The desire to occupy and narrate in notas sobre a fome by Helena Silvestre

Abstract

Helena Silvestre's Notas sobre a fome (2019a) is a collection of thirty-one creative “notes” (diary entries, letters, poems, and an essay) inspired by her experience as a housing activist in São Paulo, Brazil. During an existential crisis, Silvestre declares that she needs to learn to desire. The solution she finds is to keep telling stories; listening to the stories of children, women, and elderly people in the housing occupations where she lives; and listening to and reinterpreting academics’ theories. Her understanding of living in community is rooted in an insatiable desire for new strategies for narrating and inhabiting the city. In dialogue with Lefebvrian geography, feminist studies, and narrative criticism, we argue that Silvestre's experiments with different approaches to telling stories and occupying space underscore the importance of searching for new ways to inhabit and desire in community, as opposed to settling for solutions that maintain the status quo. This article first considers Silvestre's strategies for narrating her solidarity, then her search for heterogeneous solutions for narrating and occupying urban space, then the importance of storytelling for the creation of community, and finally ways of narrating about marginalized bodies as, simultaneously, sites of structural inequity and of joy.

Keywords:
Helena Silvestre; desire; housing; occupations; hunger; narrative; autofiction