First notes on the testimonial content of Ela e a reclusão

O condenado poderia ser você, by Vera Tereza de Jesus

Abstract

 Assuming that in all literature it is possible to identify testimonial content (SELIGMANN-SILVA, 2003a), this article aims to explain the first considerations about research related to the testimony in the work Ela e a reclusão: o condenado poderia ser você (1965), by Vera Tereza de Jesus. When presenting the publication, we revisit important points about its context of production (PENTEADO, 2018), trying to understand some elements that are absent in the material form of the book itself. In addition, we bring necessary, although initial, questions about the relationship between the testimonial content and the prison narrative of Vera Tereza, starting from a problematization of the title of the work and temporal marks in the statements of this autobiographical writing strongly defined by gender oppressions, and by the violence of the Brazilian State. With the reflection, we conclude that it is possible to observe the way in which the narrative shapes the time and the testimonial content, imbricating past, present and future in the writing that is possible for the author. As she says, the text brings the reality of her life, inscribed in crime, violence, helplessness, abandonment, and this reality of hers is the same story of many other people figured in her person. Her text anticipates all the writings referred to as marginal prison literature, which played a leading role in the Brazilian publishing scene in the early 2000s, gaining even more relevance for escaping the white-bourgeois standard of the time it was written, in the midst of the civil-military dictatorship; Vera Tereza’s work appears, then, as an event in Brazilian literary historiography.