The writing of Black women and African world-sense in Mata Doce (2023), by Luciany Aparecida

Abstract

This article examines how racial, gender and class oppression in Brazil has compounded the barriers to Black women’s literary production, focusing on writer Luciany Aparecida and her novel Mata Doce (2023). Set in rural Bahia, Mata Doce is also the name of a fictional quilombola community. The narrative addresses injustices arising from agrarian conflicts and from the centralized, abusive power structures of coronelismo. A survey of the limited scholarship on the novel shows that its Afro-diasporic elements have been treated only superficially. Framing the text within the Afro-Brazilian literary tradition, this study adopts an Afrocentric methodology to analyse the novel’s symbolic articulations of ancestry, memory and spiral time. It draws on the work of Asante (2024), Hampâté Bâ (2010), Martins (2020) and Duarte (2014), among others. The analysis of the novel’s African-derived epistemic symbols reveals its counter-hegemonic character by centring Black female protagonists and making visible the cultural and religious elements of Brazil’s Black population–elements historically marginalised and erased by the epistemicide of the colonial enterprise.