Family histories and domestic work: escrevivência through the story told

Abstract

This text presents two episodes from my parents’ childhood in the 1960s and 1970s, which highlight experiences of racism, silencing, discrimination, tolerance, and subservience. To perceive these situations, it is necessary to delve into the narratives themselves, which I analyze in dialogue with the authors studied in the course “Escrevivência: sujeitos, lugares e modos de enunciação”: Preta Rara (2019), Eliana A. Cruz (2022) and Conceição Evaristo (2020). I also draw on theoretical contributions from Gomes (2017), hooks (2022), and Kilomba (2019), who provide key insights into concepts such as place, body, and racism. Their writings enabled me to reinterpret these family stories and to understand how they reflect the lived reality of many Black people of that time. The two accounts I present focus on women in domestic labor, my mother and grandmother who in distinct circumstances, share the common experience of servitude, a condition that continues to shape my parents’ worldview, even in today’s context where the presence of racism in everyday life is more exposed and openly addressed. In my father’s narrative, the softened perception of racism conceals deep wounds and unspoken pain, which remain silenced and numbed.