Writing voices: Conceição Evaristo and Roberta Tavares

Abstract

Brazilian black female poetry instigates reflections on the review of domination practices supported by coloniality, through the reconfiguration of imaginaries and identities. Thus, this article analyzes how Conceição Evaristo (Southeast region), Roberta Tavares (North region), from their voices, space, memory and black body, manage, in a poetic way, to create paths of insurgency that re-signify racial identity and promote a decolonial turn in the face of hegemonic discourses, in the works Poemas da remembrance and other movements, from 2008, and Mulheres de Fogo, from 2023. The importance of discussing black Brazilian poetry as an epistemic response to the Eurocentric project is highlighted. The voices of these black authors rise up against racism, patriarchy and the erasure of their ethnic-racial origins. The texts mark poetic voices that reveal how literary writing represents another poetics, which does not submit to that of a literature considered canonical, because it has its own canon and its own rules. In general, this literature implies another way of writing. In this sense, it is important to investigate what poetics this is, as well as the texts of these writers, who are a voice in Brazilian literature that forces other Brazilian authors to rethink their productions. Significant theoretical discussions for the analysis and understanding of the corpus come from Duarte (2011), Said, (2011) and Ricouer (2007), among others. This reflection proposes to think about erasures as forming an aesthetic-political discourse, marked by ethnic-racial issues that reveal the place where these writers belong. The poetic production of the aforementioned writers offers us the opportunity to consider decolonial thinking as a confrontation, calling for a political and social transformation.