Ponciá Vicêncio and Becos da Memória: Literary Tradition or the Poetics of Exile

Abstract

This article analyzes the contemporary Brazilian novels Ponciá Vicêncio (2003) and Becos da Memória (2013) by Conceição Evaristo in order to reflect on ancestry and the emergence of what I define, from a literary perspective, as a poetics of exile. This discussion focuses on this author to argue for her importance in the emergence of this literary tradition, constructed on the basis of a writing process shaped by experiences that bring together common elements—exile, enslavement, nostalgia, and cultural traditions. The poetics of exile are understood as a type of literary tradition that not only recovers a historical memory of suffering, but also a memory of resistance. In this sense, the analysis starts from the idea that Carolina Maria de Jesus, following in the wake of Maria Firmina dos Reis in the nineteenth century, represents, in the twentieth century, a literary tradition that has been consolidating in the twenty-first century through writers such as Evaristo, who, like her predecessors, is an exponent of a literary tradition whose main characteristic is ancestral memory. Thus, also engaging in theoretical dialogue with Evaristo, the article seeks to reflect on these poetics, which result in escrevivência, sustained by ancestral memory and understood here as one of the strategies in response to necropolitics, or necropower, in the terms proposed by Achille Mbembe (2016).