O sorriso da avó em “Guarde segredo”, de Esmeralda Ribeiro

Abstract

In the short-story “Guarde Segredo” (1991) Esmeralda Ribeiro (1958-) substitutes the “real” parents of an Afro-Brazilian young woman with two “false” parents (vovó Olívia and Lima Barreto). Why does Ribeiro present us with this alternative family? In this article, I argue that the imagination of a new family allows Ribeiro to address the urgent question of the political, historical and literary invisibility of Afro-Brazilian women as mothers, whilst simultaneously advancing a critical understanding of motherhood when it becomes excessively visible in the private sphere. By taking strategic advantage of the panoptical principles (Foucault, 1977) used by disciplinary societies to regulate racial and sexual relations, Ribeiro inverts the process of becoming invisible that afflicts the narrator, as a potential Afro-Brazilian mother. This panoptical solution produces, in turn, a platform that allows the reader to observe the observers themselves (the false parents), one of which turns out to be more invisible than the other. I conclude by arguing that the imagination of a new family in “Guarde Segredo” contributes to enabling a sustainable and non-essentialist vision of the maternal in the context of the political and literary project of Afro-Brazilian writing.