A Escrava Isaura 9.119 · 9.119

Isaura's first word to her father is not relief but a summons to witness — 'venha ver a que estado reduzem sua filha.' She wants him to see, to be a witness to what is being done, as though the shackles were evidence in a trial only he could attend. The verb 'reduzem', they reduce, is precise and bitter: to be reduced is to be made less, and she names the shackling as exactly that, a diminishment of a daughter to a bound thing. She switches from the formal to the intimate in the space of the household's cruelty; before the master she was 'a escrava', before her father she is 'sua filha', a daughter, and the gap between those two words is the wound of the whole book.

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