I’m Mateus Sanches Duarte, first-year Ph.D. Student in Romance Studies at Duke University, originally from Nova Iguaçu, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. One of the strange characteristics of being outside your country is that you start to recognize yourself in things that are particular to it, or that you can at least associate with it. Some people would say that the fortunate ones are those who are able to detach themselves from the notion that they have of themselves and from these elements that constitute them, because once you are in a foreign territory, it no longer makes sense to be what you were in another country, and so you need to be something else. But if this strange feeling of being a foreigner can be appeased by meeting friends, family members, and people who show some affection for those things that mean so much to you — as has been my case with Brazil — I can say that the experience of being taught by Igiaba Scego led to the creation of another space, in which a sense of familiarity made space for this strangeness too. Far from my country, I was able to visit it through the selected works, and with great openness, to share the afflictions and the love for this land, whether discussing the unfortunate Brazilian colonial heritage explored in through Itamar Vieira Jr.’s Torto Arado or in the construction of another possible heritage as in Emicida’s documentary AmarElo – É Tudo para Ontem.
Throughout her stay at Duke University, Igiaba Scego spoke with great insight about the silence that permeates European society, selecting a bibliography that made us question what we inherit and what we accept as our inheritance, in a well-thought provocation that made us examine our personal history, made us ask ourselves about the trajectories of our families and those who preceded us, knowing that someday we will also be in the position to pass on a certain type of inheritance to our descendants. In the traumas explored by the books assigned to us, in this Brazil-Angola-Mozambique-Portugal connection that paralleled the Ethiopia-Somalia-Italy one, I was able to see how historical traumas are often passed on for generations, and how writing can be a way to break this vicious circle of silence in our societies. This influenced me to think about the racist arrangements that were elaborated over centuries and that have constituted the national identity formation of our countries, while at the same time it made me aware that we can act to write better pages of our history.
