Carta aberta a escritoras afrodescendentes do futuro

Abstract

I listen to Gloria Anzaldúa in her “Open Letter to Third World Women Writers.” I wonder: why was I never afraid to write? Never. I, a dark-skinned Black woman from the 4th District of Country Club, raised amidst the outlying neighborhoods where my grandmothers established a clan and a community. On one side, Sabana Abajo—a neighborhood that grew along the edges of the Central Victoria sugar mill, where my grandfather Cristino dos Santos Bulerin worked as a boiler engineer and held a partial stake in the business. (That grandfather died before I was born.) On the other side lay Parcelas Falú—where my grandmother Clemencia Falú gave birth to and raised nine daughters, before the eldest among them bought a house in the “modern” neighboring subdivision of Villa Prades. (And then there was Esteban Febres Ruiz, my other grandfather, whom I also never met. Our men die young in these lands.) A lagoon stretched between the two communities, surrounded by mangroves and pastures—river tributaries that Modernity swallowed up, turning them into concrete. It was my grandparents who, together with their offspring, laid the concrete foundation of who I am—of what still pulses amidst the waters of that mangrove, seemingly dry, yet filtering consciousness.