From the prison of the world to the world of the prison

Finding oneself and finding others in narratives of confinement

Abstract

This work intends to present representative authors of prison writing, a literary series that marked the Brazilian publishing system at the beginning of the 21st century. These are Luís Alberto Mendes (Memórias de um sobrevivente, 2001), Jocenir (Diário de um detento: o livro, 2001), Humberto Rodrigues, (Vidas do Carandiru: histórias reais, 2002), and André Du Rap (Sobrevivente André Du Rap (do massacre do Carandiru), 2002). Along with the denunciation of the horror experienced in state institutions, in which the violation of human rights is daily, I identify the presence of learning related to the experience of confinement through the narration of different voices from the prison space. In a particular way in each of the aforementioned works, the prison margin constitutes “a general geography of deprivation, but also of rescue” (Francavilla, 2012). Therefore, in this study, prison is understood as a locus of creative resistance to those who are subjectively constructed “by the (pen)alty, understood here in the sense of penalty and pen as a writing instrument (Penna, 2013), which also points out to the precariousness of their socialization before detention. Finally, I go back to Graciliano Ramos, author of Memórias do cárcere (1953), who fictionalizes the experience of a different kind of confinement, imposed on someone who was already a famous writer of Brazilian literature when he was arrested for political reasons. Even so, the narrative  presents a discovery, which concerns the world of the oppressed people, which the communist author perceives to be little known (or unknown) to him until his confinement in prison.