Pensar infâncias em perspectiva afro-feminina brasileira: caminhando ao lado de “Olhos d’água”, de Conceição Evaristo

Abstract

This thesis thinks childhoods from a Brazilian Afro-feminine perspective, taking as its field the work "Olhos d'água", of Conceição Evaristo, starting from questions such as: what childhoods does this work bring us? What does the author tell us about children? How do they appear in her writings? How do these writings help us think about childhoods? The thesis constitutes a critique of the modern colonial order, highlighting the genocide of black people, in which we do not access the knowledge that they produce. Initially, three characters help us think about the silencing/erasure of Black authorship, bringing the strategies they created to deal with the modern colonial order: Anastácia, Exu, and Esperança Garcia. Working with the previously mentioned ork, we emphasize the importance of its author in the national literature scene. In this authorship, conceptualized as "escrevivências", we find an important tool, among other things, to denounce racism and other ills that affect the lives of black people and to create a literature in which we raise our voices, breaking with the stereotypes present in the literary canon. To understand these “escrevivências”, we rescued processes of creation, registration, and communication of our ancestors in Africa. We brought the Ishango Bone, Ifá and its literary corpus, Adinkra symbols and hieroglyphs, affirming that, long before the invasion of barbarian colonizers, there were forms of writing in Africa. In Brazil, from the end of the 18th century to the present day, we find writing as one of the forms of creation and resistance of black populations. In a direct connection with Evaristo literature, we show Maria Firmina dos Reis, Carolina Maria de Jesus and the Cadernos Negros. Other characters such as Gregório Luís, Bernardina Rich, Hemetério José dos Santos and Carlos Marighella had parts of their stories narrated. We also list some laws and other movements that aimed to maintain the modern colonial order, such as: the laws of Feijó, Eusébio de Queirós, Terras, Ventre Livre, Sexagenários and Áurea, the establishment of the republic, the eugenics movement and the military dictatorship. In contrast, we also present the Companhia Negra de Revistas and the Bataclan Preta, with De Chocolat, and the Teatro do Sentenciado and the Teatro Experimental do Negro, by Abdias Nascimento. Immersed in this black authorship, we define the concept of escrevivência and, inspired by filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha, we create the methodology of "walking next to" them, in a respectful and supportive approach to Conceição's work, leading us to create a notebook with excerpts from the work, authorial notes, and dialogues with other authors. Debating the modern colonial order, from our notebook, we address the concept of childhood; the relationship between black women and childhood; ancestry and identity; the logic of development; intersectionality to think about childhood; and the act of naming. Thus, the research points to several ways of thinking about childhoods, such as: 'lost childhood', 'persecuted childhood', 'permanent childhood', 'childhood of order', 'object childhood', 'threshold childhood', 'shrewd childhood', 'rupture childhood', 'memory childhood' and 'rescue childhood'.