Inscritura in the Social Novella O encontro (2000), by Helena do Sul

Abstract

This article offers a reading of the social novella O encontro (2000), by Helena do Sul, through the lens of inscritura, understood as an embodied writing gesture shaped by memory, voice, and the Black female body. Structured as an epistolary narrative, the work destabilizes traditional forms by blending silence, fabulation, and displacement, projecting a subjectivity in transit between individual experience and collective traces of other women. The letter, in this context, becomes a surface of listening and performative writing, where enunciation calls forth presences and reinscribes absences. The analysis is based on an analytical-interpretative approach, drawing on the concepts of escrevivência (Evaristo, 2020), oraliture and body-screen (Martins, 2003; 2021), and inscritura (Quadros, 2023). Frequently neglected by literary criticism, Helena do Sul builds a sensitive and insurgent language that transforms text into an embodied archive. By reading O encontro as a dramaturgical experience of writing, this article aims to show how Black-authored literature in southern Brazil reinscribes ways of existing and reading, articulating narrative and ancestry as practices of symbolic resistance.