2006] 2017)—lembranças semi-autobiográficas de uma comunidade favelada durante a sua evicção—exemplifica escrevivência como teoria da transmissão de uma cultura de resistência à expropriação imposta. O termo é citado numa proliferção de crítica anti-racista e em estudos sobre sujeitos marginalizados no Brasil. Meu argumento é que escrevivência é crucial para o pensamento decolonial brasileiro por causa do quadro temporalmente recursive que enuncia, que abre o presente e o futuro para articulações anteriores da cultura negra no Brasil. Abordo Becos no quadro temporal da escrevivência em três maneiras, examinando a anterioridade literária (a influência das obras da Carolina Maria de Jesus), a marginalidade narrada (polifonia, corporalidade, trabalho doméstico, literatura menor), e a herança cultural (a exemplificação e a circulação da linguagem negra).

Becos da memória [Alleys of memory, or Becos in this article] ([2006] 2017) is the first novel written by Conceição Evaristo (b. 1946). Evaristo, winner of the 2015 Jabuti Prize for her short-story collection Olhos D’Água (2014), is among the best-known Black writers in Brazil, author of poems, stories, novels, and academic criticism with a diasporic focalization that contributed to the consolidation of a Black literary tradition in Brazil in her generation. She debuted in 1990 with the poem “Vozes-Mulheres” (Women-Voices) in Cadernos Negros, an annual periodical begun in 1978, whose autobiographical, racial focus made its contributors reluctant or unable to publish in Brazil. Though she completed Becos in 1988, she published a different novel, Ponciá Vicêncio (2003), three years before Becos. ¹ Becos is set in the community where Evaristo grew up, the Morro do Pindura Saia in Belo Horizonte (Almeida 2015, 92). It collects ninety-five vignettes about members of a community facing impending remoção, an urban land dispossession process. The favela is, over the course of more than a year, demolished by an anonymous construction firm (the “Firma Construtora”) whose destructive aim is never explained to the residents, becoming, as Lehnen (2019, 176) writes, “a synecdoche for a system of structural violence that impacts the lives of Afro-descendants at various levels.” By the sixties, when the text is set, the political technology of urban remoção had developed into a depersonalized process that Lehnen connects to Nixon’s (2011) theory of slow violence, “violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales” (2, qtd. in Lehnen 2019, 174). Piecemeal loss is related in narrative fragments that dramatize a Manichaean colonial context in which intracommunity modes of collective survival contrast spectacularly with the wealth and whiteness of the surrounding neighborhoods. No individual perpetrator can be envisaged; the loss of land seems to be a process ordained by homogenous time. ² With “homogenous time,” I am thinking of Benedict Anderson’s (1983) theory of how a national community is consolidated through discursive practices like journalistic print culture that establish the fiction of shared, national, empty time. In Becos, we encounter a mode of subaltern narrative enunciation that Evaristo has theorized as escrevivência, which contests that temporal emptiness from the perspective of those whose time-space is violently stolen and erased by processes seeking to ensure the homogenizing space-time of national development.

The temporal operation of escrevivência, Evaristo’s neologism that might be translated as “lived writing,” is to echo ancestral language, paying dues to the temporally abyssal grounds of resistance and Black culture and survival in Brazil. In such contestation, I argue, Evaristo’s work engages in dialogue with Black writers across the Americas who seek to narrate the collective resources central to centuries of surviving the racializing and subalternizing experience of conquest and colonial expropriation. Escrevivência sounds like sobrevivência, survival. Darieck Scott (2010, 6), drawing on an intersection between Black studies’ focus on histories of resistance in conditions of slavery and coloniality alongside psychoanalytic theories of adaptations to trauma, asks a question central to Evaristo’s novel and theory: “Is there anything of value or to be learned from the experience of being defeated”? Two of the set of what Scott calls “black powers” that emerge in efforts to make Black histories narratable (he refers to neo-slave narratives in the United States) are central to my understanding of escrevivência’s potentiality: first, the power of “dramatizing or actualizing alternatives to linear temporality [arising] largely in the temporal paradox that characterizes trauma;” such alternatives, Scott (2010, 11) writes, provide “a resource for representing—and to some extent, achieving, if only by expansions of a reader’s consciousness—a liberating escape from linear time.” In Becos, I argue, this temporal power serves the aim of reconstructing a lost collective and shared space and theorizing how Black narrative contributes to generational iterations of such reconstruction. The other power is a critique of the subject, arising from the exploration of experiences emerging “at the point of the apparent erasure of ego-protections, at the point at which the constellation of tropes that we call identity, body, race, nation seem to reveal themselves as utterly penetrated and compromised, without defensible boundary” (Scott 2010, 9). While Scott’s study is concerned primarily with these resources as they emerge from literature of Black men’s abjection, this article focuses on temporal warping and the deconstruction of subjectivity as they emerge in Evaristo’s first novel, where the anonymous violence of remoção is the central perpetrator, and defenselessness against development’s encroachment is figured on a collective level. Nonetheless, in Evaristo’s work, Scott’s theories of “black powers” are pertinent. These resources are found at the limits of time in the cycling transmission of narration and at the margins of subjectivity, in the repurposing of refuse or otherness, which is to say, of what the national subject must maintain a sense of separation from. In this second sense, I argue, escrevivência authorizes the emergence of the social positions and ways of seeing or being whose silence the national subject and citizen requires. ³ Escrevivência works at the edges of national time and subjectivity, dramatizing moments when the purportedly unspeakable has already been articulated, graphed, symbolized, and transmitted by generations that reproduce themselves precisely in this retelling that resists conquest.

In this article, I read Becos as the first instance in Evaristo’s work of escrevivência—her first novel, written prior to coining the term in 1995. Within the temporal structure of escrevivência, Becos, as the first instance, bears witness to being preceded by a continuum of resistance in a range of verbal and written expressions. I study the temporal recursivity of escrevivência in three approaches to Becos: First, I consider Becos in terms of the literary anteriority Evaristo, as literary critic, has articulated, focusing on the legacy of Carolina Maria de Jesus, the first writer of favela life. Second, I examine narrative techniques by which Becos seeks to narrate the “silence” of marginality such that its irruption into speech reveals an already-present continuity of resistance. Finally, I analyze how Becos dramatizes the inheritance of Black narrative anteriority acknowledged as a gift the narrator has made herself responsible for, and which Becos itself confers. This article builds on studies of Becos concerned with the polyphonic narrative mode it develops to expose processes of slow violence (Lehnen 2019), with narration’s power to re-member a social body in histories of violence (Franco and Caimi 2023), and with the disruptions it produces against traditional autobiographical protocols (Oliveira 2016). I suggest that the novel exemplifies Evaristo’s later theories of writing in its performance of the temporal and subjective disruptions that allow marginality the space-time to reconstruct itself as a collectively oriented speaker. The slow violence of land expropriation is resisted in Becos by the echo of prior, unpublished diasporic generations. Escrevivência, the practice of listening for this echo, is Evaristo’s theoretical term for a diasporic poetics and politics of memory and of the heritage of the possibility of Black narration.

In the past decade, a proliferation of academic work has arisen around escrevivência. It has been invoked as a theoretical justification in works concerning what Evaristo (2009, 22) calls the right to the “non-negotiable space of language and idiom.” From trans poetics (Santos 2022) and journalistic coauthorship between unhoused street artist and professional writer (Tavares and Porfírio 2021), to self-writing assignments in courses in prison (Lima-Duarte and Gaia 2020) and public schools (Moura and Seffner 2019), to Black nurses speaking about their experiences working during COVID-19 (Alves, de Sant’Anna and Izidoro-Pinto 2023), to the interruption of academic norms (Natália 2020), escrevivência is cited as an authorization of a wide range of refusals of marginalization and silencing. Rodrigues (2023, 114) has summed up its influence with the question of “how Black literature, as a way of knowing about life, is transformed in the hands of an author who theorizes her own composition”? ⁴ I build on this question by studying the theory as already embedded in Evaristo’s earlier fiction, in scenes in which her protagonist learns the names and uses of Black narrativity. Since proffering the term in her Master’s thesis in 1995, Evaristo has insisted that it offers no specific definition or methodological apparatus. Yet in interviews, she also connects escrevivência to her lived experience as a poor, Black young person and to the expressive and inscriptive practices of Black women that went unpublished for generations, and she has insisted on its opposition to the traditional stereotyping of Black women. Indeed, the phrase in her master’s thesis that coined the term emphasized this oppositionality: “Our escrevivência cannot be read as a story to ‘nurse the kids of the Big House,’ rather, it makes them uncomfortable in their unjust dreams” (qtd. in Tavares and Porfírio 2021, 167). ⁵ She has argued that for writing to “fuse,” as portmanteau into living and thus be “writeliving,” it must reveal a colonized, silenced tradition, which in her own work is a Black, maternal history of resistant acts, ideas, and symbolic creation (180). Escrevivência concerns the writing of a social position deprived of institutionalized, literary—but not of its own, inventive—language.

Escrevivência invents an archive in a process Evaristo figures as listening to an echo; the aural consistently links pastness of the present, reflecting what Lehnen (2019, 179) notes in Becos as a “temporal indeterminacy [suggesting] a diachronic continuum of disenfranchisement and repeated gestures of resistance against … disempowerment.” Becos stands out to me as the paradigmatic text of escrevivência because, beyond relating the facts of a community facing the slow violence of remoção, it is situated in an indeterminate time-space in which the concern is how that story became a story. It is the story of how a young person named Maria-Nova, becomes responsible to a speaking community, whose language overhangs an abyssal, Afro-descendant archive of resistance. Maria-Nova is the protagonist, an adolescent sharing the author’s name (Maria de Conceição Evaristo), a specular doubling that Bukhalovskaya (2022, 895) reminds us is common to the auto-fiction genre in which Becos can be situated. Evaristo (2017, 12) explains in the preface to Becos that “escrevivência can con(fuse) the identity of the narrating character with the identity of the author. That con(fusion) doesn’t constrain me.” ⁶ This blurring of writer and protagonist, of author and narrator, makes escrevivência “lived writing,” imbricating it with the terms and possibilities of testimonial or witness literature, especially the question of how truth and lived experience translate into autofiction. By the end of the narrative, Maria-Nova assumes the responsibility of the storyteller, the future narrator and point of origin of this story, precisely when she and her community are forced from the land where she was born. Becos, as escrevivência, theorizes diasporic narration mise en abyme—the story, history, historicity, and possibility of remembering this loss, of re-membering this collective plot and body, as language. Becos thus accounts for opposing gradual progressions, between homogenous time dragging toward the violent dispersal of a community, and the collective making of a storyteller named Maria-Nova who witnesses what she has heard from them. Testimony, in this sense, opens the individual to the echo of the more-than-one that informed the narratability of the witness; it is in this sense that Evaristo (2010, 136) emphasizes that what defines escrevivência is that the protagonist cannot be the traditional autobiographical, self-contained, individual subject.

Two elaborations of the term Evaristo has offered in one essay, “On the Graphy-Drawing of My Mother, One of the Birthplaces of My Writing” (Da grafia-desenho de minha mãe, um dos lugares de nascimento de minha escrita; 2020), help illustrate how Becos exemplifies escrevivência. The first passage highlights, in a directly autobiographical way, the process of writing as listening to the pastness of the present: “The genesis of my writing is in the accumulation of everything that I heard from infancy. The accumulation of words, of stories that inhabited our house and its adjacencies…. My entire body received words, sounds, murmurs, choppy voices of pleasure or pain, depending on the stories’ plot. With eyes closed, I constructed the faces of my real and speaking characters. It was a play of writing in the dark” (Evaristo 2020, 51). ⁷ Evaristo’s emphasis on aural transmission, dramatized throughout Becos, situates escrevivência against the grain of the dominant perception associated with witness—the visual. Bukhalovskaya (2022, 893) argues that blindness can grant new modes of narrative and literary perception. In the absence of “evidence” (with its visual etymology), embodied experience—the body itself, as a primary sonic architecture—is the instrument of witness, reverberating with the materiality borne in voices surrounding a domestic space. Peter Doyle (2005, 39) has remarked that, across a range of myths, the circularity of echo evokes the “speech” of the non-human world and the problematization of the single individual. Vocality’s plural blur cuts, undermines, and augments the individual with the darkness of memory to be written. In sounding an individual self as embodied echo, escrevivência locates, beyond individual capacity, the resource of collective memory.

In the same essay, Evaristo (2020, 49) offers another generative moment of her authorship in her mother’s inscription practice, which wards off the rains that threaten the community’s homes:

Perhaps the first graphic sign that was presented to me as writing, came from an old gesture of my mother. Ancestral, who knows? Since from whom would she have inherited that teaching, if not from her folks, those even older? I still remember, the pencil was a piece of wood kindling, almost always forked, and the paper was the muddy earth, near her legs spread wide…. And squatting, with part of her body almost grazing the humidity of the ground, she drew a big sun, full of infinite legs…. That gesture of movement-graphy was a sympathy to call the sun. ⁸

That the symbol drawn here is a circle sustained by many legs (depicting life’s source, the sun) relates to this sense of time as “diachronic continuum of disenfranchisement and resistance,” in which writing repeatedly becomes, in moments of impending loss of home, a collective resource. Escrevivência repeats a prior wager on symbolic creation’s power to transform the world (to bring sun to sunless sky). Evaristo (2020, 50) highlights this transformative capacity, insisting that her mother “wasn’t simply writing a sun, she was calling for it, as artists from traditional African cultures know their masks don’t represent an entity, they are the entities sculpted and named by them.” ⁹ As in Becos, Evaristo dramatizes the ancestrality of her writing in a scene in which the loss of home is impending, and in an act of resistance given by her mother, or her mother’s mother’s mother’s etc. (“Ancestral, who knows?”). Maria-Nova in Becos is the name of a certain political position that, assuming a responsibility to bear witness to a collective loss, holds onto collective, ancestral forms of written call, written sympathy.

Escrevivência as allegory of reading Carolina Maria de Jesus

These two scenes of escrevivência—as reverberating body of witness beyond the evidential and as maternal graphic resisting the encroaching loss of home—both resonate directly with Evaristo’s reflections on the works of Carolina Maria de Jesus (1914–1977), a foremother of Evaristo’s theoretical project. Evaristo has affirmed that reading De Jesus’s diaries was her first experience of hearing her mother’s voice in Brazilian literature. ¹⁰ Further, Evaristo’s engagement with De Jesus is itself escrevivência, seeking to reveal a prior writing that is not yet publicly evident as such. Along with an editorial committee including De Jesus’s daughter Vera Eunice, Amanda Crispim, Fernanda Miranda, Fernanda Felisberto, and Raffaela Fernandez, Evaristo has assumed the responsibility of republishing De Jesus’s vast archive in unedited form, which began with two volumes of De Jesus’s diaries written from 1960 to 1963, Casa de Alvenaria, published by Companhia das Letras in 2021 (it had, prior to this publication, been published only in heavily edited and reduced formats). In their preface to this text, Evaristo and Vera Eunice de Jesus (2021, 13) highlight Carolina de Jesus’s autodidactic generativity: “She creates a literary tradition in which subjects of writing, with or without academic certificates, but still literate, make reading and writing social practices that make it possible for them to take a position in the society in which they live and also to criticize it.” ¹¹ De Jesus’s diaries invented a lived writing that they theorize as moving beyond the social fact of poverty and hunger with which she is too often associated: “Yes, the language, the writing of Carolina Maria de Jesus is in constant search of the ‘best way to say,’ like every person who takes the word as tool of work” (14). ¹² Witnessing in escrevivência is beyond evidential or referential, seeking a transformation of life by working on and in language and through it, on time and subjectivity.

In becoming responsible for De Jesus’s literary anteriority by working to bring into public her vast, unedited archive, Evaristo intertwines her own witnessing process with the collective vision contained in De Jesus’s range of neologistic, syntactic, and poetic experimentation. The titular overlap here, I argue, is resistance to landlessness or home-loss, the foundational experience and all too frequently, ongoing condition of African diaspora. Indeed, many of De Jesus’s texts’ titles allegorize the land and home-space she did not own. The titles De Jesus would have chosen for her three volumes of published life-writing—Quarto de Despejo, Casa de Alvenaria, and Um Brasil para os Brasileiros (Junk Room, House of Bricks, A Brazil for Brazilians)—all refer to domestic space that she was unable to claim ownership over. Junk Room, the first of these texts, written between 1955 and 1960, for which De Jesus became famous in Brazil and around the world in the first half of the sixties, offers an image of incorporative exclusion, associating De Jesus’s lived situation raising her children as a single mother in the São Paulo favela of Canindé with the room in a household for objects that have been discarded, but remain. The second, Brick House, names the object of her desires, a solid domestic space, and it remains the phrase Black authors in Brazil use to denounce a historical condition of being denied ownership of land, which relates to the historical struggle over quilombos. ¹³ Both diary collections’ titles, phrases De Jesus repeated in her diaries, spatialize blackness in relation to the primary unit of an economy, the oikos or household. In focalizing domesticity, De Jesus initiated the literary project of rebutting the national ideology of racial harmony, commonly called racial democracy, according to which there are no racial barriers to Black social uplift. As Fernández (2019, 127) points out, the canonical text of this ideology, Gilberto Freyre’s Casa Grande e Senzala (1933), situated the scene of the “resolution” of racial difference in a sexualized, plantation domestic past free of tension; like Nelson Rodrigues’s Anjo Negro (1948) in Fernández’s analysis, De Jesus, by figuring domesticity on a titular level as the site of unresolved, racial and social oppression, repoliticizes the domestic. Indeed, these titles figure a position I would call (to maintain the domestic figuration) “vestibularity”—not quite being “within” national space, or possessed of citizenship, ownership, and authorship. Indeed, even once she has bought a house with the proceeds from her first publication, in Alvenaria, De Jesus writes of the exorbitant expectations of her that a daily multitude of mostly middle-class beggars harbor, parading to her doorstep to request handouts. Alvenaria (especially the unedited version published in 2021) thus relates the ongoing vestibularity of De Jesus—become, primarily thanks to racist and sensationalist journalism, a bestselling myth of nouveau riche—relative to possessive individualism. In this sense, the foundational work of De Jesus is to have claimed the right to speak about the condition of not having rights. De Jesus invented enduring titles for a condition of not being able to hold titles. She was unable to open a bank account in her own name, one of the central causes of her exploitation by the mediatizing industries. ¹⁴

Evaristo raised questions of territory and property in her comments regarding De Jesus at a talk I attended in November 2022 at the Biblioteca Parque Estadual, a public library in her adopted home city, Rio de Janeiro. ¹⁵ She focused on the mis-titling of De Jesus’s final autobiography, composed on a plot she moved to at the periphery of São Paulo with her remaining savings and against the wishes of her publishers. ¹⁶ Evaristo emphasized that De Jesus intended to call this text A Brazil for Brazilians, but the only published version was given the title Bitita’s Diary (1986) by its French publisher. It is not a diary. It was also editorially rearranged like her earlier diaries. In the title De Jesus would have claimed if she could, unattainable domesticity is ironically figured as an entire nation. This later autobiography recounts episodes of landlords exploiting De Jesus as a child and her fellow sharecroppers (colonos), and it offers a long account of De Jesus’s unsheltered wanderings in rural Minas Gerais and São Paulo state, in search of a cure for a leg infection. In her talk, Evaristo said that A Brazil for Brazilians demonstrated De Jesus’s poetics as rooted not so much in hunger (as Quarto was edited to demonstrate) as in what, citing Glissant, she called nomadism. In Poétique de la relation [Poetics of relation], Glissant (1990, 26) defines two forms of nomadism, the linear or vector driven (en flèche) and the spiraling or circular. If the first of these defines a Western imperial ambition that ties movement to a fixed and sedentary identity claiming legitimate possession of a territory and leading to the growth of nations, the second, in errancy, constitutes every periphery as a center, abolishing “the very notion of center and of periphery” (Glissant 41). It is errancy, rather than a fixed identity related to lack, that Evaristo emphasized, and which is testified to in the titles we have read, all of which speak allegorically, rather than in any straightforward way, about the condition of vestibularity that De Jesus poetically named. To situate De Jesus, as foundational Black poet, in errancy, we must recognize, with Glissant (1990, 27), that “errancy is vocation, which only speaks itself in detours.” ¹⁷ A Brazil for Brazilians is a text naming an errant location and vocation; Evaristo, as reader and member of the editorial committee, is bringing forth this errancy by returning, in echo and spiral, to the original language of De Jesus.

In one commentary, Evaristo (2009, 27-28) writes that De Jesus, making her marginal lived situation the stuff of narration, disrupts the “asepsis” of Brazilian literature, generating a tradition in which individual and collective voice, desire, and memory are inextricable:

What becomes interesting to discuss about the writing of Carolina Maria is the desire to write lived by a black woman in the favela. The desire, the belief, and the struggle for the right to be recognized as a writer, while trying to make of poverty, of trash, something narratable…. A favelada, without mastering the Portuguese language—like the grammaticians or the warlike defenders of an erudite language-structure—and who insists on writing the trash in which she was living, on trash, leftover notebooks, loose pages, assumes an attitude which is already an impertinence against the literary institution. Carolina Maria de Jesus and her writing emerge “to stain”—as many see it—an institution marked, preponderantly, by a white masculine presence. ¹⁸

Evaristo’s gloss on De Jesus highlights that audacity which precedes speech—the “desire to write lived by a black woman.” Literary language and a new authorial position cross the threshold of taboo because De Jesus “believed in and invented” a “new position” for writing. This is a central temporal and affective concern of escrevivência: this desire before writing—an anteriority already refusing a repressive order before it enjoins the individual to speak (note Evaristo’s repetition of “already,” emphasizing what is already resistant in desire). As in the narration of Maria-Nova explored below, Evaristo narrates the futurity latent in the desire to speak out against a given, oppressive situation. Escrevivência is already in this embodied refusal. Her point here echoes startling phrases removed from published versions but present in De Jesus’s (1958, 264) manuscripts, which elaborate on the paradox of not being allowed, in her own lifetime, to publish in the authentic language of her own inner life: “the future writer remains living in my brain.” Evaristo (2008, 8) has pointed to the difference between saying what happened and saying what could happen as what differentiates historian from poet, respectively. In the language of Hortense Spillers (2003b, 326-327), De Jesus’s writing would mark, as escrevivência, “the seizing of discursive initiative” as “a first order of insurgency” made possible when “cultural vestibularity and an after-word … must come upon Language and Law.” In my emphasis on titles, I have tried to show how De Jesus, and Evaristo’s return to her archive, make a claim in language for a collective unable to claim a space to live; Becos, as I see it, emerges in continuity with this titular theme in De Jesus’s oeuvre, a theme of land loss and land claimed that Clóvis Moura (1994) calls the radical dialectic of Black Brazil, concretized in the historic struggles of quilombos.

The title “Junk Room” directly theorizes the vestibular social position. It refers to a room where junk bound for discharge from the household is stored for an indeterminate time—stored, not housed, and in this sense De Jesus’s poetics offer a term, despejo, which means “junk” and “eviction.” The title speaks to the historical formation of Canindé in an urban renewal process tied to the politics of the “sanitation” of downtown, leading to the eviction of black and poor people from tenements there, and exemplified in the name of the wealthy São Paulo neighborhood, Higienópolis, which indicated its “asepsis” from surrounding urban poverty, subject to higher rates of epidemics and infectious diseases. ¹⁹ In this context, where sanitation has repeatedly been, as Sevcenko’s (1983) classic study demonstrates, the reason for mass eviction that “cleans up” a neighborhood, Evaristo’s comment on De Jesus “staining” an “aseptic” Brazilian literature resonates with struggles over the right to property. The poor are figured, in this metaphoric constellation, as “dirt,” “blight,” or “junk”—discardable. The Junk Room, positioned between imposed intake and discharge, also resonates with postcolonial excremental discourses. ²⁰ Colonial regimes project the threat of contamination onto the bodies and neighborhoods of the “colonized/natives”; Terence Collins (1979, 80), studying the preponderance of excremental imagery in Black Arts poetry in the United States, considers it as a creative response to a history of white people treating black people “like shit.” Evaristo is clear about this experience of discarded life she shares with De Jesus: “Like Carolina Maria de Jesus, in the streets of the city of São Paulo, we in the streets of Belo Horizonte knew, not just the smell and taste of the trash, but also, the pleasure of the return that the leftovers of the rich could offer us. Lacking basic things for the day-to-day, the excess of some, almost always constructed on the misery of others, returned humiliatingly to our hands. Remains.” ²¹ Relating her critical vision and memory of leftovers with De Jesus’s life and work, Evaristo insists on wealth’s cannibalistic dependence on need. From the space of waste, De Jesus and Evaristo redistribute value—symbolic, territorial, and economic—turning an imposed association with refuse into a life and literary vocation of recycling.

Indeed, Evaristo’s escrevivência, as a theory of collective memory’s resistance to conditions of dispossession, is, on a literary critical level, an allegory of reading De Jesus. Consider the title Alleys of Memory. An iconic site of the favela, the alley, echoing De Jesus’s titles’ spatial emphasis, also reflects a social condition—a space where a bird’s-eye view and a general vista is blocked, a kind of vestibule, providing passage between precarious abodes. Another term mediates this positionality: memory. In a parallel sense, Evaristo’s escrevivência builds on De Jesus’s poetics of property withheld by situating that politicized space in diasporic, spiraling memory.

Becos da Memória: Narrating anteriority

Following the method of escrevivência, which focuses on thresholds before speech, on the desire for the end of speech’s prohibition, I turn to how Evaristo theorizes the genesis of Becos. We read in the retrospective preface that Evaristo ([2006] 2017, n.p.) wrote for the second edition, that “perhaps in writing Becos, even in an almost unconscious way, I was already constructing a form of escrevivência.” ²² To study escrevivência is to consider how a theory of writing has emerged already:

To write Becos was to pursue an escrevivência. That’s why I am also seeking the first narration, that which came before the writing. I am seeking the voice, the speech of the storyteller, in order to mix it with mine. That was how the narrative of Alleys of Memory was born. First there was the word of my mother. She, Dona Joana, gave me the material: “Vó [Gramma] Rita would sleep entangled with her.” The voice of my mother bringing me remembrances of our life [vivência], in a favela, which no longer existed when that narration was given. (Evaristo [2006] 2017, n.p.) ²³

Noting her novel’s own escrevivência, its theory of narrative origins, Evaristo tracks the first words of her first novel to her mother’s voice as it awakens her own remembrances. They concern a woman, Vó Rita, who acts as caretaker to an unnamed woman, referred to in the novel only as “A Outra” (the Other), who is sick with a stigmatized illness (Hansen’s disease) that goes unnamed until the final pages, even as the Other deeply intrigues Maria-Nova; so motherly words about a motherly responsibility that extends beyond family ties and rejects taboo are at the novel’s genesis in Evaristo’s prefatory reconstruction. This focus on illness and caretaking as markers of marginality within a marginalized space situates Becos within a recent profusion of women-authored Latin American novels which, as Bukhalovskaya (2022, 889) remarks, in seeking to narrate non-normative bodies, allow illness to guide the reimagining of narrative prose itself, and to question socio-cultural discourses around bodies, investigating “the obscure zones of society and its cultural constellations.”

Indeed, as Dornelles (2021, 145) analyzes in the testimonial creations of the Cuban writer Mirta Yáñez, part of this effort by women authors to develop authentic testimonial literature about marginal positions involves decentering the traditional male hero of narratives about the subaltern, in order to usher in polyphony, “a collective voice which, liberated of dogmatic moorings, narrativizes the vulnerability of Caribbean experience.” A central relation of Evaristo’s novel is the triangular care, curiosity, and stigma relayed between Maria-Nova, Vó Rita, and The Other. This triangular relationship allows Evaristo to explore a child’s encounter with marginality in poetic and capacious terms. In Evaristo, memory of lost home and illness are tied through the figuration of an obscure zone; in the preface (2017, 11), she suggests that memory is imbricated with processes of not remembering (what she called a “play of writing in the dark” above): “Between the happening and the narration of the fact, there is a space in profundity, it’s there that invention explodes.” ²⁴ This “space in profundity” between fact and narration is figured in the novel by alleys, which become, at moments, personified as aural witnesses: “The alleys that were close by heard the sobs of the man who burned his pain” (Evaristo [2006] 2017, 113, qtd in Lehnen 2019, 175). In the opening scene of Becos, an alley embodies the non-visual work of memory: “I remember [The Other] lived between hiding and appearing from behind the door … which opened onto a dark alley. It was always a dark environment, even on the sunniest days” (Evaristo [2006] 2017, 15). ²⁵ Maria-Nova never “fully sees” the Other, only “half of her face” (Evaristo [2006] 2017, 16). For children and adults of the community, the Other is a mystery, except to Vó Rita. The Other inspires the narrator’s desire: “I wanted to be able to scrutinize her image with my eyes, but she noticed and would always flee. Perhaps one day, was she able to see the surrounding world, there, well hidden behind the gate” (Evaristo [2006] 2017, 16–17)? ²⁶ The Other embodies the obscure space of the alley; she also initiates us into the poetic naming of the novel, where many characters’ names open onto allegorical and theoretical interpretations, rendering the work as a whole both story and theory of how stories are made (in this case, narration as curiosity about “A Outra”).

Evaristo’s novel ambivalently figures the excremental and waste product of developmentalism as a resource available for discursive and strategic recycling by the socially discarded. This occurs when, in the center of the demolished alleys, a Big Pit grows and figures anonymous, collective defiance. In the middle of the favela,

there was an immense hole that always grew and always in the rainy season with the constant excavations. The place was known as Big Pit. The Big Pit was big, bigger than the world perhaps. Drunks and distracted children fell in. There were no deaths, but there were broken necks, legs, arms…. The nearest residents filled the Big Pit with trash. The Big Pit was one of the last, if not the last place of the favela to disappear. The Big Pit defied the world. (Evaristo [2006] 2017, 129) ²⁷

Capitalized, the Big Pit becomes the proper name and the site for the slow violence imposed on residents lacking titles. At the same time, it threatens the world with its chaos, and Maria-Nova recognizes this danger as globally existential. A prostitute, Cidinha-Cidoca, whose body is, earlier in the novel, a site of collective fantasy, falls into the Big Pit and dies. The woman who “represents life in the favela” succumbs to the formlessness of the trash pit; she “died from not living” (morreu de não viver) (Evaristo [2006] 2017, 159, 160). The Big Pit and its deathly threat leaves Maria-Nova to resolve on some mode of conserving form: “No, she would never let life pass in such a formless form. Belief was needed. Vó Rita, Bondade, Negro Alírio didn’t despair ever. She would think no more about the threat of Cidinha-Cidoca. She needed to live. ‘To live from living.’” (Evaristo [2006] 2017, 160). ²⁸ “Living” is for escrevivência the conservation of form against chaos, in the struggle to find names that allow collective resistance to encroaching chaos. The Big Pit is one such name. It signifies the inevitable failure of a construction project aiming for urban asepsis that turns human lives into junk, resulting only in insurmountable waste.

The vignette of Ditinha offers the text’s most elaborate account of making the excremental into a symbolic resource. Like the Other and the Big Pit, Ditinha’s narration theorizes the narration of subalternity. Her name is a diminutive of dito or “saying” or proverb,” which in its feminine diminutive, signifies gossip or insinuation. Gossip does not center a speaking subject, but rather a collective way of speaking/knowing, which enables subaltern survival. In comments on how Black literature is minor literature, Evaristo (2010, 136) writes “The voice of the poet is not a single, solitary speech, but the resonance of plural voices. It realizes the I/We fusion, presenting one of the characteristics of minor literature noted by Deleuze and Guattari: ‘Everything acquires a collective value.’” ²⁹ Ditinha’s name and experience in Becos crystallize this minor literary movement toward collective speech.

Ditinha never speaks in her own narration until she breaks with her own condition of subalternity, in a gesture of defiance that the collective subsequently identifies itself in. The collective recognition her gesture provokes should be situated in the way domestic workers’ histories of solidarity and resistance, as Acciari (2021, 71) notes, emerge from a social location “at the intersection of gender, race, and class oppression [with] strong historical ties with antislavery movements [that] form the basis of alliances with feminist, black, and workers’ movements.” With Ditinha, Evaristo speaks to this intersectional oppression and its symbolic fissuring. She is introduced in specular, inverted relation to the symbols of wealth and beauty she will come to destroy: “Ditinha looked at her boss’ [patroa] jewels and her eyes shined more than the precious stones” (Evaristo [2006] 2017, 99). ³⁰ The subsequent scene, as she cleans an empty, opulent mansion, plays on an internalized Manichean logic of beauty relayed as inaccessible to Ditinha’s self-effacing interior narration. (It also mirrors and inverts a parallel scene from a patroa’s visit to her domestic’s quarters in Clarice Lispector’s A Paixão segundo G.H. (1964) worthy of further study.) As she cleans up after her boss’ birthday, Ditinha reflects on how her own birthday has never been celebrated, and reminisces about her family’s misery in the bordering favela. Almost completing her work, she stumbles upon a set of jewels that “had belonged to the grandmother of the grandmother of her boss’ grandmother” (Evaristo [2006] 2017 106). ³¹ Putting the other jewelry away, she takes a green broach that is “so smooth, it even appeared soft,” but as she puts it on her breast, she realizes it is “not so soft after all, it was wounding her chest” (Evaristo [2006] 2017, 106). What appears opulent conceals a historical present laced with quotidian violence. This scene is linked to the scene of Maria-Nova’s rebellious thought when slavery is the discussion topic at the wealthy, white school she attends. The narration of that scene also follows Maria-Nova on the edge of speech. In silent anguish, she wonders how her classmates can discuss the plantation house and slave-quarters of their history textbook without reference to the present: “She closed her mouth again, but the thought continued. Senzala-favela, senzala-favela!” (Evaristo [2006] 2017, 73). Maria-Nova, facing the general apathy about the violence undergirding the historical present, feels, like Ditinha, “wounding in her chest” (Evaristo [2006] 2017, 73). In both cases, the position at the vestibule of speech, in pained embodiment, is a historical inheritance that collapses time in ongoing trauma. Spillers (2003a, 207, emphasis in original) refers to the “hieroglyphics of the flesh,” to evoke a historical wounding transferred across generations which “creates the distance between what I would designate as cultural vestibularity and culture.” Escrevivência seeks a language for the wounding of temporal experience in post-slavery society. These episodes are reminiscent of Evaristo’s early stories collected in Olhos D’Água [Eyes of Water] (2014), in which the narration limns the political situations and silences of black women characters as they irrupt into resistant speech. The protagonists, as Martins (1996) points out, are often speechless subjects of narration. It is Evaristo’s and other Black women writers’ fiction, Martins (1996, 113) writes, that dresses “the black feminine character with new meanings that indicate other possibilities of signification and interference in the processes of raising the feminine body as body of language.” ³²

Ditinha, upon returning home, throws the jewel into her family’s pit toilet, in a scene that, following Evaristo’s interest in minor literature, elides reference to any subject: “Suddenly, the flame illuminated the bottom of the pit. In a flash Ditinha saw the shit sleeping in the depths. And in an even quicker flash, the beautiful broach, of green stone so soft it even appeared smooth, disappeared among the shit” (Evaristo [2006] 2017, 123). ³³ Again, waste becomes a site of defiance, threatening the sanitized, seemingly “soft” wealth subtended by the violence of the Manichean social order. The police arrive to accuse Ditinha of being a “false domestic.” As gossip as a form of collective resistance has perhaps always done, Ditinha, insisting she is no “false” domestic, disrupts the stereotyped “true domestic” of the police, a humble and benevolent Black housekeeper. After her arrest, Ditinha lives reclusively in her home, in silent shame. Yet when it comes time for her displacement, the crowd around the bus recognizes her, and a transfiguration occurs: “Grown-ups and children who were not even accustomed to great demonstrations of care ran toward her and lifted her to their necks. They walked around with her there like a saint in a procession. Crying, weeping, laughing. How great, Ditinha had returned! Ditinha had returned! Then solemnly they put the woman on the truck as if they were placing a saint on an altar” (Evaristo [2006] 2017, 171). ³⁴ Ditinha’s defiance mobilizes the collective, reflecting the community’s investment in her gesture that interrupts generational oppression. The character named Gossip disrupts the unjust dreams of the Big House, realizing the work Evaristo promised escrevivência would do when she coined the term in 1995.

Bondade, Totó, and the inheritance of narration’s time and ground

Bondade is the name of the itinerant storyteller in Becos. His name, which shares the etymological root of the English “bounty,” translates to “Goodness,” and he allows Evaristo to theorize the generosity of narration. He is introduced in terms that relate to an errant poetics recalling the Glissant referenced above: “Bondade did justice to his name. He had no proper perch. He lived in some place, if not in the heart of everyone. —Why have a perch of one’s own? he would say. Man ought to be like a little bird, have wings to fly” (Evaristo [2006] 2017, 24). ³⁵ Unsettled, he offers everyone else in the community the possibility of being home, of settling differences (he is the “common friend of two or more enemies”) (Evaristo [2006] 2017, 25). Without a territorial stake of his own, he feels the loss of this place the most. Possessionless, he reflects the relation all share with the land, a love that grows in inverse proportion to any official claim.

Bondade figures the community’s dependence on what Maria-Nova, eying the Big Pit above, noted was needed above all for survival: faith:

Bondade knew all the miseries and grandeurs of the favela…. He knew every shack, every inhabitant. In his way, he ended up entering into the hearts of everyone. And when someone had faith in him, everything had already been told to Bondade. It was impressive how, without asking anything, he ended up participating in the secret of everyone. He was a small man, almost tiny, didn’t occupy much space. From there, maybe, his capacity to be in all places. Bondade earned the name that he merited. (Evaristo [2006] 2017, 35–36) ³⁶

The credit given to Bondade establishes a common currency, an economy of secrets in the community. He instantiates a linguistic and narrative economy, “minor” as he is himself small. The temporality he broaches (where “faith given” makes “everything already told”) is the exorbitant anteriority and immediacy of narrative itself according to escrevivência. In the repeated reference to justice done to the name of Goodness, he offers what Fred Moten (2008) has called the “paradox of optimism,” a “future orientation” in the “assertion of necessity, rightness and timelessness of the always already existing” (1746). He makes possible a series of impossibilities that help the collective survive encroaching violence: a home in perchlessness, a title for title-lessness; dispossessed, he is always able to offer something his host needs: “No one knows how, but Bondade always had some little thing to exchange. It was some milk he would buy, a medicine he would bring, bread that we wouldn’t have had that day” (Evaristo [2006] 2017, 36). ³⁷ Bondade instantiates a minor circulation with generosity equal to his name.

In Donner le temps (1991), Jacques Derrida evokes a gift that exceeds any given economic valuation and while allowing the possibility of economic circulation in general. Such a gift is “mad” in its excess to the reciprocity of economy, coming incommensurably before it and instantiating it. It must be unknowable or immediately forgotten, which is to say, secret, as a gift, commensurate to no reciprocity (Derrida 1991, 53). In that excess, Derrida writes, it initiates economy, circulation, currency, credit, faith, time, speculation, narrative. Escrevivência is the dramatization and theorization of the reception and conferral of such a gift. In this Afro-diasporic context, the gift has less to do with the inheritance of a surplus of time as Derrida discusses in modernist poetry; rather, it concerns those who produce surplus time and value for others, whose bodies gave racial capitalism its originary gift. ³⁸ Facing the Western nation and its citizen-subject, escrevivência’s subject does so as one burdened with an unpayable and violently imposed debt. ³⁹ The excess conferred in Becos is miniscule like Bondade in the above passage, secret like the silent embodied resistance of Ditinha, or like what Bondade already knows, and corrosive like the waste that threatens the sanitization and refuse-making process.

Bondade confers the secret of everyone to Maria-Nova, parallel to what De Jesus conferred in “making trash and dispossession narratable.” The scene also marks the sharing of the wounding that is already a collective condition. Bondade is telling the story of a labor leader, Negro Alírio. Precisely when Bondade notices that Maria-Nova is feeling pain and cuts off his narration, the transmission of a dehiscence beyond language is evoked: “He also went quiet with a knot in his throat, since it’s well-known that Bondade intensely lived every story he narrated, and Maria-Nova, every story she listened to. Each one’s breast is bleeding…. [T]he girl is the type who likes to put a finger to the wound, not those of others, but to the wound that she carries in her breast” (Evaristo [2006] 2017, 63). ⁴⁰ This is one of several scenes where Maria-Nova inherits a choked throat. In the hiatus of Bondade’s story, the narrator notes the Goodness of this pained inheritance; Maria-Nova likes fingering the “wound she inherited from Mãe Joana” and a host of other characters in Becos—she likes the wounding of the scene of storytelling (Evaristo [2006] 2017, 63). As Scott (2010, 207) observes, the scene of a painful connection underneath discrete individuality, in a state when the defenses of the ego break down, offers, even in defeat, the most intense and possibly pleasurable embodied experience of identification with ancestors.

Escrevivência borders the autobiographical; Becos features some of Evaristo’s own ancestors. Tio Totó—the name of Maria-Nova’s (and Maria Conceição Evaristo’s) uncle, becomes responsible, together with his third wife, Maria-Velha, for raising her (as Evaristo explains in an autobiographical sketch, Totó helped her mother have “one less mouth to feed”). ⁴¹ He raises Maria-Nova with his life’s narrative recounted in fragments throughout Becos, which articulate a disjointed pattern of eviction, migration, crossing bodies of water and losing loved ones in the process, and of recommencements. His stories bear witness to, and grieve, his diasporic heritage. Becos bears witness to this witnessing, as escrevivência is the art of witnessing prior witness. As from Bondade, the Other, from the silences of Ditinha, Maria-Nova inherits pained embodiment, the consciousness of this temporality, at the edge between speaker and listener, in the transfer of Totó’s story. Upon his death at the end of the text, Maria-Nova inherits another life to tell: seeing him die she “strangled the cry. Not a cry of fear or surprise. She strangled the cry that came from her, that came from him. It was death, it was life” (Evaristo [2006] 2017, 176). ⁴² The strangling of the cry along the edge of embodiment becomes escrevivência’s material. The cry strangled is an outward-condensing or ex-pressive process that translates pain into language. Maria-Nova, after hearing Totó lament his life at one point, decides “it was necessary to put everything outside” (era preciso pôr tudo para fora) (Evaristo [2006] 2017, 76). Totó’s gradual death parallels and accentuates the murderousness of the passage of homogenous time in expropriation. Throughout Becos, Totó announces his death in territorial terms: “my body is asking for land” [meu corpo pede terra] (Evaristo [2006] 2017, 18). And Evaristo’s escrevivência is inscribed in his wake (the “wake” as grieving, as wakefulness, as following ancestors, as surviving in slavery’s aftermath that Christina Sharpe has proposed). Escrevivência does this work Sharpe (2016, 10) asks after: “What does it mean to defend the dead? To tend to the Black dead and dying: to tend to the Black person, to Black people, always living in the push toward our death? It means work.” The narration tends to Totó’s ongoing gift, in his wake: “Tio Totó didn’t understand that his ninety-something years were necessary for the almost fifteen of little Maria” (Evaristo [2006] 2017, 49). ⁴³ There is something of living-together, of the convivência of escrevivência in the text recording Totó’s gradual demise. Escrevivência teaches this lesson of the necessity of a prior generation, of ancestrality, to the narrative of a diasporic self. Heritage becomes a task to accomplish in language that bears witness to how one always inherits from more than one.

Totó’s experience offers a kind of proto-testimonial. In the very first words about him, the narration of Totó provides a prior instance textual self-authorization, in dissent from existing reality: “Uncle Totó wouldn’t conform himself to the facts. God in heaven, would that be life?” (Evaristo [2006] 2017, 18). ⁴⁴ Narratability, here, is this disjuncture exposed in questioning the capacity of facts to amount to life. Life, in Totó’s preoccupation with unjust referents (“that” cannot be “life”), opens itself to the out-of-joint time of virtuality and inscription. As a recycler-originator of a dispersed Afro-discursive tradition, Totó too works on the name by which he is called. If Bondade’s name spoke to the rightness of names, Totó offers discontent with what he has been given, his unjust or improper naming. He finds this discontent as the reader of his own inscription: “Antônio João da Silva—Totó—a dog’s nickname, no problem, dog is man’s friend. One day, after gathering letters and words, he read this: A dog friend is worth more than a friend dog. He didn’t understand right away what it meant. He brought the letters together again, then the words, and almost gave a cry of delight. That’s it, it’s better to be a dog and friend of the owner, than to be a man and never be a friend” (Evaristo [2006] 2017, 19, emphasis in original). ⁴⁵ Totó, another originator of Evaristo’s escrevivência, uses chiasmus to invent a livable space for himself. As the strategy of one denied a human position in language, chiasmus performs the obstinacy indicated by the imperfect tense of refusal in his introductory phrase (“he wouldn’t conform with facts” [não se conformava com o acontecido]). Like Evaristo’s De Jesus, who believes in and invents herself a position, Totó’s self-writing proffers a fundamental belief in and study of the vestibular position whose meaning is reworked in his inscription.

Conclusion

Escrevivência is a theoretical name for the kind of writing that invents a subject prior to self-possessed individual subjectivity, an authority of self-enunciation that emerges from and reveals the legal and discursive vestibule whose policing keeps the literary subject individual, aseptic, general, and dominant. Evaristo (2008, 11) suggests that her literary heritage offers a different model for heroism: “I read in the epic cant of the Afro-Brazilian poet the construction of another model of heroism, which doesn’t pass through the immediate victory of a subject, but through the continual resistance of a people whom this hero represents. Heroism in which the poet also participates. In the creation of the poem the continuity of the quilombo struggle emerges.” ⁴⁶ Escrevivência tracks a continuity of resistance by remembering and believing in a historical struggle for expropriated space, which it sets in the wounding time of trauma. The poet, participating in heroism, sutures the invisibilities and silences subtending resistance into a continuum and common ground of refusal. The Goodness escrevivência’s subject inherits is the possibility, the time and the space, to continue to relate and narrate diasporic collectivity. With escrevivência, Evaristo pays linguistic dues to the exorbitant claim to a space at the margins of literature staked by her literary foremother, Carolina Maria de Jesus. In this article, I have related this literary enunciation to Maria-Nova’s inheritance from various relations—kin and otherwise (Totó is “uncle of his nephews and of the nephews of others,” and Vó Rita is likewise Grandma to many)—who raise her with their narratives and cultivate her ability to narrate (Evaristo [2006] 2017, 19). With escrevivência, Evaristo writes the ancestrality of the dispossessed as the enabling force of their futurity and creation.

Becos theorizes and performs a diasporic time of narration, an anterior futurity, given by various community keepers and speakers. The ones studied in this article confer a certain kind of responsibility on Maria-Nova: Vó Rita is a model of responsibility that cares for the limit-subject, the Other, whose very recognition demands polyphonic, dispersed narration; Ditinha offers a violent interruption of the unspoken, first-person situation of the domestic worker; Bondade is a model of responsibility to community in everyday speech and narration offered in and against a situation of lack; Tio Totó offers the responsibility of the living to inscribe in the wake of a relation’s passing on, in the relation of the Crossing and of loss, of lettered dissent and of descent. Carolina Maria de Jesus offers the responsibility of literary persistence, of a belief in her own and future namings of vestibularity. Slavery and its capitalist aftermath steal time and land from Black people. In the wake of that theft, Evaristo writes the inheritance of a maternal and untimely Black enunciation, the ongoing writing of a prohibition already refused.