XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

The Door Left Open: Women and Housing in Brazilian Fiction

• In Event: Feminist and Ecocritical Readings of Contemporary Brazilian Literature

Abstract

In 2021, Natércia Pontes published her first novel Os tais caquinhos. In the novel, the teenage narrator, Abigail, lives with her father and sister, Berta, in a home marked by the absence of their mother and two youngest sisters who left years prior. Abigail’s father, Lúcio, hoards compulsively, and their Fortaleza apartment, where most of the narrative is set, is heaped with his possessions. Abigail’s many tribulations—domestic partner abuse, sexual assault, unplanned pregnancies, and the loss of her mother from her everyday life—are barely mentioned. Instead, her fixation is the fetid apartment, both symbol and setting, that reflects the suffering that she has faced. Yet, due to the style of the prose, hopelessness surprisingly does not permeate the book. Instead, imagination does. The novel foregrounds Abigail’s creative command of language: her humor, unique perspective, irony, metaphors, and wordplay. The text, which is often nonchronological, gives us little information for understanding Abigail’s life rationally. Instead, the novel draws us into Abigail’s sensory perceptions, emotions, and dreams, especially as they relate to the apartment. Writer Jennifer Croft proposes that “in general, there has to be chemistry between form and content for a book to be good.” In the chemistry of Os tais caquinhos, form and content are immiscible. I argue that the novel’s content, particularly its fixation on a squalid apartment, mercilessly sticks our nose in abjection, while the novel’s form insists on the aspects of Abigail’s personhood that transcend abjection: her playfulness, imagination, emotional and sensory awareness, unique brand of hope, and ability to overcome hardship. The dynamic disconnect between form and content gives the text a quirky, mismatched, unstable quality that captivates our attention. I make this argument drawing primarily on Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection. The article first considers Kristeva’s use of abjection, comparing it to the first description of the apartment in Pontes’s novel.

Author

• Sophia Beal, University of Minnesota