Legacies and memories of violence in <i>Becos da memória</i>

Abstract

This essay examines how the concept of “slow violence” (Nixon, 2011) features in the narrative of Conceição Evaristo’s novel Becos da memória (2006). Nixon defines slow violence as a diachronic process of disenfranchisement that affects principally low-income communities and racial minorities and that is often less visible. Slow violence manifests in different ambits, including environmental depredation and marginalization. It is the environmental aspect of slow violence that differentiates it from structural violence, though both types intersect. Evaristo’s text confronts the reader not only with the consequences of structural violence (Galtung, 1969), but also how this violence impacts the experience of spatiality and of environmental marginalization for impoverished racial minorities and, as a result, the everyday lives of these groups. In this sense, the novel touches upon the effects of slow violence on marginalized communities. Becos da memória therefore brings to light the confluence between environment and the lived experience of subjects who live both at the social and the spatial margins.