Ẹjẹ́ mi jíṣẹ́: uma escrevivência afrodiaspórica decolonial e autoetnográfica de uma neta de raizeira.

Abstract

In a country that emphasizes its rich flora, there are secular records on the use of medicinal plants and a resistance of this knowledge, why was it not possible to structure and understand our Traditional Brazilian Phytotherapy? Where did the narrative that natural does not hurt come from? Why are popular practices and knowledge folklorized and not validated as knowledge? Concerns that come from an ancestral root of my experiences as the granddaughter of a raizeira, pharmacist who works with medicinal plants. In this autoethnographic research, which employs the theoretical contribution to self-writing, the escrevivência of Conceição Evaristo, and which communicates through an Afro-diasporic language and rhythm, I invite you to enter and reflect with me from the autoethnography of my writings, and with the help of of decolonial theory and other diasporic analytical categories, on the process of invisibility, erasure and silencing of traditional and popular knowledge involving medicinal plants. From the following pages, I propose a way to understand why we still do not structure, deny and defend our Traditional Brazilian Phytotherapy. And let's see how the forms of coloniality of knowledge, being and power, and racism, are imbricated in these oppressions, and present both in the self and in the collective.