WHO TAUGHT YOU TO SPEAK? THE VOICE THE SCHOOL DID NOT LISTEN TO

Abstract

This article presents an excerpt based on a scene from a master's dissertation in progress. The scene emerges from the researcher's childhood memories and is rewritten through the characters Eulina and Vó-Zefa. In it, the Black grandmother, a traditional prayer healer and street-market vendor, questions the girl's effort to pronounce words according to the school norm and asks: "Why speak so properly?". The objective is to analyze how this voice, elaborated through escrevivência, challenges the linguistic and epistemic hierarchies produced by schooling. Escrevivência, formulated by Conceição Evaristo, guides the methodology; conversation, in dialogue with bell hooks and with Ribeiro, Souza and Sampaio, sustains the ethical and relational dimension of the research. Lélia Gonzalez enables an understanding of pretuguês as an African imprint and a form of linguistic resistance; Leda Maria Martins contributes the notions of body-screen and spiral time; and Sueli Carneiro grounds the discussion of epistemicide. It is argued that Vó-Zefa's voice does not return as a decorative memory or as testimony from a woman defined by a lack of schooling. It returns as embodied thought transmitted through orality. Recognizing it as knowledge constitutes, within the limits of this article, a situated gesture of epistemological repair.