Maria Ondina Braga: autobiografia, life-writing e relação

Travel, life and writing mix themselves when one speaks about Maria Ondina Braga, a Portuguese writer who has travelled the four continents as a tourist, traveler and emigrant. In several interviews, Maria Ondina Braga has declared “I write because this world that I lived in has revolutionized my soul so much that I had to tell it” and the title of her first book is, unsurprisingly, I came to see the land. This article aims to explore the writer’s encounter with the strangeness of the world, with the different landscapes and cultures and the diversity of people who inhabit it, but also the writer’s encounter with her own intimate landscape, in permanent change with travelling. From autobiography to life-writing, travel as an intimate experience of the world and encounter with identity and otherness are the condition of this writing.