The sweet and salty waves of black letters in research

When thinking about the movement of words in literary art by black authors, we can gaze at waves of letters creating images and enabling us to imagine and (re)imagine other possible black existences, thus contributing to build the unfinished work of the world. Words that expand like the sea, salting wounds to heal misfortunes, but that also border the forests like the rushing waters of a brook, sweetening our life. The prose and poetry of black authors, following the courses and paths of the waters, despite encountering stones along the way, flow possibilities of a constant human and humanizing reconstruction, in a continuous flow from the self to the us and from the us to the self.

Based on readings of the works (prose and poetry) of black authors, I realized the possibility of expanding the reflection in the theoretical and practical field of museums—regardless of their type—and Museology, as to the representations of black bodies and their Afromemories in museum spaces, but not only. I conceive the literary art of black authors as an epistemic foundation that provide us with analytical offerings to reflect on the world, on our time, on the societies of which we are part and their ills, on our political contexts, and as something that encourages us to create new musealization processes and remove from the museological rubble that which was intentionally buried by the dredges of racism.

Since 2020, I have been weaving dialogic webs between literary arts by black authors and Museology, through the research project called “Memories that come from words: museological perspectives on the literatures of black women,” within the scope of the Museology program, of the School of Visual Arts (FAV), at the Institute of Art Sciences (ICA), at the Federal University of Pará (UFPA), coordinated by me (Luzia Gomes Ferreira), in partnership with the Museology and black women’s literature: decolonization of the view in decorative art Project, coordinated by Joseania Miranda Freitas, professor of the Undergraduate Program in Museology and the Graduate Program in Museology at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). The combination of these two researches resulted in the Interinstitutional Research Project called Weaving webs: dialogues between Museology and black women’s literature. In this research, I am interested in pointing out how the literary creations of black authors build new regimes of visibilities in addition to platforms of Afromemories, which may or may not be inside museums; as well as opening spaces for a horizontal dialogue between Museology and the literary arts by black authors.

With the premise of contributing to new reflections on Afro-diasporic memories in museological theory and practice, the “Memories that come from words: museological perspectives on the literatures of black women” Research Project analyzed novels by Brazilian and foreign black female writers; and that enabled observing, based on these writings, how these authors write about the Afro-diasporic black people: families; loves; friendships; politics and several other subjects that go beyond the denunciation of racism. As reminded by sociologist Patricia Hill Collins (2019, p. 12, our translation): “[…] Governments change, but black women’s long history of commitment and creativity persists in this struggle to claim our full humanity.” Furthermore, the literary arts of black authors are presented as a possible paradigm to reflect on musealization processes that seek to dialogue with the principles of anti-racist and anti-sexist struggles. The investigation was divided into three lines, namely:

1st Line – Black slavery: in this line, we analyze literary works by black female writers that deal with slavery. The books selected were:

Úrsula, by Maria Firmina dos Reis;

Água de barrela, by Eliana Alves Cruz;

Amada, by Toni Morrison;

O caminho de casa, by Yaa Gyasi;

Incidentes na vida de uma menina escrava, by Harriet Ann Jacobs;

Eu, Tituba: bruxa negra de Salem, by Maryse Condé.

2nd Line – Black childhood: in this line, we analyze literary works by black female writers in which black children are protagonists in the plot. The books selected were:

Meu mundo! eu, rio e Mar, by Mônica Conrado;

A cor da ternura, by Geni Guimarães;

Cartas para minha mãe, by Teresa Cárdenas;

O olho mais azul, by Toni Morrison.

3rd Line – Black women in diaspora: in this line, we analyze literary works by black female writers that deal with displacement, especially that of black women. The books selected were:

Cidadã de segunda classe, by Buchi Emecheta;

Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie;

Esse cabelo, by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida;

O ventre do Atlântico, by Fatou Diome;

Adua, by Igiaba Scego.

This research project originated both from my work as a reader of literary art by black authors, as I mentioned earlier, and from my experiences in the classroom, with the classes of the Undergraduate Program in Museology at UFPA, in the curricular components Museological theory and Musealization of heritage . I felt the need to bring other knowledge to the classroom, in addition to the epistemic canons of Museology, in which mostly white and Eurocentric still prevail, and, most of the time, do not manage to critically think about black memories in the Americas beyond slavery with its objects of torture. When holding the seminars with the classes, where we read and debate books by Conceição Evaristo, Eliana Alves Cruz, Fatou Diome, Yaa Gyasi and Toni Morrison, I realized that it was possible to present to the students other narratives about the black people in the American continent, in which black people are human beings, with names and surnames, with their complexities, their paths, their histories, with their dreams of freedom and emancipation. And I always emphasized, for female and male students that were prospective museologists, the importance of them understanding that there are other references to think about the representations of the black population with dignity and respect in our museums. As written by bell hooks (2013, p. 273, our translation): “[…] learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a setting of possibility.” The meetings and dialogues in the classroom raised issues that could be deepened in the investigation. I consider it important to record this interconnection between education and research in the academic universe, as it often seems that research does not develop in the classroom and vice versa.

We are aware of the need to collectively build strategies to disentangle materialized colonialities from museum structures. Accordingly, I consider that our research can concretely contribute so that museums rethink and decolonize themselves, and together we can create joint proposals for new musealization processes that are, in fact, anti-racist and anti-sexist. Understanding the literary arts by black authors as a source of learning for museological theory and practice does not mean disregarding scientific sources, but rather adding to them other productions of knowledge without hierarchy. On the other hand, it is always important to remember that museum institutions are established and managed by people. Therefore, museum professionals need to create an anti-racist and anti-sexist pact considering and based on the collections, as objects alone do not lead to transformation.

Building the possibility of having literary arts by black authors as one of the theoretical frameworks in the epistemic field of Museology is important for the reconfiguration of contemporary museological theory and practice, especially at a time when new practices and ways of doing of/in museums are under discussion. We cannot think about the museums of the present without questioning the hegemonic musealization processes arising from colonialism, nor forget that museum institutions were colonial instruments. Nor can we think about changing museums without the presence of the artistic and scientific writings of black and indigenous persons. Writer Eliana Alves Cruz, in her novel Água de barrela, invites us—right in her notes—to reflect on what we no longer want in the plots of the memories of the world. The prose writer narrates:

We no longer want that which whitens the black way of being. We no longer want the slow and constant fading of the color of the wet, sweaty, enchanted earth… We want the patches of the clothes, in the plots of the years suffered, loved… And above all, passionately lived. (CRUZ, 2018, p. 11, our translation).

In the museological field, the debate on the right to memory continues. However, we need to agree on what are the other/new black memories we want to present and represent in museum spaces considered classic/traditional. Nowadays, there is constant talk about the decolonization of museums; however, it is generally not questioned which bodies are producing museological theories and carrying out the musealization processes in these official institutions of memories. And the issue is often reduced to the representations of black bodies in exhibition spaces, but we rarely talk about the systemic backstage of museums, of those who really have the power to intentionally show and hide, and thus make some memories emerge and others immerse. Most of the time, there is a visible attempt to adjust a supposedly decolonizing thought to a society immersed in colonial practices, in which female and male black subjects, most often, are not heard, despite often being inside the academia, museums, political spheres; even so, they almost always go on without possibilities of denomination and presentification. According to bell hooks (2019, p. 32, our translation):

With no way to name our pain, we also have no words to articulate our pleasure. In fact, a fundamental task of critical black thinkers has been the struggle to break with the hegemonic models of seeing, thinking and being that hinder our ability to see ourselves from other perspectives, to imagine, describe, and invent ourselves in ways that are liberating.

Regarding the research, although memory is an important category for museological theory and practice in museums, this research is not interested in framing literary works by black authors only as memorialistic writings. As much as some works by writers studied in our research—such as Eliana Alves Cruz, Monica Conrado, Geni Guimarães, Toni Morrison and Maryse Condé—bring to light the past materialized in the present, and memories interconnect these black writings in some way, making us realize that memory is dynamic and does not materialize only in two- and three-dimensional objects, when we come into contact with the novels of these authors, it is evident that they cannot be reduced to a treatise on black memories in the Americas.

Poet and novelist Miriam Alves, talking about literary arts by black authors, emphasizes the understanding that this writing

[…] is a literature of various and diverse narratives. It is not a narrative of a single place… it can but is not solely memorialism, it can and is not solely ancestralism, it can and is not solely combat literature, it can and is not solely revolt literature, it can and is not solely counterattack narrative. (ALVES, 2019, our translation).

Carrying out research focused on the literary arts of black authors, specifically of Brazilian and foreign black women, is to establish prose and poetry as contemporary sources of knowledge. It is also a political way of elucidating the importance and need of decolonizing academic and museological perspectives, thus considering new theoretical frameworks for a profound transformation in education, research and extension. Literary arts by black authors are concrete poetic possibilities of imagistic and historical counter-narratives. Rosane Borges (2020) says that “It is necessary to turn images into categories of transformation” these black writings are a way of reinscribing our existences in the tracks of time through our subjectivities and collectivities. They are the materialization of our secular struggle to exist in a violently racist country like Brazil, which kills us imagistically, symbolically and physically. The literary arts by black authors enable us to have a plurality of images of black bodies in the world through words, because black letters are also places of imagistic creation and possible imaginaries in the scene of the world as it is.

From the enchantment in Ogun’s bowl to the breath of memory in the events.

When organizing my presentation –, I suggested to the webinarists the prior reading of four literary texts by male authors Edimilson de Almeida Pereira and Jeferson Tenório and female authors Miriam Alves and Roberta Tavares. While listening to the webinarists after my presentation at the Black artists, contemporary literature and art table, alongside professor Renata Felinto and curator Thiago de Paula Souza, some references to the texts of writers Edimilson de Almeida Pereira and Jeferson Tenório caught my attention. After the event, in contact by email with some webinarists, I decided, in the second part of this article, to address two texts that I indicated for the webinar.

Of the texts indicated for dialogue here, I selected those by writers Edimilson de Almeida Pereira and Jeferson Tenório. These are not authors I focus on in the research, because, in the ongoing investigation, mentioned in the first section of this article, we study books by black female writers. However, I am a reader of the works of these two writers. I do not intend to conduct a literary critique analysis, as that is not my training, nor my profession, but rather to do exercises that I consider important to think about museums, memories, our society and objects, based on the literary arts of black authors.

“The leftovers of the affections…”

I start with the book O avesso da pele, published in 2020, by Jeferson Tenório, a writer born in the city of Rio de Janeiro and based in Rio Grande do Sul. This book won the Jabuti Award in 2021, in the Literary Novel category. For the webinarists to read, I selected subchapter 1, which is part of the chapter “The skin” and whose narrator is Pedro, a son mourning the death of his father, a black man, a literature teacher murdered by the police. When talking about his father, Pedro also talks about himself, and in this visceral plot, which grips us from beginning to end as readers, the racial ills of Brazilian society are presented. However, as the literary art enables us to look and see beyond what is concrete to the eye, in the cracks of the letters of O avesso da pele it is possible to find guiding threads to understand how the things/objects are related to us in today’s time, remembering the past.

There are memories of you in the objects, but it seems that all that is left of them harms or comforts me, because they are leftovers of affection. In silence, these same objects tell me about you. It is with them that I invent you and wait for you. It is with them that I try to find out how many tragedies we can still endure. (TENÓRIO, 2020, p. 13, our translation).

How many things/objects in museums harm us? Nevertheless, at the same time, how many things/objects in museums can enable us to endure the daily tragedies as a black population? Is that possible? I read and listen to Pedro while thinking about how often in museum institutions we see/treat things/objects based on their materiality, we deal with their durability based on conservation techniques, we record them in the documentation sheets, until we display them in an exhibition. Can we already see/perceive collections as things/objects that carry pieces of persons, since their creation, execution, uses and reuses by living people and how they connect us to people from our past?

We know that not everything is nor will be in museums, as we do not shy away from selection in the constitution of collections. However, in order to understand the material aspects of black memories in constant movement in Brazil, we also need to look outside museum spaces. Often, the fragments of our memories are in a corner somewhere, in the effervescence of the crossroads, in the offering in a cemetery, in the cumeeira (in Afro-Brazilian religions, an object on the ceiling of a worshiping building representing the central point of energy, connection with the sky) of a terreiro (meeting place where rituals of Afro-Brazilian religions are held), or in a clay bowl behind the door, as Pedro presents to us:

But as a traversal that examines the environment and initiates a jigsaw puzzle, a jigsaw puzzle that begins behind the room door, where I find an orange clay bowl. And, inside it, a stone, an ocutá (stone fetish), wrapped in red, green and white beaded necklaces, an orisha. I observe it carefully. That’s how you step into a life that’s gone. I take the ocutá out of the bowl. I remember the day you told me that your head belonged to Ogun, and that that was being lucky, because Ogun was the only orisha who knew how to deal with the abysses. I remember that it was from your mouth that I first heard the word “abyss.” There are words that we keep in childhood because they comfort us. (TENÓRIO, 2020, p. 14, our translation).

Since we came to exist and forcibly inhabit these Americas invented by colonialism, we are on the brink and inside the abyss. Ogun, materialized in the ocutá or human matter, helps us to shun abysses and, when we often cannot get out of it, Ogun is there in the front, pointing to paths of fight and retreat for protection. But I also like to see Ogun as a loving father, who embraces, protects and lets go, as in this case of the dreamer:

[…] paths close in displacements with gray clouds… the sun doesn’t seem to be able to go beyond the strange paths in times of darkness… while the sky does not open to the new year… an aching body in the gutter of the earth crawls around the corners in search of comfort in the arms of the invisible… taken by the fatigue of the seven human mistakes the physical matter falls asleep at the crossroads of hopelessness… unconscious in the scourge of sleep, the piece of human flesh discarded on the street of helplessness relives its ancestral memory at a terreiro party… in the xirê, it sees Ogun stepping on the Àiyé, tearing the asphalt and the lines of iron, dancing with his technological sword of loving consolation… like a father who does not abandon his daughter in January periods, Ogun embraces her and dances with that body rejected by the twenty-one eyes of neglect… in that moment of contemplation of the embrace of support the dreamer is sure that Ogun ate roasted yam with palm oil and feijoada on the Axé road!… (GOMES, 2020, our translation)

Returning to Pedro’s narrative, he closes this subchapter by informing us that it is through things/objects that the history and memory of his father’s life will be reconstituted. Even though these things/objects can become a visiting ghost:

I look at all this and realize that it will be these objects that will help me narrate what you were before you left. The same instruments that defeated you and that now tell me about you. The objects will be your ghost visiting me. (TENÓRIO, 2020, p. 14, our translation)

While reading and listening to Pedro, I conceive the possibility of building new theories about things/objects based on the literary arts by black authors, and not only that. Not the appeasement theory, but the confrontation theory. We need to name the things/objects that haunt us in museums, the ghosts that live on in collections that are not heard. And maybe that way, at some point, we can see in these things/objects the leftovers of the affections that make us endure the secular tragedies in these Americas.

“A place for the living, even if dead”

The book FRONT, by professor and poet Edimilson de Almeida Pereira, was published in 2020 and, in 2021, won the São Paulo Literature Award. This book is part of a trilogy consisting of two more books: O ausente and Um corpo à deriva. FRONT presents the narrative of a man from the rubble, from the dunghill of a big city; a city which exists in every capital of this country. I don’t know this man’s name, I don’t see his face, but I know who he is. Because he is present on street corners, in landfills, in the visible invisibility of our urban centers. In chapter 13 of the book, this faceless, nameless man, this tree man, visits the museum created by the character Jean-Charles:

‘Here is a house where memory breathes and accepts to discuss events.’ (…) While I was talking about the spirit of the Museum, I looked around reading the fortune and misfortune of the objects. Some were leftovers from the repression: a single shoe instead of a pair, a wallet without documents, a headset divorced from music. According to Jean-Charles, objects were not just the result of violence on happy bodies. They were a sign of orphanhood of those who attacked and those who jumped across the abyss to save themselves. (PEREIRA, 2020, p. 93, our translation).

The leftovers and the abyss once again stand out; however, I like to think of this museum in which memory can breathe, because sometimes we leave it without lightness, without a minute of relief. I also consider it important that museum spaces hold discussions about events, without watering them down; nevertheless, I do not know if that is possible and if we can already do that without hiding behind the collections. What are the fortunes and misfortunes of the things/objects that constitute the collections of our museums? When I visualize in my imagination the museum created by Jean-Charles, I cannot imagine a place that I would feel comfortable after visiting.

‘You see,’ Jean-Charles insisted, as he pointed out the objects to me, ‘here is not a place for clichés like: sometimes we are saved by chance, saying nothing is saying everything. No. Here is a place for the living, even if dead. This is intense and does not fit in the catalogs of conventional museums. Here, the shattered, almost invisible objects show that we are a constellation. That we can stretch the soul to the maximum and, close to the limit, let it go.’ (PEREIRA, 2020, p. 93-94, our translation).

Despite the discomfort that Jean-Charles’ Museum causes me, it is remarkable to think about how the dead live through shattered things/objects, because these dead are the unremembered, the bodies of the undesirable ones, the terribly others, as says Rosane Borges. Criticism of conventional museums is posed; however, I also think that any museum belongs to us. But the key needs to be turned, museological narratives need to follow the events that for centuries they have tried to bury in the dungeon of oblivion.

Jean-Charles is right: his Museum is the defeat of certain memories that imprison us. Gathered and blown in this Museum, life is not a password for oblivion. At Jean-Charles’ Museum, what has lived dances through the ideas they evoke. (…) What did you expect from a living being that we happen to call a Museum? If you touch this or that vestige, at least here you will have to deal with its entrails. Everything is absolutely fertile here. (PEREIRA, 2020, p. 96, our translation).

There is an interesting twist here. Jean-Charles’ Museum, by defeating incarcerating memories, humanizes the terribly others. The exposed entrails of the vestiges summon us to deal with social and collective traumas and, who knows, find a path to healing. However, if healing is not possible, the wounds and scars will not be hidden in the technical reserves of museums. In Jean-Charles’ Museum there is no room for the enjoyment of contentment and beauty; violence is there, presented, bluntly, in the objects separated from the people to whom they belonged. Nevertheless, at the same time, the faceless, nameless man from the rubble, together with Jean-Charles, reminds us that they too have stories to tell, that they know who the owners of the “scheme” are, that they have the right to have their memories registered, that they too have a right to life.

Pausing the letters

Literary arts by black authors and museums go on in movement. However, they do not always meet and dialogue. Therefore, my exercise in this text, based on the research I have been carrying out and on my work as a reader and poet, was to try to build this dialogue, so that literary writing plays not a secondary role in relation to museums or Museology, but a leading role with autonomy, unveiling and revealing other ways to think about things/objects, Afro-diasporic memories, life, our existences and everything else that makes us human, all too human.

Something important to point out when I deal with museum institutions and the literary arts by black authors is that none will solve all the social problems—including racism—that dilacerate the lives of black persons in Brazil and the Americas as a whole. I think, notwithstanding, that they are places (I conceive prose and poetry as places of inscription in the world) that can contribute to the construction of new emancipatory images and concepts of and for the black population.

Finally, I hope that each and every Brazilian museum, regardless of its type, has, as one of the principles of its mission, being an anti-racist institution. That they find ways to communicate to their public that the black population has not only made a “contribution” to the formation of Brazil, but rather that we are Brazil’s society. And that they do not reduce our histories and memories in the Americas to slavery.

References

ALVES, Miriam. Entrevista no Canal do Youtube Bondelê. 2019. Available in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W–oD2cL_tg. Access in: 20 jan. 2022.

COLLINS, Patricia H. Pensamento Feminista Negro: Conhecimento, Consciência e Política do Empoderamento. Trad. de Jamille Pinheiro Dias. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2019.

CRUZ, Eliana A. Água de Barrela. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Malê, 2018.

GOMES, Luzia. A Sonhadora. In: Etnografias Poéticas de Mim. 2020. Available in: https://etnografiasdemim.blogspot.com/search?q=a+sonhadora. Access in: 20 jan. 2022.

HOOKS, bell. Olhares Negros: raça e representação. Trad. Stephanie Borges. São Paulo: Elefante, 2019.

HOOKS, bell. Ensinando a Transgredir: a Educação como Prática de Liberdade. Tradução de Marcelo Brandão Cipolla. São Paulo: Editora WMF Martins Fontes, 2013.

PEREIRA, Edimilson de A. FRONT. São Paulo: Editora Nós, 2020. TENÓRIO, Jeferson. O Avesso da Pele. 1. ed. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2020.