At the presentation of my latest novel, Vista chinesa, Brazilian critic Beatriz Resende commented that she finds in the literary production of contemporary women a preference for first-person narratives, and asked me if I had any guesses as to why. I had been thinking about the subject for some time―after all, autobiographical writing is at the heart of feminist thought―and talking about it for the first time gave substance to my ideas. I realised my path made sense when, at the end of the presentation, some women came to me to talk about their childhood and teenage diaries―the subject on which my response was based, and which constitutes the guiding thread of this text.
Almost every girl in my generation received diaries in their childhood, most of them with locks, to ensure that no one would have access to what was written there. Colourful, small, medium, or big, with or without stickers, with or without perfume, with or without illustrations, with or without sentences scattered across the pages―there was one for every taste. There we would write down our most intimate thoughts and acts, our little subversions, the secrets we wouldn’t dare tell, not even to our best friend, trusting the power of that simple lock. We learned, from a young age, that our feelings are ours alone―and they must be told in the first person to an inanimate object: “Dear Diary…” And so we learned, early on, to hide our ideas, our sensations, and our bodies as well.
Until one day we grow up, drop the diary, and leave our bodies and writing locked away. Perhaps that is why, when a woman writes, she lets her childhood and teenage writing reverberate, a writing that was built in intimacy and in secret, that was built with a body which, much like words, was forced to withdraw, to retract. “In this room, there’s no place for you, for your body’s quirks, for your writing’s glow,” said the voice outside the bedroom where we wrote―that is, when we had a bedroom of our own.
With diaries, we learned―all girls, those who continued to write, as well as those who would never touch a pen again―that writing was about intimacy, about secrecy. We wouldn’t write for others, but for ourselves. We wouldn’t write to be read; on the contrary, we would write not to be read. And we would go on like that, hiding, living in secret, in whispers, recounting only to ourselves, locking away what happened to us―the boy we liked, the first kiss, the fights with our parents, the world’s incomprehension.
Despite the thesis I wish to put forward here―that of the relationship between diary writing during childhood and adolescence and the predominance of first-person writing in contemporary literature by women―my relationship with diaries is rather peculiar. Small, red, with a drawing of a Hello Kitty holding a cup of tea on the cover, the invitation: Would you be free for a cup of tea?, and a now rusty lock, my first diary, which I got at the age of nine, has but a few pages filled in. Some are dated the same year I got it, others are dated the following year; after that, there is an entry from 1990, when I was eleven; two from 1993, and a few from 1994. In 1989, I apologize to the diary for going so long without writing. In 1993, I confess to being a terrible diary writer. I frequently abandon it, because, in all fairness, I never enjoyed writing diaries. I like the cuts, the time that goes back and forth, and a diary demands a linearity that doesn’t appeal to me. I’ve never felt comfortable writing on the right days―of course I could find a way around it, I could forge them, play with the diary, but at ten or eleven or even at fifteen it simply seemed to me that the format didn’t interest me, it wasn’t my way of writing.
In 1998, I went on a trip to Turkey and Greece with my mother and my sister. My mother was very ill, she had just had chemotherapy, had lost her hair, and couldn’t think of organizing such a trip. But it was something I really wanted: to go to Turkey with her, in search of traces of our family; to go to Greece with her, because she, Helena, had made me love the Greeks. So, I went to a travel agency―that’s how it was back then―and booked the passageways, took note of the information, and sketched out a route. I insisted so much that my mother eventually gave in. I’m stubborn. So was she, and so is my sister, too. I don’t know if stubbornness is inherited or learned, but I know in this case I don’t regret it at all. A year and a half later, my mother would die. Seven years later, from this trip and this death, my first novel, A chave de casa, would come to life.
Before the take-off, I got my second diary as a gift―this time without a lock. Green cover, a girl in a ballet costume, her back turned, her face in profile, hands over a dance bar, her hair tied up in a bun; on the top, in yellow letters, the words: Unforgettable moments. I believed that writing a travel diary would be easier―it would’ve made more sense―than writing some random diary. Each day that passed, so many new things, so much to recount. In the beginning, I took the mission seriously; but as time went by, it became clear that the mission was indeed a mission, and that recounting doesn’t always have to do with writing. I turned out to be an equally failed travel diary writer. On February 15th, 1998, I note: “It has been nine days since I last wrote; I feel I haven’t been able to write a travel diary.”
After that, I never had a diary again. In total, I only wrote two failed diaries, not having been able to fill in even a third of their length. However, I ended up owning four, for I took over another two, which hadn’t been written by me, but by a little girl who had lived her childhood in the 60s, and, years later, would become my mother.
One afternoon, when I had come back early from work, my mother came into my room and gave me her diaries as a gift. One of them, an ordinary ruled, spiral notebook, with a mansion on the cover and the words “Winner,” narrated, from the first page to the last, the day-to-day of a wealthy 13 or 14-year-old girl in Leblon, Rio de Janeiro, respecting the linearity of time, the unfolding of daily events, the most intimate secrets. The other one, cushioned, had the title My Diary in gold cursive writing. It was the account of a boat trip through Europe she went on when she was 17, and it told in detail what she had seen, felt and thought.
A few weeks before, I, who never spoke about what I wrote, had told her, almost distractedly, that I was thinking about writing a diary again. But I thought it wasn’t going to go well because deep down I didn’t like writing diaries, I didn’t know how to write diaries. I remember saying I wanted to try it again, as a kind of practice, to see if I could get the hold of it, if I could learn to write diaries like the other girls. After all, that's what I wanted to do with my life, to write, but if I couldn’t even handle a diary, while my friends were filling up pages and pages, how would I ever write short stories, poems, novels?
So, my mother showed up that afternoon and gave me her diaries. Filled from the first page to the last. In the following days, months, years, I dwelt on those words countless times. They hadn’t been written by me, but they could have been: the diaries I inherited from my mother, the diaries I chewed, devoured, swallowed, and which became my diaries.
When I told a friend I had decided to write about those diaries, she remarked, “What was your mother thinking, giving you those diaries when you were just a teenager!” I had such an umbilical relationship with her, so close and confusing, that I had never questioned her about such a gesture. On the contrary, I almost felt grateful that she wrote the diaries I couldn’t write; the names were different, but what she said was what I wanted to say; what she felt was what I felt. My mother’s secret side was just like mine. When I read her diaries, I grew certain of it. I felt even more connected to my mother than before, almost like the same person.
I think that’s exactly what she wanted. To tell me that I wasn’t the only one who felt the ugliest at school; the only one who didn’t have a boyfriend while all the others did; the only one who spent her afternoons buried in books; the only one who felt so much anguish in the face of existence; the only one who cried over the death of loved ones in advance; that I wasn’t the only one to fall for impossible stories; the only one who wanted to be free before understanding exactly what that meant. My mother wrote just like me. Or rather, I wrote just like her. Those diaries were exactly the diaries that I would write, if I happened to write diaries.
I took my mother’s diaries as my own, I appropriated them and only wrote again during the trip to Turkey. If I wanted to access my intimacy, it would only take one page of any of her diaries. If I had a daughter one day, when she would become a teenager, I would hand her my mother’s diary as if it were mine, and maybe she would feel the same as I did. This way, the diary would pass on from generation to generation, the secret side of the girls in the family repeating themselves with no need for rewriting. We would all be symbiotic, we would all feel the same amazement, we would all be intelligent, free and literature lovers, and, despite all this, or maybe because of all this, we would all suffer for impossible loves.
But since not everything in life―or almost nothing―goes according to plan, that was not quite how things went. Some years after I inherited the diaries, my mother died, on the 24th of August 1999, exactly thirty days after the death of my aunt and godmother, Gilda. Three and a half years after my older sister, Djamila. At the age of twenty, I, who had grown up amongst so many older women, suddenly found myself alone with my little sister, and an enormous emptiness, an enormous pain―when I think of those times, I feel some relief for not inhabiting them anymore.
Very early on, I had my mind set that if I wanted to be a writer I would have to suffer; the sadder my life was, the more legitimate my path would be. An unfashionable idea in the 90s, but which I absorbed through the readings I had done at the time, the biographies I read of some writers, and it would become very hard to undo. As the disasters happened one after the other, and they happened early on, I interpreted them as a sign that that was it: I could go on writing.
I remember that, both at my sister’s burial and my mother’s, I felt as if I lived in the depths of my interior―I cried and cried, until my body couldn’t take it anymore. But there was also a sense in which I felt in the exterior, as if I were a spectator, observing the funeral, observing the pain of others and observing my own pain. I suffered and observed. I suffered and wrote. I lived and I wrote at the same time. There was this kind of perverse, self-centred inversion of things, as if it were predestined that those women needed to die, that I needed to suffer, to be able to write. Without that pain, I would never be able to write, so all of that was happening somehow so that I could write, or because I was going to write. So I would observe, from the inside and the outside, present and absent, buried together with them and suspended in space. There would only be writing born out of loss, written after the loss, with the loss, about the loss, a madness that wouldn’t let go of me for it had rooted very early on in my head, in my body.
For a while, after those deaths, I was reluctant to lay down on a couch, for I was afraid to be healed of the pain. If I were to heal, how would I write? When I read Nietzsche for the first time, when I read Deleuze for the first time, I remember thinking: I don’t need all that suffering after all. I don’t need to suffer in order to write. The women of my life didn’t have to die in order for me to write. After all, literature has nothing to do with me, it has nothing to do with the writer’s life; therefore, I can be happy and write. But the things one puts in one’s head when one is growing up are very hard to reverse. I could read all of Nietzsche. All of Deleuze. And a bunch of other philosophers, of other literary and joy theorists. I could even lie down on my couch for years. That being which had grown in me at fifteen was not going away so easily.
To a certain extent, writing remained, for me, forever associated with the idea of pain. Much in the same way the idea of a successful, accomplished woman, a woman who speaks her mind, who uses her body and her head freely, remained associated with the idea of failure in love. A woman could only be all of that if she were unlucky in love. And, very early on, I understood I wanted to be all of that.
When my older sister died, when my aunt died, when my mother died, what I heard the most were words of consolation that could be summed up in the famous expression: “Time heals everything.” I would lower my head in a sign of agreement, tears coming down, because I couldn’t disagree with who was there holding my hand, to give me a bit of the lap I had lost. But inside I felt so angry at that consolation, so angry at the time that had already passed, that would pass, and I didn’t want it to pass. I didn’t want time to pass unless it went backwards, to my women, to the women who took care of me, to the women who made me the eldest woman so soon, so ahead of time, which was all wrong, scrambled in its stupid linearity. Time, making me move forward at a constant pace, the time I wanted behind me or ahead of me, close to them and away from the pain. And I just kept telling myself: No time will fill that hole. No time will bring my sisters back, my aunt back, my mother back. No time will ever ease the pain, that was what I found in the Emily Dickinson verse I borrowed as the epigraph of my first novel. Writing A chave de casa was, unknowingly, part of the grieving process I thought was never-ending. I say I didn’t know because writing about my mother’s illness and death didn’t make it hurt any less. I continued to think about her every day after that. I continued to cry over her death every day after that.
I write this now and it seems to me like I’m writing about someone else. I find it hard to believe: did I really cry every day? And when did that stop? When did I stop crying? When did time go by?
Because it was precisely that: suddenly, time had gone by. It is now twenty-three years since my mother died. It has been more years without her than with her, although this entire sentence is wrong. Both for the obvious fact that time is experienced in a relative and subjective way―the time of childhood, for instance, is infinitely slower than the time of motherhood―and for the fact that grieving is not just about learning to live without the dead, but also, and foremost, to live with them.
I learned to live with my mother in many ways: in silence, out loud, talking about her to my children, in dreams, in writing, rereading her letters and her books, in photographs, befriending many of her friends, having endless laughs. However, there is one way that was snatched from me shortly after her death.
Due to a domestic accident, while moving from my father’s home to the apartment where my sister and I would live together for seven years, a number of boxes with memories of our lives disappeared: all of my older sister’s family albums; my mother’s youth albums; letters from my mother, some clippings of mine and my younger sister’s whose content I can’t remember; a beautiful and big original picture of Manuel Bandeira with Elizeth Cardoso, that I used to hang on my wall; the pictures of my mother standing among Egyptian soldiers during the Yom Kippur war; and, without a doubt, the most painful one, her teenage diaries, that I had made my own.
It was a death within a death. Losing those diaries was like losing my mother a second time. It was like losing myself, like losing the legacy I would leave my daughter: the lineage of strong, free women, writers and unlucky in love. I’ve never fully accepted that loss. As I never saw the dead body―the diaries weren’t torn, they weren’t burnt―I’ve spent the last twenty years hoping to find them. Every time I decide to tidy the closets of my home in Rio de Janeiro, I’m seized by the hope of finding them. Who knows whether they survived the accident? Who knows whether I won’t open their pages one day, feel their smell of old sheets, and let my eyes slide over my mother’s cursive and almost incomprehensible handwriting?
Writing has been an endless conversation with those absences. Here and there, I try to recover the lost affection of my mother and the diaries that, due to an ordinary accident, disappeared. At my novels’ presentations, I often confess that I start writing them in the third person. I have the strange desire to write a novel in a realistic fashion, with an omniscient and omnipresent narrator, but I fail every single time. There’s a first-person which always imposes itself. Not necessarily mine. It might be Joana’s, Antonio’s, Ana’s, or Julia’s. I’ve been thinking about her―and about her relationship with the teenager who did (not) write diaries. The teenager who learned, like all girls in general, that writing is born out of a very intimate place and must not be shared with anyone. The teenager who, finally, grew up at a time when many women, in different parts of the world, decided to expose such writing and assert that the personal can also be literary, and that literature is always political.
