Embodying escrevivência, wake-work, and Conceição Evaristo’s "Poemas da recordação e outros movimentos"
Written as part of a Master’s degree under the supervision of Dr. Rory O’Bryen
“Minha criação [literária é…] profundamente marcada por minha condição de mulher negra e pobre” (emphasis mine). So speaks contemporary Afro-Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo, unmistakably positioning herself as an embodiment of a triple alterity – mulher, negra, pobre 1– and her work as an expression of Black female subjectivity. It is precisely from within this conceptualisation of ‘escrita marcada’, outlined above, that I begin this paper on corporeity, wake-work, and Black femininity – for in Poemas da recordação e outros movimentos2 (2008), there exists a complex intertwining of marked orthographies and branded bodies through which Evaristo’s poetics of Black womanhood is foregrounded. In Poemas, the Black female body is transformed into a site of re-membering, subalternity, and Afro-futurism. Inherently diasporic, this gendered, racialised subject takes on a palimpsestic corporeality, a “body-politics of knowledge”3. Such fleshly-textual encounters are frequent in Poemas and push at the boundaries that have been previously demarcated in Western feminist theory. Indeed, for Evaristo, ‘marked writing’ transcends its Cixousian definition as a “libidinal and cultural – hence political, typically masculine – economy”4 and expands into what Hortense Spillers coins a “hieroglyphics of the flesh”5, an embodiment of the postmemorable cultural texts that have come to delineate the symbolic ordering of racialised bodies: the so-called ‘American Grammar’6. Like Spillers, Evaristo signals in Poemas to the “potentialities of Black pornotroped flesh”7 which, in turn, allows her to launch a reclaiming of a Black female body that has historically been commodified, exoticised, and violated by systems of imperial domination whose reliance on hegemonic signifiers of ethnicity have long exposed Black flesh as “a defenceless target for rape”.8
Zanone Fraissat/Folhapress 1
In this paper, I argue that by working within the porous intersection between feminism and race, Evaristo writes back against Western phallogocentrism, under whose domain “a man’s body gives credibility to his utterance, whereas a woman’s body takes it away from hers”9. Moreover, in re-constructing her own version of the Black female body, Evaristo strives to counter what Spillers describes as the processes by which “the dynamics of signification and representation […unravelled] the gendered female” through the marking of Black woman’s “flesh as a prime commodity of exchange” during slavery10. This leads in Poemas to a rejection of sexuality’s lexical crisis under enslavement11, or rather, a rejection of the ways in which bodily “dispossession as the loss of gender”12 translates into Blackness’s “anagrammatical [abuttal]” of the feminine/familial markers ‘woman’ and ‘mother’13. Disavowing the ‘American Grammar’ as such allows for Evaristo’s re-vindication of Black flesh, seeing it transfigured into an embodied cipher of shared heritage, unified resistance, and communal healing – a project of re-inscription which, drawing on the theoretical idiom of Christina Sharpe, I shall call ‘wake work’. The kaleidoscopic meanings of ‘wake’ abound in Sharpe’s writing, encompassing “the keeping watch with the dead, the path of a ship, a consequence of something, […] awakening, and consciousness”14 – at once appealing to the historical traumas of the Middle Passage and the violent slave-plantation economy, ‘wokeness’, and projects of memorialisation.
Since Evaristo works from an intersectional understanding of body and subjectivity, a multifaceted theoretical approach is required here. With this in mind, I begin by putting Hélène Cixous’ seminal text of l’écriture féminine, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, into dialogue with Evaristo’s escrevivência, exploring the interplay between corporality, writing, and self-expression in the feminine Symbolic Order. Where Cixous’ conceptualisation of ‘New Women’ falls short in relation to Black womanhood and the body, I turn to de-colonial and racial studies, using the theories of Spillers and Sharpe to think through the ways in which racialised embodiment can draw upon and rethink Black feminine signifiers in slavery’s wake.
Bordering on auto-fiction, Evaristo’s escrevivência is deeply informed by her ‘locus of enunciation’, exploring as it does the condition of subaltern Black women living in contemporary Brazilian comunidades. It is also infused with allusions to Bantu mythologies and thereby speaks to bodies marked by the transcultural processes of slavery’s ‘Contact Zone’. Positioned within this ambiguous Third Space and at the Symbolic Order’s outermost limits, escrevivência plays freely in the margins between ‘vivência’, ‘escrever’, and ‘se ver’15 and, as such, invites reading in conjunction with Deconstructivist thought and, specifically, l’écriture féminine. This is especially true when we consider escrevivência’s intent to “brinca[r] com as palavras”16, or rather, to undermine the Western literary tradition’s (white/male) linguistic economy, in order to present certain, potentially provocative, “realidades transformadas em ficções”17. That said, readings of escrevivência evaristiana must, necessarily, look to that which cannot be contained within such a tradition, and to what Weheliye refers to as Blackness’s constitution as “fleshly surplus” over centuries of “violent political domination”18. Highlighting “blackness’s signifying surplus”19 as such clarifies the ways in which escrevivência transforms into an orthography of the wake, a “new mode of writing, [a] new mode of making-sensible”20 for which Sharpe so passionately advocates. By moving “towards reading and seeing something in excess of what is caught in the frame”21, Evaristo participates in Sharpe’s project of Black annotation and redaction: a means of “imaging and imagining blackness and Black selves otherwise, in excess of the containment of the long and brutal history of the violent annotations of Black being”22, thereby permitting Black lives and bodies to become visible and viable in their own right.
Both Evaristo and Cixous’ literary aesthetics are bound up with issues of corporeality – indeed, Cixous demands it be so: “woman must write her self”, “women must write through their bodies”23. For Cixous, writing the body goes hand-in-hand with attaining the agency that has long been denied to women by patriarchal structures of control. Bodily and authorial censorship are violently linked, and by “[putting] herself into the text”, woman carves out a space for herself “[in] the world and [in] history by her own movement”24. Evaristo’s anthology forges similar associations – in ‘Inquisição’, for instance, she appears to elaborate on Cixous’ call for textual embodiment as she alludes to the inscription of stories and memories onto the speaker’s body, and to flesh’s transformation into a text to be read. This body-as-palimpsest nods to the necropolitical branding of Black flesh as postulated by Spillers. The reference to “invisíveis/e negros queloides, selo originário,/de um perdido/e sempre reinventado clã”25 recognises Black “flesh as a primary narrative […] its seared, divided, ripped-apartness” a testimony to the “high crimes” committed against enslaved Black bodies26. Juxtaposing the hypervisibility of Black bodies in the physical and literary world, the “invisíveis […] queloides” also speak to the lasting structural effects of this violent categorisation of racialised bodies as less-than-human, evocatively depicting “the [simultaneous] signifier and signified of Blackness generated from and on the flesh”27. Interestingly however, the flesh-to-text transformation in ‘Inquisição’ also yields new potentialities. The eu-lírico insists on “acalentando nessa escrevivência/não a efígie de branco brasões/sim [… os] queloides”28 – a cherishing of branded flesh which, simultaneously, disavows and vilifies the Grand Narrative of Whiteness whilst also appealing to Weheliye’s notion of habeas viscus. Translated as ‘you shall have the flesh’, habeas viscus spells out the potential for a liberating praxis of embodied Black self-determination and uncovers “’new genres of humanity” in those racialised (gendered) subjects who, having been branded with a de-humanising hieroglyphics of the flesh, find themselves marked out as infra-human in Western liberal humanist ‘Grammars’29.
The speaker in ‘Inquisição’ describes having been barred from such signification as a Black female body and writer, with both “o poeta” and “a inquisição” “interroga[ndo]/a minha existência,/e nega[ndo] o negrume/do meu corpo-letra”30. Indeed, there exists the distinct sense here that ‘existência’, ‘corpo’, and ‘letra’ become grammatically incompatible, or “anagrammatical” as Sharpe suggests, alongside the racialised, gendered marker of the speaker: negra31. Under the necropolitical control of (white/male) inquisitorial power and ‘Literature’ the Black female as-body, as-creator, and as-subject falls victim to an all-encompassing machista conspiracy of oppression under whose control her ‘corpo-letra’, her very ‘existência’, is unable to “operate as a meaningful signifier in Euro-Western cultures”32. Just as Spillers conceives of the symbolic ordering and violent rupture of Black flesh under a necropolitical ‘American Grammar’, Evaristo palpably conveys the “ripping apart of language”33 as a direct consequence of refusals to accord the Black body the “capacity for self-creation through recourse to institutions inspired by specific social and imaginary significations”34. As Mbembe notes, this results in a withholding of sovereignty from this racialised subject and a depreciation (interrogação/negação) of their socio-political, and in this case, lettered being, ultimately reducing Black populations to “the status of living dead”. 35 Thinking back to Cixous, we can therefore begin to appreciate how the necropolitical matrices of the literary (‘o poeta’) and ecclesiastic-juridical (‘a inquisição’) spheres aim to ensure that Black “woman has never her turn to speak”36, that she never achieves subjecthood.
Nonetheless, such barriers do not prevent the insistent insertion of the speaker’s ‘corpo-letra’ into these patriarchal spheres and, in physically binding her body to the letter (‘corpo-letra’), she moves to remould a once-exclusivist masculine language within a Black feminine idiom in which embodiment and text are foregrounded. Moreover, the eu-lírico’s defiant repetition of ‘prossigo’ and ‘persigo’ forms a refrain-like structure whose alliterative force powerfully conveys her struggle for self-determination and her resolve to make her ‘corpo-letra’ heard. This drive increases throughout and we see ‘corpo-letra’ become ‘corpo-escrita’ become ‘escrevivência’– a fully-fledged literary genre in which the marginal body is shifted into focus and imbued with the power to speak, allowing for the now-embodied subject’s “shattering entry into history, which has always been based on her suppression”37. Returning to Mbembe’s concept of ‘living death’, we can see here how Evaristo’s escrevivência poses a direct challenge to the necropolitical structures that ascribe Black bodies with an abjection that subsequently expels them from the realm of the Symbolic and denies them fleshly, and lettered, sovereignty. Therefore, we can read into escrevivência a distinctly biopolitical undertone – or perhaps, as Yelin suggests, a “biopoetics”: a defiant “[modification] of texts […] in order to produce new imaginaries and new symbolic systems”38. Building on the Foucauldian notion of “artistic production [… as] the fixing of forms of subjection or of mechanisms of power/knowledge”39, this biopoetics transforms the Black writer’s inhabitation of a literary “death-world”40, their impotent ‘dead letter’, into an orthography of the wake – a vitalist testimonial writing, a writing-as-living, an escrevivência that disrupts the brutality of the ‘American Grammar’. This biopoetics of escrevivência permeates through ‘Inquisição’ and, ultimately, instils in the Black female speaker the agency to ‘become subject’, figuratively and grammatically (‘prossigo’), and with this newly-established literary enfleshment comes the emancipatory possibility for Weheliye’s “alternate instantiation of humanity”41 founded in the embodiment and creative productivity of Black woman.
While Cixous states that “writing is precisely the very possibility of change”42, for Evaristo textual embodiment is complicated by her belief that writing, as understood by Western epistemology, is an insufficient means of translating the body – that it can be a deadening “traição do corpo”43 through which the subject’s vital energy is lost. Evaristo counters this in her collection by mirroring the vivacity and embodied performativity of oral storytelling which she understands to be “uma poética de corpo, uma poética da voz”44. Orality pervades every line of Poemas, from the simplicity of Evaristo’s poetic style to her emulation of popular speech, and references to h(H)istory’s silencing of Black voices are frequent: “as vozes mudas caladas/engasgadas nas gargantas”45. The combination of assonance and sibilance physically impedes the ease of enunciation here and, simultaneously, mimics this notion of choked back voices, whilst playing into the embodied performance that is so central to oral traditions. It is precisely through her employment of such evocative narrative forms that Evaristo democratises the written text and, in so doing, sees that “as falas silenciadas/explodem”46 and “o que os livros escondem,/as palavras ditas libertam”47. This opening up of a revolutionary, emancipatory space in Poemas allows the Black female writer to “break up [and] destroy” l’ancien, the hegemonic discourse on women’s bodies and writing, and to “foresee the unforeseeable”48: a re-working of the signifiers that have perpetually cast Black women’s bodies into positions of silence and subalternity. That said, in her forging of this distinctive oral-literary aesthetic, Evaristo transcends a Cixousian understanding of writing the body whose parameters are unmistakably marked out by a white, bourgeois feminism. If for l’écriture féminine, the female body’s liberation is bound up with writing, then for Evaristo, the liberation of the Black female body requires a more egalitarian narrative form – one which is not so entangled within lettered paradigms, but instead honours subaltern social imaginaries and knowledge systems, thus providing all (Black) women the opportunity to access and (re)claim their subjectivity.
As the narrative form of Evaristo’s childhood, orality is also deeply associated with the maternal. This is evident not only as the author reflects in her poem ‘De mãe’ on her own mother, “mulher prenhe de dizeres,/fecundados na boca do mundo”49, but also in her awareness of the oral text within a female literary genealogy inherited from the enslaved mammies “que tinham de contar a história para ninar os da casa-grande”50. Thus, where Cixous argues that women have been “brushed aside at the scene of inheritances”51 and that “the number of women writers […] has always been ridiculously small”52, Evaristo would riposte that Poemas is inextricably entangled with notions of a rich oral inheritance, female authorship and creative productivity. Indeed, “a future [that] must no longer be determined by the past”53 is unimaginable in escrevivência as Evaristo assumes the role of the griot, the oral historian and “preserver of the common memory of African peoples”54, a responsibility seemingly inherited from her mother who taught her to “fazer da palavra artifício/arte e ofício do meu canto,/da minha fala”55.
This narrative inheritance passed down through the maternal line is clearly portrayed in ‘Vozes-mulheres’. In this poem, a transtemporal dialogue spanning five generations is crafted and gives voice to Sharpe’s notion of the ‘Trans*Atlantic condition’ – a concept which weaves together (post)memories of the Black Atlantic, “the range of trans*formations enacted on and by Black bodies”56, and the processes by which we might begin “listening for the unsaid, translating misconstrued words, and refashioning disfigured lives”57. Opening with the haunting echoes of the enslaved bisavó’s “lamentos/de uma infância perdida”58 and the commodified avó’s “obediência/aos brancos-donos de tudo”59, we are immediately situated within the realm of the wake “where the spectres of the undead make themselves clear”60. Spillers’ work is instructive here as, initially, the de-humanising force of the imperial project is such that the captive bodies “slide into […] powerlessness”, “becoming being for the captor”61 which results in the near-decimation of the Black woman’s voice – a mere “[eco] criança”62. However, as this echo reverberates and gains momentum throughout the poem, past, present, and future temporalities and oralities collide in the body of the daughter: “a voz de minha filha/recolhe todas as nossas vozes”, “o ontem–o hoje–o agora”63. This constructs the girl as an enfleshment of the trans*Atlantic “longue durée, the residence time, of the wake”64 and, now imbued with the strength of a cumulative chorus of ‘vozes-mulheres’, her body becomes an active site of physical and verbal resistance founded in oral inheritance – “recolhe em si/a fala e o ato”65. In forging this dialogic past with her enslaved ancestors, the girl is able to move beyond the racialised, gendered silences found in the Grand Narrative of ‘History’ and forge her own counter-narrative, a “violent and live-saving” work of ‘aspiration’, which, to paraphrase Sharpe, breathes life and voice back into the corpses of her dead66.
Reminiscent of Brand’s ‘Ruttier for the Marooned in the Diaspora’, the echo-chain that forms the structure of ‘Vozes-mulheres’ could be read as an “oral […] poem containing navigational instructions”67. In harking back to the bisavó’s journey “nos porões do navio”68 and mapping out the trajectory of the ‘voz-mulher’ as it grows from an infantile “[eco] criança” to a diminutive “[eco] baixinho [de] revolta” to a unified “fala”69, the poem demonstrates the generational transferral of this internalised ruttier, depicting it as a “way-making tool, a gift of knowledge” that, in its vocalisation, details and fortifies the means through which Black female bodies can fight for survival in the wake’s aftermath70. This sense of communal knowledge is translated grammatically in the poem, and indeed in the remainder of Poemas, through the binding together of words: “vozes-mulheres”, “vida-liberdade”71. Seemingly responding to Spillers’ call for a new Syntactic/Symbolic Order, this Evaristian Black feminine Grammar is centred around hyphenation, recognising the reparative wake-work that is so needed in re-establishing the kinship ties severed by slavery72. These hyphens also appeal to the wake-work of malungaje, that is, the kinship of the “malungo, brother, irmão”73, those Bantu bodies-turned-chattel that suffered “the experience of having shared passage on the same slave ship”74. As such, we can see here how Evaristo’s poetics of Black womanhood transforms into a poetics of malungaje, of lives branded and bonded by shared trans*Atlantic ‘routes and roots’75, thus introducing to Black female subjectivity and self-determination “a new semantic field/fold more appropriate” to this collective history76.
This entangled continuum of inheritance and motherhood is underpinned however, by a darker reality – that which Sharpe describes as “living ‘the afterlife of property’ and […] of partus sequitur ventrem”77. Translated as ‘that which is brought forth follows the womb’, this biopolitical doctrine inscribes Blackness’ abjection onto Black female flesh, locating it specifically in the matrix/matrice78, and sees that the ensuing expulsion from the realm of the Symbolic is also re-produced in Black offspring who, de facto, “inherit the non/status, the non/being of the mother”79. To a certain extent, this ancestral legacy is evidenced in ‘Vozes-mulheres’ as the speaker traces the various ways in which each of her female relatives inhabits a Fanonian zone of non-being, a life touched and transformed by slavery’s wake and the structures of (post)coloniality that maintain their stranglehold over Black female bodies in contemporary Brazil. For instance, the eu-lírico speaks of a life marked by “sangue/e/fome”80, the marginality and miséria of which is not so far removed from her mother’s experience: “no fundo das cozinhas alheias/debaixo das trouxas roupagens sujas dos brancos/pelo caminho empoeirado/rumo à favela”81 (emphasis mine). Thinking with Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, we can see how the proliferation of prepositions here work to orient Black bodies towards a sub-human, sub-altern spatiality (‘debaixo de’) that is characterised by a certain distancing from an inherently ‘white’ world82 (‘no fundo’, ‘alheia’, ‘rumo à favela’). In much the same way as the ‘American Grammar’ renders the Black female ‘branded-flesh-as-property’ and therefore anagrammatical, this inherited (de)socialisation of the Black female body within the realm of the abject, the cast-off, marks these ‘vozes-mulheres’ out as incomprehensible, as too distant for signification within the “corporeal”/“racial epidermal schema” of the West83.
Importantly however, in Poemas this fleshy unintelligibility, this bodily dispossession does not yield to the violent ungendering of female flesh and, therefore, refuses to succumb to the disintegration of the gendered signifiers ‘mother’ and ‘woman’ in their contact with Black femininity84. This is exemplified most emphatically in ‘Eu-mulher’ whose title, along with its distinct hyphenation evaristiana, orients racialised, gendered flesh towards subjecthood. Opening with the image of “uma gota de leite […] uma mancha de sangue”85, ‘Eu-mulher’ seems, initially, to recognise the Black mother’s body as a primary site of extraction and productivity, with the convergence of ‘leite’ and ‘sangue’ perhaps a reference to the surrogate legacies of Black mammies whose bodies were appropriated and commodified by the casa-grande/senzala binary. As ‘Eu-mulher’ progresses however, we see Evaristo’s poetics of Black womanhood transform a once captive womb, “a factory producing blackness as abjection much like the slave ship’s hold”86, into a life-giving, generative space, one which sees the enfleshment of the ‘Lei de Ventre Livre’ under which the Black female body can “inaugur[ar] a vida”87. In so doing, Evaristo writes back against the “brutal [ungendering] language of the hold”88, with her now-transfigured womb becoming a new holding space of positive affirmation, “desejos [que] insinuam esperanças”89, and anticipation of “o que há de vir”90.
Evaristo’s crafting of this space in which there is no being without the potentiality of becoming, and in which Black female bodies orient themselves towards the future (“antes-vivo”91), imbues ‘Eu-mulher’ with a Derridean sense of the à-venir. This is powerfully felt when the eu-lírico defiantly identifies herself, staking claim to her body: “Eu fêmea-matriz./Eu força-motriz./Eu-mulher […] moto-contínuo/do mundo”92. Here, ‘fêmea-matriz’, once the very site of Black female bio/necropolitical capture, is cracked open to produce a formidable ‘força-motriz’, with the chiastic structure embodying this space of movement, this unpredictable future in which slippages in signification and grammatical ruptures can be powerfully (re)productive and re-inscriptive. As such, we understand that Evaristo’s ‘eu-mulher’ is not the white, bourgeois “I-woman” with whom Cixous identifies93, nor does she conform to Sharpe’s Black mother as “the birther of terror”94. Rather, Evaristo’s ‘eu-mulher’ is an embodiment of trans*Atlantic time – a figure that pays wakeful homage to her literary foremothers and sisters - namely Sojourner Truth (‘Ain’t I a woman?’) - whilst also continually gesturing towards the horizon, towards a utopic Afro-Futurism (‘moto-contínuo’) which rejects the Symbolic Order’s rendering of ‘Black mother’ as anagrammatical and (re)imagines the racialised womb as a space of empowerment and emancipation.
In Poemas, this re-claiming of the Black womb comes together with Evaristo’s desire to “sound a new language”95 in a Black female idiom. Writing this racialised, gendered body against the grain, Evaristo viscerally inscribes the once-exsanguinated Symbolic ‘Woman’ with “femininos unguentos,/contrassinais a uma antiga escritura”96 and it is from within Black women’s very “entranhas”97, the maternal site of creation, that this “vital urdidura/de uma nova escrita/[…] lugar-texto original”98 is located. Envisioned as a site of ‘biopoetics’, of enfleshed escrevivência, the Black matrice is imbued with the power of an internalised ruttier founded in “sábias anciãs”99 and the guidance of Iemanjá, the Bantu Orisha of motherhood – “femininas deusas [entre nós]”100. Such allusions to transcultural afro-brasilidade underpin this Evaristian desire to transcend the space of the white-feminine Symbolic Order, to abandon racially-exclusive ‘Grammars’, and to re-inscribe the “nova-escrita” of Black female flesh within the realm of “Black feminist intellectual traditions”101, or rather, within a liberating space of Afro-Futurist becoming.
Finally, then, we can see how escrevivência evaristiana, like Black female flesh itself, can be understood in Poemas as a re-signified corpus – an interruption of the economic model of (creative) (re)production tied to the plantation complex through a re-claiming of surrogate mammies’ oral legacies and commodified wombs. Here, the “‘matter’ of race is very much about embodied reality”102 and, as such, Evaristo reaches beyond the Cixousian desire to “inscribe the breath of the whole woman” into ‘Literature’103. Instead, she breathes life and voice back into branded Black flesh through her racialised poetics of womanhood, at last giving space to reflective wake-work and allowing for a racialised, gendered embodiment of the à-venir that pushes beyond the socio-political/lettered foreclosure of Black female bodies by Western/féminine Symbolic Grammars.
Conceição Evaristo quoted in Biblioteca Nacional, ‘Entrevista Com Conceição Evaristo’, Biblioteca Nacional, 26 November 2015, <https://www.bn.gov.br/es/node/1774> [accessed 1 December 2021].
2 Henceforth Poemas.
3 Ramón Grosfoguel, ‘The Epistemic Decolonial Turn’, Cultural Studies, 21:2-3 (2007), 211-223 (p.213).
4 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs, 1:4 (1976), 875-893 (p.879).
5 Hortense Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’, Diacritics, 17:2 (1987), 64-81 (p.67).
6 Ibid., p.68.
7 Hortense Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby’, cited in J. Kameron Carter, ‘Paratheological Blackness’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 112:4 (2013), 589–611, (p.591).
8 Spillers, p.66.
9 Dorothy Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (1987), cited in Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p.x.
10 Spillers, p.75.
11 Ibid., p.76.
12 Ibid., p.77.
13 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), p.122; Spillers, p.76.
14 Sharpe, pp.17-8.
15 Conceição Evaristo quoted in Tayrine Santana and Alecsandra Zapparoli, ‘Conceição Evaristo – ‘A escrevivência serve também para as pessoas pensarem’, Itaú Social, 9 November 2020, <https://www.itausocial.org.br/noticias/conceicao-evaristo-a-escrevivenci... [Accessed 12 November 2021].
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), p.1.
19 Sharpe, p.80.
20 Ibid., p.113.
21 Ibid., p.117.
22 Ibid., p.115.
23 Cixous, p.875, p.886.
24 Ibid., p.875.
25 Conceição Evaristo, ‘Inquisição’, in Poemas da recordação e outros movimentos, 5th edn (Rio de Janeiro: Malê, 2017), pp.107-110 (p.109), ll.31-4. Kindle eBook.
26 Spillers, p.67.
27 Kibi Blaze Williams-Brown, ‘Poetics of the Flesh: The Rearticulation and Recuperation of the Black Body’, (unpublished Senior Capstone Project thesis 831, Vassar College, 2018), p.22. <https://digitalwindow.vassar.edu/senior_capstone/831> [accessed 13 November 2021].
28 Evaristo, ‘Inquisição’, p.109, ll.28-32.
29 Weheliye, p.137.
30 Evaristo, ‘Inquisição’, p.108, ll.1-5.
31 Sharpe, p.77.
32 ibid., p.53.
33 Ibid., p.69.
34 Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, trans. by Libby Meintjes, Public Culture, 15:1 (2003), 11-40, p.13.
35 Ibid, p.40.
36 Cixous, p.879.
37 Ibid, p.880.
38 Julieta Yelin, ‘From Biopolitics to Biopoetics: A Hypothesis on the Relationship between Life and Writing’, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 20:4 (2018), 1-9, p.4. <https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.3365> [accessed 14 November 2021].
39 Ibid.
40 Mbembe, p.40.
41 Weheliye, p.43.
42 Cixous, p.879.
43 Evaristo quoted in Santana and Zapparoli, ‘A escrevivência’.
44 Ibid.
45 Evaristo, ‘Vozes-mulheres’, in Poemas, pp.24-5 (p.25), ll.24-5.
46 Evaristo, ‘Do velho ao jovem’, in Poemas, pp.91-2 (p.91), ll.12-3.
47 Ibid., p.91, ll.14-5.
48 Cixous, p.875.
49 Evaristo, ‘De mãe’, in Poemas, pp.82-3 (p.82), ll.7-8.
50 Evaristo quoted in Santana and Zapparoli, ‘A escrevivência’.
51 Cixous, p.878.
52 Ibid. p.878.
53 Ibid. p.875.
54 Lamine Konte, Unesco-Courier (1985), quoted in Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p.39.
55 Evaristo, ‘De mãe’, p.83, ll.29-31.
56 Sharpe, p.30.
57 Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’ (2008), quoted in Sharpe, pp.32-3.
58 Evaristo, ‘Vozes-mulheres’, p.24, ll.4-5.
59 Ibid., ll.7-8.
60 M. NourbeSe Phillip, Zong! (2008), quoted in Sharpe, p.38.
61 Spillers, p.67.
62 Evaristo, ‘Vozes-mulheres’, p.24, l.2.
63 Ibid., p.25, ll.21-2; l.29.
64 Sharpe, p.128.
65 Evaristo, ‘Vozes-mulheres’, p.25, ll.27-8.
66 Sharpe, p.113.
67 Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return (2001), quoted in Sharpe, p.106.
68 Evaristo, ‘Vozes-mulheres’, p.24, l.3.
69 Ibid., pp.24-5, l.2; l.10; l.28.
70 Sharpe, p.107.
71 Evaristo, ‘Vozes-mulheres’, p.25, l.32.
72 Spillers, p.79, p.74.
73 Evaristo, ‘Malungo, brother, irmão’, in Poemas, pp.18-19 (p.19), l.32.
74 Richard Price, Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, 3rd edn (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), p.27.
75 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), p.19.
76 Spillers, p.79.
77 Sharpe, p.15.
78 Ibid., p.74
79 Ibid., p.15.
80 Evaristo, ‘Vozes-mulheres’, pp.24-5, ll.18-20.
81 Ibid., p.24, ll.11-5.
82 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (London: Duke University Press, 2006), p.111, p.121.
83 Ibid., p.110.
84 Sharpe, p.77.
85 Evaristo, ‘Eu-mulher’, in Poemas, pp.22-3 (p.22), ll.1-3.
86 Sharpe, p.74.
87 Evaristo, ‘Eu-mulher’, p.22, l.9.
88 Sharpe, p.71.
89 Evaristo, ‘Eu-mulher’, p.22, l.7.
90 Ibid., l.15.
91 Ibid., l.14.
92 Ibid., pp.22-3, ll.16-21.
93 Cixous, p.879.
94 Sharpe, p.77.
95 Ibid., p.19.
96 Evaristo, ‘Bendito o sangue de nosso ventre’, in Poemas, pp.34-5 (p.34), ll.16-7.
97 Ibid., p.35, l.26.
98 Ibid., ll.24-7.
99 Ibid., p.34, l.14.
100 Ibid., l.19.
101 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2009), p.16.
102 Ahmed, p.112.
103 Cixous, p.880.
