Individual and Collective Memory

Melhor não contar by Tatiana Salem Levy

Abstract

This work attempted to analyze the resources used by Tatiana Salem Levy in her most recent work, Melhor Não Contar (2024), to interlace individual and collective memory. The author emphasizes the use of the diary as a tool to continue silencing women, at the same time as she reveals the sexual harassment she suffered during childhood and adolescence at the hands of her stepfather. Advised to maintain silence about the case, more than twenty years after the death of her mother, Tatiana externalizes her unique experience and, in parallel, verbalizes issues that permeate women's experience in patriarchal societies. This is a book that breaks the imposed silence and raises issues that are indispensable for the reaffirmation of women as political and historical subjects. For the investigation, the historical perspective of Michelle Perrot (2007) and the thought of Jacques Rancière (2023) were essential. Joel Candau's (2018) work was the basis in terms of the memory perspective adopted here, while Florencia Garramuño's (2014) research was fundamental regarding the resources used to compose contemporary narratives, such as the destructuring of literary genres, the fragmentation of the narrative, the exposure of intimacy, the use of other resources such as photography and archives.