Recovering the voice: trauma, sound and word in Não falei by Beatriz Bracher

Abstract

In Não Falei (2004) Beatriz Bracher works on the traumatic memory of those who survived torture under the Brazilian military dictatorship. This essay analyzes the important space occupied, in the novel, by the dimension of the voice, as a mean to deal with the paradox of the impossibility-necessity to narrate the trauma (Agamben). Starting from Adriana Cavarero’s theoretical proposals on the “devocalization” of logos, and from Donatella Di Cesare’s reflections on the dimension of torture, this essay attempts to read the intense work on language and on the effort of accessing the space of the voice, experienced by protagonist and witness Gustavo, like a painful path of re-vocalization, necessary to produce the testimony of trauma.