Essay on Anger

07/01/2025

Culture • Literature • Books • Racism

By CHRISTIAN RIBEIRO*

Commentary on Fabiane Albuquerque's recently released book

It is worth mentioning, initially, that the book Essay on Anger by Fabiane Albuquerque is a portrait without any retouching or stylistic subtleties that end up softening the author's narrative. It is a novel with pulsating lyrics, from the first pages with each word and generating an accumulation of narrative power that gains more nuances and layers as the work develops. It is a provocative, tense, nervous book that makes us an active spectator of the narrative.

It situates the centrality of black women in understanding and overcoming our incompleteness as a nation, guiding a narrative from a Brazilian urban periphery, relegated to a structural marginality that has race, class, gender, body and soul in Brazil. It is presented as a work inserted in the process of reinterpretation and resignification of the world, which black literature exercises, through an openly black feminist bias.

Without fear or concern of being labeled as a militant book, victimhood, revenge or any other label that always applies to artistic-cultural manifestations originating from social classes, historically subordinated in the power relations of this country.

A book that begins with a question, posed by Teodora, its main character, will allow Fabiane Albuquerque to discuss the details that are not heard in their systemic citizen erasure in the resistance processes of black populations in Brazil, especially those originated by its Afro-Brazilian women.

Which allows us to understand this question: “And I myself, where do I run away to?”, the key question that ends the first paragraph of the book Essay on Anger by Fabiane Albuquerque as the great discomfort that will instigate the reader throughout the argumentative construction and narrative of the novel in which we will follow the life of Teodora. A black woman, always alone in the world, even among so many, mother, grandmother, daughter, sister, friend, companion, maid…

Always aware of her place in the world, in the midst of a daily non-existence. Always invisible and silenced in her desires, loves, dreams and emotions. Never able to receive and give love to her loved ones, but always hypocritically pretending tenderness, passion and patience in front of those who did not even recognize her as a human being.

In her second book, Fabiane Albuquerque refines and polishes her writing for a more elaborate discursive novel, less memoirist than her previous book. Letters to a Black Man I Loved (Malê, 2022). A refined writer, skilled in the development and connections of emotions that she awakens in the development of a story, she presents us with a more traditional bibliographic production. But no less elaborate, and with a result as exuberant as its predecessor.

Here we have an author who presents us with a work focused on situating us before the daily life of its main character, Teodora. In the midst of her everyday universes between family, work. Between her social relationships of [non] love, hate and frustrations… Before a problematization against a world that only returns pain and more pain, traumas and abuse, in exchange for a servile resilience that always ends up perpetuating the oppressions of her non-life!

As an intellectual and black feminist activist, Fabiane Albuquerque, in her work as a writer, gives rise to a courageous and exquisite contemporary literary problematization of what it means to be a black woman in a historically and structurally racist society like Brazil. Without concessions or conciliatory social appeasement agreements, which end up building our myth of a socially harmonious society, without conflicts or gender-based, classicist or ethnic-racial violence. In which, although the “cheapest meat” is always black, and especially female, racism is always seen as something of the “other”. Far from the “me/you”, which does not affect or is part of “our/your” daily life. As if both its cause and its effects were restricted to others and not to you, or yours.

Essay on Anger It is one of the best narrative constructions that exposes the hypocrisy and villainy of this uncivilized national characteristic. It questions the role we play in this game of illusions that we inhabit and call “Brazilian society”. At the same time, it highlights the role of black women in confronting the deconstruction of this imagery and potential builders of new potentialities. Not only of existences, but of sociabilities constituted beyond the alienating and oppressive mediocrity of our racist and sexist archaism.

This introduces us to the poetic development of Teodora as a character initially lost in her personal frustrations, who shows herself to be alienated, if not incapable, of loving and allowing herself to be loved. When she survives only to meet the needs and whims of a patronage that claims to be superior, due to a condition of race and class. Until a fraying of this fabric of reality, which she begins to question, from the perspective of tension: “what is your place in this world?”

Here, there is a game of writing that associates her process of self-knowledge and self-worth as a black, working woman with the preparation of coffee in the first chapter of the novel. There is a whole conception and refinement of this process. At the end, she feels invigorated and reconnected with her fellow workers of race and class, who share her desires, dreams and wishes. No longer having her words impeded or banned.

No longer afraid of being who they are. Finding strength and courage in being there for each other. Using samba as a purifying element in this process of Teodora rediscovering herself. In which Fabiane Albuquerque subtly uses it as a form of prayer that liberates all of her character's pain and fear. Samba as a path to all loves. As a living connection to her ancestry and at the same time as a means of preserving her humanity.

What makes her no longer ashamed of having hate, of having anger as feelings fostered in her being, which now dominates her… Teodora, by no longer denying anger as part of her being, stops being ashamed of herself. And she no longer directs it against her family and her peers. But directly against the “system” which she has come to see and look directly in the eye…

A moment of liberation that the book weaves page by page, boiling and balancing the different parts that make a good coffee. Straining its impurities and balancing its flavors without the masking of ideological sugars, thus leading us to reinvigorate the awareness of who we really are, as a people, as human beings. So that the reading public, too, decides to go out into the world, inspired by the aroma of coffee to accompany us in an eternal lullaby that we are not alone – and never will be. To go out there, in the hope of recreating it in a new dawn, in a new sunrise!

Anger liberates, as an element of love, collectivity, affection and care… Breaking ties and prejudices! Rebuilding identities and solidarities, outside of limiting Eurocentric and petty bourgeois logics. Essay on Anger It is a novel that dialogues with the times that were, are and will still be!

A hope in eternal rebirth, from the outskirts of a non-place, from an immense shapeless mass called Brazil, sewn in lines so well woven by this craftswoman of writing that is Fabiane Albuquerque, in offering work that reminds us why reading is an art that shines. Of that which best makes us and makes us human!

But it is not an easy read, make no mistake. It provides us with a vivid, intense reading, just like Teodora's sweet, bitter coffee. It warms our soul, invigorating our spirit, in the face of the difficulties of the world! It does not let us give up, and never forgets, that the world only changes in our image and likeness. When we no longer stop to walk for our dreams. Closing the novel, at peace with yourself…

Responding to the provocative motto of its first page, that it is no longer necessary to escape from this world to find oneself! Never again being held hostage by the illusions of others, or resigned to the alienation of seeking to survive, through sad hopes! Revealing to us, as the final act of its story, the constitution of a blackness. That despite being so (re)denied throughout Teodora's life, at the end of it was made to flourish and reveal itself, in spaces and forms hitherto unimaginable.

Contemporary blackness captured by the author's attentive gaze – even if imperceptible to more conservative or alienated eyes and sensibilities – that exists and is active at the core of our sociability, even if sometimes in the sense of resistance. That exists and persists in the face of the hardships of a social orthodoxy that always seems to be constituted for the denial and destruction of humanities that are in disagreement, in non-acceptance of the canons of a supposedly universal whiteness in its elitist, sexist and racist civilizing logic.

A literary work that defies limits and foolish premises, without fear of labels of any kind. Solely committed to giving vent to its literary construction, which critically tensions and permeates Brazilian social and historical normativity, through the elaboration and development of one of the most intriguing novels to have been published in recent times. Essay on Anger is, among so many qualities and particularities – some of which I have discussed here – a work that is more than recommended to those who appreciate a good narrative. At the same time, it consolidates Fabiane Albuquerque as one of our great national authors and thinkers.

Get cozy, sip the coffee offered by Teodora, and let yourself be carried away by the enchanting reading of this book that is already a classic. You won't regret it! It's time to to walk...

*Christian Ribeiro is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Unicamp.

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