Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that instead of a celebratory discourse of origins what we need is to think about what can be done once the idea of Africa has been produced (in Brazil, or in Europe). Here, I ask how Afro-Brazilian writer Esmeralda Ribeiro deals with essentialist views of Africa as ancestral root.

Paper long abstract:

The aim of this paper is to discuss the ideas of Africa which organise both the literary output and existing academic responses to the ethnic collective officially known as 'Afro-Brazilian women writers'. This will be done by focusing on Esmeralda Ribeiro's short-story, 'Guarde Segredo' (1998). As this story exemplifies, Ribeiro oscillates between an engagement with, and a subversion of, the fiction of the unitary authorial kernel which goes by the name of 'Afro-Brazilianness'. Despite Ribeiro's aesthetic and political 'dance' between consumption and criticism of an essentialist idea of Africa in Brazil, existing literary appraisals (Afolabi 2009) tend to assign Ribeiro the central position of (political) symbol and signifier of Brazilian national difference. In the light of this, I sketch a line of continuity between African paternalistic reifications of the mother (tongue) as the depository and matrix of memory (pre and post-independence), and the present quest for an African maternal kernel in Brazilian national identity. In both cases, the reification of the grand mother as orality, tongue, or smile, is, to quote Ward, 'not a fond and flattering caress but a deadly act of appropriation' (1997: 117). Ribeiro's depiction of the uncanny smile of Lima Barreto in the grandmother's lips provocatively exposes how the myth of Africa as origin and utopia in Brazil is dangerously incorporated into a 'monoglossic discourse that has been coded in advance' (Ward 1997: 121).