The article proposes a reflection on the role of writing in the representation of the other excluded from the literary universe, based on the short story "Totonha", by Marcelino Freire, which integrates the collection Contos negreiros (2005). The question is analyzed in the light of problematizations about writing of the other evidenced by ethnography (Geertz, 1989; Clifford, 1998), and from the perspective of a political criticism of social divisions generated by exercise of writing (Ranciere, 2004, 2005). At the end, we intend to elucidate the hypothesis that writing Marcelino Freire enacts the paradox to say the other within a performative writing (Ravetti, 2003), which presents itself as resistance to the dominant system of signification of the other.