The "Escrevivência" of Adão Ventura’s "A cor da pele"

• In Event: Experimental Aesthetics as Experimental Life: Alterity and Form in 20th and 21st Century Southern Cone Literature

Abstract

According to Conceição Evaristo, the narratives of Afro-Brazilian women “cannot be read as stories meant to ‘soothe the residents of the master’s house’ but rather to unsettle them in their unjust dreams.” Writing over or alongside the spatial subjectivity of Gilberto Freyre’s plantation master, Black women assume a poetic agency and capacity to dismantle his house; their tools of cartography are as (re)productively cosmological and epistemological as they are bodily and material, the recesses and resources of ancestral nightmares and dreams. Guided by Evaristo’s concept of escrevivência, this paper will examine racialization in Adão Ventura’s poetry collection A cor da pele (1981) as a spatial, spiritual, and gendered process that re-imagines the Black body/spirit. Against modernist framings of national space and time, Ventura’s diasporic identifications enable a remaking of the self at the intersection of situated experience, ancestral culture, and history. To dismantle hegemonic geography, as Ventura’s poems do, requires privileging the diasporic subject’s conceptual agility—her ability to draw from a field of experience richer and more critical than what the secular imaginary permits.

Author

• Lucas A de Lima, University of Pennsylvania