“Sei que o mistério subsiste além das águas” e “Vagos desejos insinuam esperanças”– navegar entre Ponciá Vicêncio, de Conceição Evaristo e A Mercy, de Toni Morrison é preciso

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate the literary text in prose of two black contemporary authors: the work Ponciá Vicêncio (2003), of the Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo and A Mercy (2008), of the American writer Toni Morrison. Once both writers develop narratives which resume the colonial period, it is intended to establish an analysis of the slavish context prominent in these works. Therefore, the movement of the characters Ponciá Vicêncio and Florens is focused in order to observe the importance of the geographical space in the process of the construction and social formation in the New World. Dialoguing with the history which involves the black in Brazil and in the United States, the enhancement of the socioeconomic consequences resulted from the systematic crossing of the black (by the forced physical dispersal or symbolically exclusive) is examined. By means of mobility, we find the multiplicity of spaces, beyond the bonds which unite the multiple territories. In addition, the not inert nature of the spaces and of the multiterritorialities is pointed out from the changes involved in material relationships and in the dominant and influent signs of the territory. It is, therefore, through the “shared” representation of the social world which the black lives your position in the face of the other social agents. The spaces, in this way, constitute the place, place that, in the works studies, is presented as the lack of place of the black in the Brazilian and in the American society. As our proposal aims the black woman experience in the several instances of the private and public, we can see how the writing of the authors contributes to the construction of this absent place of the black woman. It is emphasized, by this point of view, the crossing over the exterior and the interior, actually, goes beyond the idea of “home” as house or “lar”. “Home” is characterized, specially, by the state of being, the physiological condition in dialogue with the deep intimacy. Moreover, the sense of the feminine authorial writing is focuses, interpreting this “escrever-viver” (writing-living) as the center of the state of the writers, the discussions of the literary history and the search for doing a black literature in the oppressed female voice.