Escritura de processo e o arquivo crítico da língua no Caderno de pensamentos de Carolina Maria de Jesus

Abstract

This article presents reflections on previously unpublished writings from Carolina Maria de Jesus’s collection—material I designate as the "Notebook of Thoughts." I view this as a documentary genre of significant importance to the study of Black literature in Brazil within a diasporic context. I argue that, despite the material and epistemological relevance of these notebooks for understanding modes of writing, thinking, and language formulation in the first half of the twentieth century (and earlier), academia has not yet brought this genre into scholarly debate. Through a theoretical reconstruction, I have developed the concept of "processual writing" and demonstrate that these notebooks function as linguistic laboratories of great importance to the historical constitution of the Portuguese language—particularly due to the presence of erasures, intermediate versions, traces of orality, idiolectal markers, non-standardized graphic solutions, and experimental syntaxes that rarely appear in published versions. I therefore contend that the "notebook of thoughts" constitutes a critical archive of language in flux, the absence of which from the philological repertoire compromises our understanding of textual trajectories and the history of writing in Portuguese.