Juliana Streva reads and listens to and thinks with Beatriz Nascimento, Marielle Franco and many others as she improvises, experiments and learns with women engaged in various grassroots movements.

 

A poem

There are cuts and deep cuts
In your skin and in your hair
And furrows on your face
That are the ways of the world
That are unreadable maps
In ancient cartography
You need a pirate
Good at piracy
Who’ll bust you out of savagery
And put you, once again,
In front of the world
Woman.

Beatriz Nascimento, “Dream”, 1989  [+]Poem translated by Christen Smith et al., see Christen Smith, Archie Davies, and Bethânia Gomes, “‘In Front of the World’: Translating Beatriz Nascimento,” Antipode 53. 1 (2021): 279-316.[-]

 

Lívia Ferreira da Silva – Rede Sapata, União Nacional LGBT e Coletivo Lesbibahia, Salvador

 

“A possibility in days of destruction” [+]This phrase is taken from Beatriz Nascimento’s “Quilombo: em Palmares, na favela, no carnaval” [1977], in: União dos Coletivos Pan-Africanistas (ed.), Beatriz Nascimento: quilombola e intelectual. Possibilidade nos dias da destruição, São Paulo: Editora Filhos da África, 189-197, my translation.[-]

The act of speaking has been a key concern across theoretical frameworks. Critical race studies, feminist and anti-colonial perspectives, studies on positionality, standpoint theory, locus of enunciation, lugar de fala, speaking with, speaking nearby – all these are just some examples. [+]See also Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” in I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Domitila De Chungara, Let Me Speak!, ed. Moema Viezzer (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1978); Heleieth Saffioti, “The Social Position of Women,” in Women in Class Society, trans. Michael Vale (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978); Lélia Gonzalez, “Cultura, Etnicidade e Trabalho: Efeitos Linguísticos e Políticos Da Exploração Da Mulher,” in Por Um Feminismo Afro-Latino-Americano, ed. Flavia Rios and Márcia Lima (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1979), 25-44; Gloria Anzaldúa, “Speaking in Tongues – A Letter to Third World Women Writers,” in The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, ed. AnaLouise Keating (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1979); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988); Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Woman, Native, Other. Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000 [1990]); Linda Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” Cultural Critique 20, no. Winter, 1991-1992 (1992): 5-32.[-] They emphasize the importance of recognizing one’s position within the existing structures of power when researching, writing, and speaking. Instead of abstract-disembodied-metaphysical-floating beings, we are (unsurprisingly) situated-embodied-enfleshed subjects. And yet, especially within the institutional sphere, processes of othering and silencing still attempt to reduce insurgent narratives to undetectable, indistinguishable, senseless, detuned, particular, and isolated noise. At the same time, state institutions have given white male speakers the necessary counterpart of a listening public. This structural setup (re)produces the myth that they alone have a voice and therefore can speak for everyone. [+]Listen to “Falta de Silêncio” by Lia Itamaracá (thanks to Katherine McKittrick for reminding me that the footnotes are also territories for sharing, improvising and grooving).[-] Lélia Gonzalez has called this “abstract universal rationalism”, so typical of a white and masculinizing discourse. [+]Lélia Gonzalez, “Por Um Feminismo Afro-Latino-Americano,” in Por Um Feminismo Afro-Latino-Americano, ed. Flavia Rios and Márcia Lima (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1988), 142.[-]

 

Perpetua Pereira Cerqueira – Coletivo Yukaka/Kukama, Manaus

 

In the academic realm, the Western method of investigation (re)produces a colonial extractivist logic in which marginalized people are still considered as objects of study, as data, as a number, as a scientific-passive source, as an object, as nonhuman [+]Listen to “A Caminho de Palmares” by Mbé, Juçara Marçal and Orlando Costa.[-], instead of what they actually are: subjects of knowledge.

Day after day, Black, Indigenous, trans, travesti, lesbian, bisexual, favelada women have been breaching the logic of this ecocidal and genocidal world to make their voices-narratives-stories-agendas-theories-experiences-cosmologies-desires heard. [+]Listen to “Silêncio” by Obinrin Trio.[-] Peripheral narratives should therefore not be equated with the absence of speaking, but rather with the absence of listening. The claim is not to give anyone a voice. The gesture is towards a politics and poetics of listening that enables dialogues and dismantles the historical monologue – or what Sylvia Wynter has called the Western, white, male “monohumanism.” [+]Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,” in Sylvia Wynter. On Being Human as Praxis (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 9-89.[-]

 

Re-member-ing

I first encountered Beatriz Nascimento’s work in 2016 through Alex Ratt’s Eu sou atlântica (2006). Nascimento was an influential intellectual, activist, historian, poet, co-founder of the Brazilian Unified Black Movement. How come I’d never heard of her before? [+]This question follows Lélia Gonzalez’s, Sylvia Wynter’s and Katherine McKittrick’s concerns as to how racism, sexism and other forms of oppression underpin the political economy of academic and nonacademic disciplinary thinking.[-]

/epistemic violence; coloniality of knowledge; internal colonialism; political economy of knowledge production; epistemicide; feminicide/

Beatriz Nascimento provided a crucial contribution to an understanding of the quilombo in Brazil. She conceptualizes the quilombo as not just a fixed geographical space where Black enslaved people escaped and formed alternative communities against colonial slavery, but also as an ongoing political and poetic living practice. It entails historical as well as contemporary strategies of fugitivity in, from, and through a system where there is no way out. In her existential and geographical thinking, “each person is the power, each person is the quilombo.” [+]Beatriz Nascimento, “Transcrição Do Documentário Orí [1989],” in Beatriz Nascimento. Quilombola e Intelectual. Possibilidade Nos Dias Da Destruição, ed. União dos Coletivos Pan-Africanistas [UCPA] (Diáspora Africana: Editora Filhos da África, 1989), 334, my translation.[-]

 

Noélia Pires da Silva – Associação Nacional das Baianas de Acarajé (ABAM), Salvador

 

Epistemologically speaking, lived experience is not opposed to scientific knowledge. For Nascimento, knowing is feeling is knowing; an ontoepistemology. By challenging binary and hierarchized ways of thinking, she highlights entanglements of theory and practice, writing and orality, language and dance, knowledge and experience, etymology and movement. In this way, the primacy accorded to written language above all other forms and ways of knowing and sharing is displaced and challenged. This entanglement of body, time, performance, memory, and knowledge, Leda Maria Martins later called “oralitura.” [+]Leda Maria Martins, Afrografias da Memória, 2nd ed. (São Paulo; Belo Horizonte: Perspectiva; Mazza Edições, 1997).[-] As Martins explains, in the Bantu and Nagô-Yoruba traditions and diasporic praxis, the body is not only the extension of a re-presented knowledge, nor the archive of a static crystallization. It is, rather, the site of a knowledge in continuous movement of formal re-creation, reference, and perennial transformations of the cultural corpus. [+]Leda Maria Martins, “Performances Da Oralitura: Corpo, Lugar Da Memória,” Letras, Revista do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras da Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Língua e Literatura: Limites e Fronteiras, no. 26 (2003): 78.[-]

 

The archive, or Oralitura and collective memories

On 14 December 1890, the Minister of Finance, Rui Barbosa, ordered the burning of all records of slavery in the Brazilian National Archives. Barbosa later justified his order by stating that it had been necessary to eliminate all fiscal evidence of slave possessions so they could not be used by former masters to seek compensation for the loss of their ‘property’ at the time. [+]Américo Jacobina Lacombe, Eduardo Silva, and Francisco de Assis Barbosa, Rui Barbosa e a Queima dos Arquivos (Brasília, Rio de Janeiro: Ministério da Justiça, Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa, 1988).[-] Following the institutional politics of destruction, in 2018, the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, home to the largest Indigenous archive in the country, was almost completely destroyed in a fire. Resisting the ongoing epistemicide, Antônio Bispo dos Santos says: “Even if they (white people) burn the writing, they will not burn the orality. Even if they burn the symbols, they will not burn the meanings. Even if they burn our (quilombo) people, they will not burn our ancestral heritage.” [+]Bispo dos Santos, Colonização, Quilombos: Modos e Significados, 39 (my translation).[-]

But how to rehabilitate an archive so blatantly overdetermined by political and institutional violence? How to (re)narrate history or, rather, histories, in a way that does not reiterate and reify the afterlife of slavery and plantation-colonial violence? Would it be sufficient to criticize the existing situation instead of reconstructing possibilities to make present the narratives that have been, historically and continually, erased and silenced? [+]These questions feed into the critical meditations and confabulations carried out by Sylvia Wynter, Beatriz Nascimento, Saidiya Hartman, Ariella Azoulay, Fred Moten, Christina Sharpe, and many other radical black thinkers.[-]

 

Michelle Barbosa Andrews – Coletivo Difusão, Manaus

 

History has been conceived as the narrative and territory of the victors, but the fugitive movements of this essay do not merely aim to replace it with the history of the defeated. In Nascimento’s words, “we have not yet been defeated. Those who have been called beaten are individuals, full of stories. Their stories may be small, but they are rich and captivating.” [+]Beatriz Nascimento, “Por Um Território (Novo) Existencial e Físico” [1992], in Beatriz Nascimento. Quilombola e Intelectual. Possibilidade Nos Dias Da Destruição, ed. União dos Coletivos Pan-Africanistas [UCPA] (Diáspora Africana: Editora Filhos da África, 1992), 414; for a translation, see Smith, Davies, and Gomes, “‘In Front of the World’: Translating Beatriz Nascimento,” 305.[-] Thus, the hierarchical binary of the victors and the defeated, those with a history and those without, is pushed aside here for a more complex meditation on memory, history, time, and the body; for a meditation on living archives in the plural, not only as a movement against something, but as a creative, multiple and collective assemblage.

“Memory is the contents of a continent, of its life, its history and its past. As if the body was the document.” [+]Beatriz Nascimento, “Transcrição Do Documentário Orí” [1989], 333.[-] The body as document resituates the archive and discloses it as an unfixed, relational, intertextual, decentered, ungeographical, embodied, multiple, and moving praxis. As Nascimento and Martins explain, the body in movement is not only an expression or a representation of the action, but the place of the very inscription of knowledge, knowledge that is written in the gesture, in the movement, in the choreography, in the sonority. [+]Beatriz Nascimento, “Transcrição Do Documentário Orí” [1989], 488; Leda Maria Martins, “Performances Da Oralitura: Corpo, Lugar Da Memória,” Letras, Revista do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras da Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Língua e Literatura: Limites e Fronteiras, no. 26 (2003): 66.[-]

More than reading the body as a colonial map (often reduced to a mere representation), Nascimento is concerned with other ways of drawing its lines and reclaiming its physical and symbolic territories. Such an insurgent gaze implies the active and inventive process of re-existence, which interrogates the political violence while transforming it, moving the institutional structures from below and within towards a “new political aesthetics” as envisaged by Marielle Franco. [+]Marielle Franco, “Mulher, Negra, Favelada e Parlamentar: Resistir é Pleonasmo,” in O Golpe na Perspectiva de Gênero, ed. Linda Rubim and Fernanda Argolo (Salvador: Edufba, 2018), 120.[-]

 

Roberta de Pádua – Coletivo Madame Satã, Rio de Janeiro

 

An email (or Notes on my own body in relation)

April 1st, 2019 [one year and 18 days after the femicide of Marielle Franco]

Betreff: 1 Woche 1 Kps 1x/woche dann WV zu E2 Therapie

Dear Ms Streva,

I received your information via the [clinic]. Meanwhile, I had left a message on your answering machine. Please take one capsule per day for one week. And from then on, 1 capsule every 2 weeks. Your estradiol [+]Two brief quotes on estradiol and estrogen: “During the reproductive years of the human female, levels of estradiol are somewhat higher than that of estrone, except during the early follicular phase of the menstrual cycle; thus, estradiol may be considered the predominant estrogen during human female reproductive years in terms of absolute serum levels and estrogenic activity.” – “Estrogen is considered to play a significant role in women’s mental health, with links suggested between the hormone level, mood and well-being. Sudden drops or fluctuations in, or long periods of sustained low levels of estrogen may be correlated with significant mood-lowering. Clinical recovery from depression postpartum, perimenopause, and postmenopause was shown to be effective after levels of estrogen were stabilized and/or restored” (Wikipedia).[-] level is very low and we have to initiate replacement therapy. Please make an appointment.

All the best
GH

Dr. med. GH
[clinic]

 

Sandra Benites – Movimento de Mulheres Indígenas Guarani Nhandewa, Rio de Janeiro

 

Trying to make a way from no way

 

But why write another essay on antiracist, feminist, and anti-colonial struggles in, from and through brasil (lower-case and with an s), or anywhere else? In the current globalized context of exhaustive zoomification, digitalization of movements, and cybernetic contagion of distorted and fake information, the dispute as to how we produce knowledge and how knowledge produces us becomes even more acute, even more sensitive, even more pressing for our collective survival.

“We will not be interrupted” is a reference to the last speech given by Marielle Franco on 8 March 2018, when she said: “I will not be interrupted. I will not be interrupted by a citizen who comes here and doesn’t know how to listen to the position of an elected woman!” [+]My translation from the original: “Não serei interrompida. Não aturarei interrompimento de um cidadão que vem aqui e não sabe ouvir a posição de uma mulher eleita!”[-] In agropoetic grounds, Black and Indigenous feminists revindicate Franco’s legacy by invoking the vocabulary of semente (seeds) to address the ancestral and ongoing struggle for re-existence and coexistence. Seeds encapsulate the organic and the spiral cycle of life, the fertility of the soil, also evoking the Ubuntu notion of interconnectedness and togetherness – “I am because we are.” Thus, a perfect storm cultivates seeds that, when growing and spreading, radically transform the entire body-territory. The perfect storm announces the end of the world as we know it. [+]Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(Ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World,” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 84-85.[-]

This video-essay is part of and puts into momentary composition an ongoing process of listening, sharing and struggling together. The conversations with Lívia, Noélia, Perpetua, Sandra, Michelle and Roberta were recorded in 2018, after the femicide of Marielle Franco and before the national elections that would bring the current far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, to power. I travelled through the cities of Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and Manaus with a small camera, a tripod, a microphone, and a very simple audio recorder, improvising, experimenting and learning with women engaged in grassroots movements. The short videos included here are part of a longer documentary-film entitled Mulheres em Movimento.