Da escravidão à liberdade: refiguração e sobrevida de Chica da Silva na literatura brasileira

Abstract

Only a few characters in history have flirted with both poetry and prose like Chica da Silva. She was described for the first time in the decade of 1860 by Joaquim Felício dos Santos, in Memórias do Distrito Diamantino do Serro do Frio, and as of that time, she, Chica, has been many characters in one. Transformed, destroyed, celebrated, regreted, demonized, sanctified. Among several images of Chica, one prevails: the image of a national myth, she was for a long time the portrait of “a black being”. Chica is a way of saying and understanding Brazil, of comprehending how our nationality was (and still is) forged by means of the racism of the white patriarchal supremacy. Literature is a fruitful field concerning several of the speeches on her. A field in conflict: Chica da Silva is a territory under dispute. Over the centuries, all of her images and their meanings to Brazil tell us so much about her, but, especially and more intensely about ourselves and about how the images of all black women were built over the years and the different ways by means of which Brazilians, women and men, give a new sense to slavery and to the places of black bodies. Chica personifies to some extent the image Brazil has internalized of itself. If the images portraying Chica’s life are true or untrue are less important to me than its architectural construction. For this purpose, each piece of this Chica’s big mosaic matters. The pieces (or bricks, if you prefer) are components, in the end, of several images of Chica da Silva that side by side create a big mosaic of her, of black women (enslaved/freed/free), of us, of Brazil. The mosaic reflects the violence of Me in relation to the others - male/female. My perceptions are based upon the authors – men ou women – who structured the imagery, the representations of black women. Their theories helped me build a methodology that could embrace all the diversities of Chica’s images in the course of their works. I must confess the files I chose and analysed had much to do with a wish to know the unsearchable I tried to carry out. In this way, I make use of novels, poems, tales, memories, chapbook literature, lyrics (which are poems) and, in other words, everything that touches or is touched by the narrative to develop line after line, word for word the different ways of refigurations and survivals of Francisca da Silva. Even if my choices are chronologically organized it doesn’t mean, however, that I intend to forge a beginning and an end from a negative to a positive pole. Writing about Chica da Silva is not just ‘writing about Chica da Silva’. She is a flow of other questions very dear to nationality (not perceived necessarily as something static!), to racial issues and violence against the bodies of black women. Thus my research tries to follow step by step the imaginary formation of Francisca da Silva de Oliveira known as Chica da Silva