Mikaia

Mikaia won the 2022 Sesc Literature Award in the Romance category.

Mikaia , Taiane Santi Martins' debut novel and winner of the 2022 Sesc Literature Prize, tells the story of three generations of women who lived through and fled the Mozambican civil war through the search of Mikaia, a ballet dancer who suffers from sudden amnesia. Told by multiple voices, the book explores the different ways of coping with a traumatic past. While Mikaia wants to remember, her sister, Simi, wants to forget, and her grandmother, Shaira, chooses to remain silent. The plot unfolds in the clash between Mikaia's attempts to recover a past that was stolen from her, the fragments of memory that return to her confused, and Simi's resistance to renouncing a childhood invented and cultivated for twenty years at the cost of oblivion.

The book explores themes such as the body, dance, violence against women, war, the construction of memory and cultural identity, and also discusses Brazil's perspective on Mozambican culture, as Mikaia experiences the dilemma of feeling Brazilian while simultaneously needing to relearn what it means to be Mozambican. In this sense, just as the central character transitions between identities and belongings, moving between the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, the novel's language construction also transitions between variants of Brazilian and Mozambican Portuguese—and her native language, Emakhuwa, becomes a central element in this movement toward recovery.

In the blurb, Luciany Aparecida and Itamar Vieira Junior write:

"By featuring Black women as protagonists whom we long to love and listen to, the novel recreates in the literary dimension stories that were taken from us by times of brutal invisibility. If at first reading Mikaia seems to present a story about silencing, by the end, one understands that this is a novel of speech and, therefore, a story that must be heard. May we stop and listen to Mikaia , feel with our bodies and hearts her movements of hope."