Carolina Maria de Jesus’ “room”: encounters and (dis)affirmed black existences

Abstract

This work is an interweaving of singular narratives and thoughts gleaned through similarities. An assumed and shared exposition. Writing that emerges from silence and then becomes a conversation between the arrangement of individual and collective action. Here, the words of the black woman from/in the countryside and the black gay man unfold; words in conversation amplified beyond the protective room. The text is the narrative of the lived experiences perceived through the lens of (dis)affirmed existences, therefore, an autoethnography (the method), aiming at the vocalization of the I-we enclosed in the subjective “room”. This article is atypical in format, since it has two important divisions, marked by voice. First, her voice (the black woman from/in the countryside), shaping the house of-self, stepping on and forming the meanings and the very structures of the artisanal “room” in connection with nature, the land and ancestry. Then comes his voice (the black and gay man) revealing his differences within the oppression of the “room” and then reaching the vastness of himself. Between Her and Him is the writer Carolina Maria de Jesus; a timeless link of black lives that assert themselves in her literature of flesh, bone, skin, blackness, and poetry consciously aware of stigmatizing experiences. It is a simple text about (dis)affirmed existences, based on the objective and subjective struggles between racism, homophobia, machismo and prejudice. A reflection of the suffocating and frightening experiences of the past-present lived in the “room”. Assuming that every person has a “room”, the authors point to the beauty of having a “window”, preferably wide open.