Black Motherhood as a Freedom Practice

Abstract

This essay aims to present how Conceição Evaristo's escrevivências reconstruct the place of black motherhood as a freedom practice, through ethics of love based on concerns regarding the domination and oppression policies that cross the “identity avenues” of many black women. For the analysis of the short story “Shirley Paixão”, from the book Insubmissas Lágrimas de Mulheres the by Conceição Evaristo, I use the theoretical and methodological approaches of bell hooks, Oyèrónkë Oyěwùmí, Davi Reis and Thiago Prado, Audre Lorde and Jorge Silva as paramount in reinstating the “motherhood” institution as a libertarian and identity construction for many black women. Shirley Paixão and, so many other Evaristian characters, teach us what it is to be a black mother, above all, in the process of restoring our humanity, through a fraternity of women. Silences are multiple, as are scars, but expression like this exercise of exposing your voice, your point of view accompanied by black corporealities, of transforming silence into language and action, which begins in the narrative under analysis breaks, bleeds and stops non-submissive women, who even with tears in their eyes, insist, resist and prove to us how much we are the owners of feminine power.