The brutalization of writing: Perishment and precariousness in Eliane Brum’s Uma duas

Abstract

Eliane Brum’s first novel Uma duas raises a number of considerations about traditions and (post) humanist discourses. The narrative is built from the conflict of subjectivities (of a daughter and her mother) and seeks to understand how an unhealthy human legacy of relationships confronts individuals and their permanent state of precariousness and ruin through an aggressive memory. The first part of this article proposes to read the narrative and its connections with the posthumanist senses derived from it, seeking to understand brutalization  as a loss both of the aura of  individuals and of their works. The second part of the text discusses how writing relocates the character Laura in her humanity, relieving her of the reason for her dystopian hybrid identity semi-attached to the "large and hard breast" of Maria Lucia, her mother.