A pele que habitamos: as (auto)narrativas de Ruth, Zezé e Lázaro

Abstract

In the wake of the debates on racial prejudice, three (self) narratives are presented here as reading possibility in the literary field. For this exercise, the following works were considered: Ruth de Souza: estrela negra (JESUS, 2007), Zezé Motta: muito prazer (MURAT, 2005) and Na minha pele (RAMOS, 2017), which contain the reports of the two actresses who lend their names to the two first books and the actor Lázaro Ramos, respectively. There is in these stories a common feature that, as we shall see, permeates the line between fiction - work field of the subjects presented here -, and reality: the black skin color, element considered during the construction of the characters. The possibility of this reading in literary studies is anchored here in the ideas of Arfuch (2010), Benjamin (1994), Bourdieu (2006), Evaristo (2017), Lejeune (2014) and Lima (2013, 2014). The temporal distance between the beginning of the careers of the actresses and the actor indicates some attempt of change in the roles that are given to them, however, not without less effort, both to act and to continue the work, given that the reception of the public to certain roles remains a space for negotiation. If, on the one hand, the reports on the lived experiences fulfill the role of individualizing them, differentiating them by their trajectories, on the other hand, the racial adjectival always and constantly attributed to them intersects their histories, indicating an equally constant movement of negotiation of transits and stays in fictional spaces, often questioned in their resemblance to reality, in the case, to what it is attributed by others' readings about the black skin color.