[In the following essay, Martins chronicles attempts by black women writers in Brazil to create a language of self-definition and expression that reflects their condition, both as women and as black women.]

In the last decade the debate about women's role and figurations within the context of Brazilian literature and society has been very fruitful. A variety of essays not only give focus to women's social conditions in our society but also critically unveils the masculine gaze from which the representation of feminine characters had risen in Brazilian literature and social imagination. The debate has also focused women's literary production, though the research about Black women writers is still at its beginning.

In one of her books, Ruth Silviano Brandão argues that in the arena of Brazilian literature, woman, particularly the white woman, has been portrayed as an idealized figure, as a model either of virtue or of madness, inhabiting the scene of masculine fantasy. In these texts, which have a long tradition in Brazilian literature, the masculine imagination voices the female characters with men's desires:

The female character, constructed and produced by the masculine register, does not coincide with the woman. It isn't her faithful replica, as many times the naive reader may believe. She is instead the product of an alien dream and as such she circulates in this privileged space that fiction makes possible.

As Brandão goes on to argue, it is as a “mirage of the feminine” created by language that the female body becomes an object of men's desires, the text “being the place where these objects of desire are embodied by the materiality of the signifiers.” In the locus of the text the female character is the “passenger of an alien voice,” “built as a phallic body, as the complement that heals the [men's] void.” As Rosemary Curb also points out:

The woman may be perceived by self and others as virgin mother, femme fatale or mother Earth. She may be seen as politically powerless and emotionally passive, or imbued with mythic powers; but the image is never self-defined.

Encovered by this narcissistic gaze, these female figurations, in the literary scene and the social imagination, engender woman's annihilation and delusion. As such, they inhabit what Josefina Ludner names “fictions of exclusion,” fictions that tend to conceal the difference.

This frozen frame is broken particularly in women's contemporary writings, where female characters face new agendas and shape different roles, giving visibility to their own experiences as human beings. The women's texts remodel the representation of womanhood with new significations and appearances, deeply interfering in the whole process of literary construction and language annunciation.

But even when the women's writings bring to focus new agendas concerning the feminine condition, the lights barely touch the modes of representation of Black women, either in literature or in the social context.

In the Brazilian literary tradition, the Black female character, with rare exceptions, has been figured as three main images: the Black mammy, the prototype of the generous Black mother, always smiling, always singing, always taking care of and feeding the white children; the Black maid, the white's housekeeper, that usually has no face or has some facial features considered “ugly,” and finally the “lascivious” mulata.

It's interesting to observe that during the Romantic period, in the nineteenth century, when a project to create a national Brazilian literature (and culture) was in progress, the native Indian woman was regarded as the ideal image of Brazilian ancestry, the legendary and celebrated mother of the Brazilian “race”: a sign of the New World, a figure that embodied qualities of motherhood, beauty, and silent renunciation, as is designed in Alencar's character Iracema, whose name is an anagram of America.

While the native Indian female character was portrayed as “a figure through whom the writer could celebrate the good qualities of the land, the purity of the people, and the values of an admirable culture,” the mulata was used to fulfill and justify the sexual desires and adventures of the white men. Her figure is thus always confined within a pattern that inexorably points to sensuality, lasciviousness, malice, mundanity, immorality, vice, selfishness, complicity, and pleasure. From the seventeenth century in Gregório De Matos's poetry, to Brazilian contemporary fiction, theater, TV series, and so on, this overeroticized body of the Black woman has played the main role, and is best exemplified by Gabriela, the “clove and cinnamon” character of Jorge Amado's novel Gabriela.

To trace the various tracks Black women writers have been following in order to break away from these violent images of ourselves isn't an easy task. We still need much research and work to give visibility to Black women's writings, voices, and actions in the Brazilian cultural milieu. Even an author like Carolina de Jesus, whose writings have been translated into several languages all over the world, does not receive enough attention in our academic institutions. Most of the production of contemporary Black women writers is not welcomed by the major publishers and does not reach a large number of readers. Nevertheless, their poems and fiction continue to be produced and to circulate in anthologies and smaller editions. Some of these writings have also begun to be studied at the universities, particularly by the new generations of Black women scholars and readers.

To bring into focus Black women's writings and conditions is a disturbing issue in Brazilian cultural debates. Usually even the Black male writer, when writing about the attitudes toward the African descendants and toward Blackness in Brazilian literary and cultural contexts, approaches Black women's selfhood as an extension of his own identity, or regards it as a minor issue. Talking about her own experience at Quilombhoje group, Miriam Alves affirms:

When we attempted to talk about groups of writers, we ended up joking. I analyzed the jokes in this way: a white man, when he's not taking me seriously, jokes about the most serious thing I have—myself; the black brother, when he's not taking me seriously as a woman writer, jokes about something even more serious—my being.

In the same interview, given to Callaloo, Miriam Alves reaffirms the use of the literary language as a tool to negotiate relationships and to dramatize the Black woman's voice in the sexist and racist Brazilian society. Writing is viewed, then, as a device to engender self-liberation:

Literature is my instrument. If I am able to communicate by filling the pages with commas, and the reader understands that I am talking about the place that Brazil is, about the misery in which the Black population finds itself, if I manage to speak with commas, I'm going to fill the page with commas.

In most of the literary pieces I refer to in this paper, the Black woman writer aims to achieve a language of self-recognition and self-apprehension that mirrors her double condition, both as a woman and as a Black woman. Being Black and being a woman becomes, then, a thematic from which the literary craft derives.

In the poetry produced by contemporary Black women, this feminine Blackness arises from some signifiers which are linked: voice, body, and desire. The literary text is, then, the arena filled with diverse language modulations, which at the same time by means of reversal, disruption, confrontation, and self-celebration unveil and dress the Black female body in the landscapes of the literary idioms. By their intervention in the formulations of literary discourses, Black women writers enact the variety of textual archives and memories that dialogue within their texts, giving voice to their own desires and dilemmas. In their craft and language rituals they put into motion different tunes that seed their writings with new translations of female figurations:

A drop of milk
runs down between my breasts.
A stain of blood
adorns me between my legs.
Half a word choked off
brakes my mouth.
Vague desires insinuate hopes.

In this poem by Conceição Evaristo, the woman defines herself as someone floating “in red rivers,” whose words “rape the eardrums of the world.” In this short piece, the building of womanhood is formulated and stressed by the repetition of the pronoun I, repeated at the beginning in eight of the twenty-one verses. The movement of this I, as a subject, transforms the image of woman from a “female matrix” into a matrix power that paints the feminine figure in a new dimension:

I—woman
Shelter of the seed continued motion
of the world.

The metaphor of this voyage through the territories of language is repeated in many poems, where the female body is located in special narrative images. Literature is viewed as a continent also occupied by feminine tongues, whose phrases and frames are signatures of selfhood, metaphors of woman as lady of her own voice. In her poem “Endless Continent,” Esmeralda Ribeiro begins with a special metaphor:

At the bend of the river
the
image
of poetry without
limits
goes along

And she ends the poem with the same territorial imagery, revisiting the place and voice of the woman in a cartography which was once men's domain:

On the bed
the body
anoints itself with
verse and prose.

This metaphor of woman's dislocation and revisiting, which condenses women's internal and external struggles, also points to the new meaning of the Nation itself, addressed not as an exclusive male territory, but as a conceptual landscape and notion, also redesigned and refigured by women. To write the woman is then to rewrite the Nation, and both tasks are accomplished by braiding the signs in the tapestry of language. Thus to write the woman:

It is to trace the lines
of the map of a nation.
It is to write on your head
a black song.

To redefine feminine territories and self is also to rename the subject or the woman as subject. In this sense womanhood is not taken by the poems as a sign of completeness, but as a sign of nonlinear movement, a kind of curvature inscribed in the modes of enunciation. The pronoun I, that renames and voices the subject, is best defined as a vicarious term, a signifier that represents woman as a voyager, a migrant, always in search of her words, her language; someone who is able, through continuous relocation, to free herself and to give birth to new idioms and voodoo languages. In her poem “Voodoo,” Miriam Alves writes:

There's a road
sliding up the hill
hidden
where a curve works overtime.
This road penetrates the wilderness
it runs back out
where the curve waves
to hidden sadnesses
I buried there the voodoo of uncertainties
stuck with pins
of sorrows
in order to free my womb.

To free the womb from alien desires is also to use the word as a knife, reshaping the female libido with images of joy and demystification. In another poem, Miriam Alves articulates:

It is I
in bed who embrace
consume you with the ardor of sex.

And in “Pieces,” Roseli Nascimento plays with language to break old expectations toward female sexuality:

sheltered
united
mapping
libido
orchestrating
cries
nakednessexogenous
nakednessexogenous

This intervention operated on language but also by language brings us to focus another important issue in contemporary women's writings: their forms of speech and the role memory plays. In her book Black Women, Writing and Identity, Carole B. Davies calls our attention to how some acts of speech are rearticulated in women's writings. As she puts it: “Play between the articulation of language, silence, and other modes of expression weaves its way through women's writing.” She also highlights “the multiple ways of voicing that reside in Black women's textualities,” affirming that a “significant amount of creative work by Black women writers” offers us “ways of reading a range of signifying practices which give voice to material and historical specificities of Black female experiences.”

Very briefly I will approach some of these modes of voicing in two narratives, first by viewing the articulation of memory as a rhetorical sign that signals the character's elaboration of a Black feminine tongue, and second by naming as acts of speech the voice that derives from the tension and friction between two boundaries: the feminine interior narration, built by diverse recollections, and the external gaze and language that also figure her.

Black women remember. Many times a Black woman remembers in silence. Memory is her intimate house, a site where she also locates herself, where she mirrors herself and the world. Some narratives dramatize the gaps in between this internal voice, created both by memory and the recollection of experience, and by an external, public gaze that comes from the “others” represented not only by white people but also by Black men. This tension that rises from the struggle between the voices of intimacy and the public view is enacted by acts of silence or indirect acts of speech. In Conceição Evaristo's short story “Maria,” a Black maid is going back home after a hard day's work. She is tired, her children are at home, hungry and sick. Suddenly a man, her former husband, sits at her side and whispers words in her ear. During all the narration, Maria doesn't say a single word. She remembers. She thinks. Deep in her mind, other voices and narrations struggle—her private memories, her stories of love and abandonment, her desires and fears, her history and identity. Her action is mainly an act of sewing her most personal reminiscences.

“This time he whispered a little more loudly,” says the narrator, and “she still guessed what he was saying, without hearing him directly: a hug, a kiss, love for the child.” Suddenly the man and his partners rob the other passengers, take their money and leave the bus. “It was then that she remembered the anger of the others.” Maria is then caught by the voices and gazes toward her that come from everywhere: “Calm down people! If she was with them, she would have gotten off too,” “That whore, that shameless black woman was with the thieves.” “Lynch her, lynch her, lynch her!” “Just look at her, still black and bold.”

“Bleeding from the mouth, the nose and the ears,” Maria is seriously injured by the passengers and we hear (from the narrator or from herself?) that “Maria wanted so much to tell her son that his father had sent a hug, a kiss and love.” How do we, readers, hear Maria's voice in this narrative? Only through her memory, dramatized by silence. We hear and see her on the very edge of language, where she dwells. It is in the frontiers and borders of conflicting discourses that her silent voice is articulated.

In Esmeralda Ribeiro's short story “Guarde Segredo,” the act of narration is an act of historical reconstruction. Here the author portrays memory as written references that are quoted by reversing the models, by inscribing some traces over the text of the literary tradition, thus operating a change. In this story, the narrator, a young Black woman, writes a letter to a friend, confessing that she has killed her white lover, Cassi Jones. Amazingly, Cassi Jones is also a character of the novel Clara dos Anjos, written in the beginning of twentieth century by the Black writer Lima Barreto. In his novel, Clara, a young mulata, is seduced by Cassi Jones and is abandoned after she becomes pregnant. The novel ends in a chorus of lamentation, where the narrator criticizes the education of Black women, which does not enable them to face their desire for whiteness. In Esmeralda Ribiero's narrative, Lima Barreto himself becomes a character, either as a photograph or as a ghost inside the house. After the female narrator murders Cassi Jones, Lima Barreto becomes visible and says: “Bravo! This was the other end I wanted to that scoundrel Cassi Jones.” Her grandmother adds then: “It had to be this way, my darling. We can't accept destiny with resignation.”

In this narrative, memory is an instrument of action and change. The literary sources are voiced in the text only to be dislocated, revisited, rewritten differently and not to be accepted with resignation. Nevertheless, at the end of “Guarde Segredo,” Clara confesses that it was good to tell someone her story by writing it, but asks her friend to keep the secret. Here again silence becomes a sign of self-preservation, which reminds me of what Carole B. Davies names as the “left overs” in Black women's tongues, something that is there as “excess,” as “supplement”; and, I would add, even as silence. She affirms:

It is this tension in between articulation and aphasia, between the limitations of spoken language and the possibility of expression, between space for certain forms of talk, and lack of space for Black women's speech, the location between the public and the private, that some Black women writers address.

In Conceição Evaristo's story, Maria's silent act of recollection displays her voice as an oppressed speech pushing toward the act of telling, toward the act of liberation. The woman narrator in Esmeralda Ribiero's short story, by the act of writing, already speaks and rearticulates memory as a device to transform the literary discourse and to relocate Black women's roles and figurations. In both narratives, to be silent or to keep silent signals the actions of self-preservation and camouflage; it also signals the formulation of acts of speech engendered on the edge of sound and silence, enunciation and announcing, the hidden and the unveiled, past and future. This rhetorical acts also points to the Black women writers present time.

The pronoun “I” migrates along all these texts, speaking aloud or by murmurs. Both modes of rhetorical articulation present to us new tunes on female figurations but also reveal the very conditions of the writers, as women and as Black.

I myself do not value a piece of work based on the author's color or gender. Nevertheless, we should never forget the roles gender and “race” play in the formulation of the canons, in the inclusion or exclusion of the texts chosen to be read and honored. The writings I've mentioned here are just a small part of the current production of Black Brazilian women writers, at whose side, modestly, I include myself. These voices challenge the literary criticism daily, disrupting and enriching the literary idioms. And as Toni Morrison once said: “All of us, readers and writers, are bereft if ashen criticism remains too polite or too fearful to notice a disrupting darkness before its eyes.”

I will conclude by adding to this chorus of tongues my own poetic words:

The hollowness of the word
enacts the duration of memory
imaginary texture
of a strange and familiar desire.
History is nothing
but Tabulation.
Memory is always
an invasion of the void.
And the suburbs of the night
are webbed in the interspace of alleys
in the relics and ruins of the future
in the figures of oblivion
flaring shadows
under the luminaries.