HOUSE, N.F. SINGULAR AND PLURAL

Abstract

The right to migration has become one of the most pressing contemporary debates, as well as the reception of those who, by force or will, decide to move. Maria Velho da Costa, with her novel Myra (2008), thematizes the precarious life of an illegal Russian immigrant in Portugal, tracing the sinuous path of the character, who makes her physical wandering also an existential questioning and an attempt at subjective construction. This work is concerned with elaborating the concept of the house for those who, illegally, occupy a country that is not their own, make use of a language foreign to their own and remain eagerly on an identity border. The fluctuation and uprooting treated in Myra provide subsidies for us to deal with homelessness, violence and fragility, establishing the materiality of the body as the only possible space to inhabit. To this end, we mobilize authors whose works thematize the wandering body in a foreign space, and others who, from a literary perspective, approach the house and the work undertaken to make it home.