Luíza Mahin and Luiz Gama: slavery and (self)fiction in an intercepted correspondence

Abstract

The article reaffirms the significance of the letter genre in the context of Brazilian slavery in order to analyze comparatively the novel, published in 2006, Um defeito de cor, which in one of its reading senses performatizes a letter from Luíza Mahin to her missing son Luiz Gama; and the letter written by the poet Luiz Gama in 1880, in which Luíza Mahin, identified as the missing mother of Gama, appears for the first time in the country's discourse. In the face of a context of violent coercion, the possibilities of a "writing of the self" by Africans and their descendants in Brazil are thus linked to procedures that are based on the supplementarity between literature and history.