Defying the Door of No Return

the Afro-Diasporic Proverbs of Carolina Maria de Jesus and Mãe Stella de Oxóssi

Abstract

Implicated in the gesture of questioning certain foundations of hegemonic literary studies, the article relates the works Òwe/Proverbs (2007), by Mãe Stella de Oxóssi, and Proverbs (1964), by Carolina Maria de Jesus. With the purpose of complicating the dichotomies between orality and writing and between knowledge and experience, it seeks to understand and highlight the ways in which the poetic form of the proverb tensions and synthesizes features of a philosophical and pedagogical nature, revealing strategies of transcreation and updating the plethora of African knowledge in a diasporic context. Thus, it examines the hypothesis that, in the face of historical movements of dispersion and fragmentation of the subjectivities of subordinated Black subjects worldwide, the proverb, as employed by the authors, constitutes an aesthetic, ethical, and political utterance that not only recovers Black experiences and memories but also safeguards within itself, in a coded way, the potential to redirect scattered lives and to rebuild communities beyond the homeland.