Memórias de duas ditaduras ibero-amefricanas: Brasil, Moçambique e Portugal nas escrevivências pós-coloniais de Conceição Evaristo e Isabela Figueiredo

Abstract

This investigation problematizes the effects of coloniality in the entangled present of Brazil, Mozambique and Portugal. Thus, it analyzes the experiences of contestation, through testimonial literature, to the updates of violences from a persistent traumatic past in the space of Ibero-Amefrica, which manifested itself both in the authoritarian actions of the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship and through the functioning of the Portuguese Estado Novo in the African overseas. In this sense, the research examines as documentary sources the escrevivências [writing-livings] and critical fabulations in Becos da memória, by Conceição Evaristo, and in Caderno de memórias coloniais, by Isabela Figueiredo, thought of as instruments to the elaboration of trauma and the production of insurgent and disturbing memories – considering the authors’ desires to wake the dominators from their unjust sleeps and betray colonial barbarism by refusing to forget the terror imposed by both dictatorships. In view of this, the study debates the use of testimony in favor of creating an archive attentive to the rejection of neglect of the lives of people who resisted the catastrophe, even if they were defeated, as well as discussing the chance of using a topographic temporal conception in favor of the construction of cartography that seeks to map the past from the now on, with a view to rejecting the idea of a non-existent racial harmony in the tropics and, therefore, with the aim of treating and redeeming the pain, which has never ceased, caused by the active subalternization scheme on both sides of the Atlantic to the Indian. Since the authors, from different, localized and partial points of view, take advantage of their personal and family trajectories to shake these insistent scars and to present, in the public sphere, speeches that subvert the desires of power for silence, it is possible to perceive the ethical and political purposes of their texts in the history of the present time and which, with this, bring them closer to a testimonial turn in historical knowledge, which connects the victims of colonialism to the opposition to events that attempt to re-edit their pain, such as the cases of desfavelamento [favela extinction] and brutal black sexual and labor exploitation, alluded to in the documents read. In this way, based on references associated with post-colonial thought, the work understands that the books denounce a broader time of horror coupled with patriarchal and racist conduct and, therefore, announce an incomplete project that points out the urgency of putting a finger on the colonial wound and to brush Ibero-Amefrican history against the grain.