“The country of the future / has an immense past ahead of it”

ecoescrevivência in black women’s literature

Abstract

The memory of Brazil’s colonial and slave-owning past emerges in every “stray” bullet that “finds” a black body as a target. This necropolitics of color and social class, sustained for centuries and fantasized by a “racial democracy”, reveals not only the death of a certain group as an isolated fact and point of discussion. It draws a trail of bodies that are intertwined with the history of the construction of this country: authoritarian, racist and violent. The productions of black women, represented here by Conceição Evaristo, Lubi Prates and Eliana Alves Cruz, reconstruct what was erased by the colonial system: individual and collective narratives of the occupied nations, in favour of a white and imperial imposition of civilization that condemns what is considered “Other” to annihilation. It is in this sense that the writers, by dismantling the dominant discourse, restoring what Lélia Gonzalez defined as “a history that has not been written, the place where truth emerges” (Gonzalez, 2020, p. 65), decolonize memory and history, ecologizing their escrevivências.