Oshun's Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas

Four: Sacrifice and Salvation: Helena Parente Cunha, Sônia Fátima da Conceição, and Conceição Evaristo

119 Ñ four Ò Sacrifice and Salvation Helena Parente Cunha, Sônia Fátima da Conceição, and Conceição Evaristo Aos poucos, vou desatando um nó, desamarrando um laço, depois as malhas da rede, por fim me livro de todas as correntes. O meu corpo ilimitado e demovido desemboca em rios imprevistos, transpõe barreiras insuspeitadas. —Eu Little by little, I am undoing a knot, casting off a chain, then the mesh of the net, finally I free myself of all restraints. My limitless and liberated body flows into unforeseen rivers, crossing unsuspected barriers. —I A menina nunca tinha sido dela. Voltava para o rio, para as águas-mãe. —Maria Vicêncio The girl was never hers. She was returning to the river, to the Mother-Waters. —Maria Vicêncio 120 O S H U N ’ S D A U G H T E R ’ S In her introduction to the 1994 edition of Ruth Landes’s seminal text The City of Women (1947), Sally Cole offers the following observation about the relationship between women and Candomblé: “Candomblé makes visible women’s experience, and offers women well-defined roles, personal access to a multiplicity of spirits who speak to women’s needs, and access to extended personal networks and material resources” (xiii). The river inspires liberation; for both the protagonist of Helena Parente Cunha’s first novel Mulher no Espelho (1983) and the mother of the protagonist of Conceição Evaristo’s first novel Ponciá Vicêncio (2003), the cool river waters signify personal freedom and more importantly, autonomy. In the course of the novels, both protagonists discover and assert the right to be fundamentally who they are, sloughing off restrictive definitions of Brazilian womanhood confined by societal definitions of race, class, and gender. Instead, they take their cues from the entity identified with the river in Candomblé Nagô, Oxum, and Candomblé Angola, Ndanda Lunda. The 1960s and 1970s marked a pivotal moment in the history of women’s literary production in Brazil; though the country had seen the rare publication of writings by women since its existence as a colony of Portugal, only in the twentieth century were women recognized by their male counterparts as legitimate contributors to cultural production. Writers such as Rachel de Queiroz in the 1930s, and Clarice Lispector and Lydia Fagundes Telles in the 1940s published short stories and novels that are seen as a counternarrative to the dominant discourse written by their male counterparts, one in which women (irrespective of race and class) were seen as marginal. The military dictatorship plunged the country into political chaos beginning with the coup d’état of 1964 and ending twenty-one years later in 1985; in that span, tens of thousands were detained by the government. Many, including the sitting president, Dilma Rousseff, were tortured by military police, with thousands forced into exile.1 Activists on the political Left, though victims of increased censorship (especially after the passage of the Institutional Act Number 5, which allowed for the suppression of political rights of individuals and groups deemed as threats to national security), fought for the reestablishment of their civil liberties. The formation of the dictatorship also coincided with the global women’s movement, as nations across the world, including Brazil, saw the political activism of women as they demanded full equality in the face of the law. The United Sacrifice and Salvation 121 Nations declared 1975 to be International Women’s Year, inaugurating the Decade of the Woman; women’s groups such as the Movimento Feminino pela Anistia (the Women’s Movement for Amnesty) and Nós Mulheres (We Women) gained greater prominence. Women across racial and class lines made these demands, confronting a culture in Brazil in which women were (and are) explicitly eroticized and conceived of as little more than sexual playthings. Those in support of the equality of men and women in the eyes of the law saw the women’s movement as part of the greater human rights movements. The publication of literature was therefore a critical mechanism through which political alliances were fortified, as more women across racial and class lines offered differing perspectives on life in the supposed racial democracy. Literature is most explicitly political in the hands of the women who take part in writing groups that grew out of the local black nationalist movement of the 1970s, the most famous one...