[APPLAUSE] KARYN MOTA: I will open
my presentation today with a quote from Saidiya
Hartman's book, Lose Your Mother. She says in her
introduction, and I quote. This is the afterlife of
slavery, skewed life chances, limited access to health and
education, premature death, incarceration and
impoverishment. I, too, am the
afterlife of slavery. The words of Hartman
resonate with me because I also am the
afterlife of slavery. From the south of
Bahia State, my family has been working on
this region's lands as formerly enslaved
for over 100 years. Our lineage from the African
continent is unknown. The only life story
that we are aware of is the one of the forced
African diaspora to Brazil. My family and I have
no recollections of any traditions,
rituals or beliefs that were brought from Africa to us. We do not preserve any oral
history about our genealogy. We just preserve
our color, black. Before writing this project, my
reflections about my ancestors were limit to what I believe
is a shared perspective of most mixed race peoples in Brazil,
which is a journey of resilience to overcome the unspoken evils
of the past and the present. We overcome them,
and when we do, we push these
memories of struggles deep down within ourselves. These evils are often times
named as hunger, illiteracy and dispossession. But I never heard these
evils being called racism, as if being black
has nothing to do with this unspoken past evils. As someone who grew
up in huge Janeiro, I have witnessed poverty in
the most perverse of ways. But poverty always
had the same color. Poverty is black. Black as my ancestors. Black as my family. But I have to come clean and say
that my research about slavery and reparations was not a
calling for my ancestors to make justice for
the evils of the past, or even to pay tribute to them
and honor our unknown history. I chose to work with esteems
because of the quiet. I was summoned by the utter
quiet that resides in me. While I agree that quiet can
be a space for resistance, I wondered how can I
continue to be quiet? How can the evils of my
past go another day unnamed? Honestly, I felt unworthy of
such a life changing mission. When reading novels by
black female authors, I identified a maternal
genealogy of women voices. I found in their literary works
that their fictional characters were the ancestors that I
had never heard of before. Their fictional
life stories were my unknown feminine lineage, and
the unspoken evils of my past were already written by them. Black literature was
my ultimate calling. My research impacts a
comparative analysis of literature in Portuguese,
Spanish and English, informed by a hemispheric
decolonial black feminist thought. My study shows how contemporary
Afro-Latin American Caribbean fictional novels
can be perceived as symbolic reparations projects
for the legacy of slavery. When I was conceiving
this project, I understood that financial
and material compensation for historical injury is a
crucial part of the debates over reparations for slavery. However, the symbolic
dimension of redress also has a fundamental
role in restoring what was denied to black
people, their humanity. My research serves as a regional
platform for inquiry, devoted to the vital process of
rehumanization of black people, driven by the ideas of
resistance and community healing. My research analyzes
how fiction fills in the gaps in the
official history. I examine how narratives
can give a different meaning to the experience of the
forced African diaspora to the Americas. The Caribbean writer, Jamaica
Kincaid, wrote as follows. Nothing, nothing
can erase my rage. Not an apology, not a large
sum of money, not the death of the criminal, because this
wrong can never be right, and only the impossible
can make me still. Can way be found to make what
happened not have happened? Kincaid's words made
me reflect on how this group of women voices
such as hers, when speaking up, can change the
wrongdoings of the past. These women voices
disturbed my inner quiet and brought me here today
to use this space dedicated to critical inquiry that I have
been giving to do what I can do, which is to speak up. We are here. We bear witness. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
