Olhares para uma literatura afro-brasileira : a infância como memória e educação nos contos de Olhos D’água

Abstract

This dissertation belongs to the research line of the Postgraduate Program in Education, Federal University of Mato Grosso, Campus Rondonópolis, “Childhood, Youth and Contemporary Culture: rights, policies and diversity” and the research group “Childhood, Youth and Contemporary Culture” (GEIJC). Its main objective is to analyze childhood memories in “Olhos D’água”, written by Conceição Evaristo (2014), based on the following questions: what kind of childhood experiences are addressed in the work of Conceição Evaristo? What educational processes, brought upon the work, are destinated and experienced by childhood? What is the condition of childhood and its relationship with adults, as well as their interactions and the appropriations of the divisions of roles, practices and spaces in this social organization? As a theoretical contribution, authors such as Conceição Evaristo (2007), Walter Benjamin (2011) and Jeanne Gagnebin (2009) were consulted to discuss the understanding of memory. Thus, intersectionality (CRENSHAW, 1991; COLLINS, 2017; hooks, 2019; GONZALEZ, 2018; NASCIMENTO, 2018) were presented as a possibility in terms of analytical perspective. The analyzes developed in the research were based on the following thematic axes: (a) motherhood and childhood; (b) childhood suspension; and (c) education and childhood. The analytical part of this research acknowledges that “Olhos D'água” (2014) narrates individual stories, underlining the experience of black people in a collective childhood: hunger, pain and death, for instance; the book also points to childhood as a living memory of the ancestors, as a promise and as a celebration of life and hope. “Olhos D'água” is a work which shows Evaristo's literature as a voice in contrast to a hegemonic discourse of ‘salvation of the Brazilian child’, deconstructing it and revealing the ambivalence of the social place occupied by the Brazilian black children – who are marked by inequality, but also by the potential of acting and producing memories of happy moments and of resistance. The book combats the burial of the black childhoods memories which are silenced or neglected in the Brazilian history. The streets enact spaces of production and articulation of meanings of different worlds; they allow forms of disobedience as a path to knowledge; words appear as a manifestation of the desire of placing oneself as a subject in the world. The considerations provided by this research are directed to think about the performance of an education based upon memory, seen as a proposition of a space that potentiates and echoes the voices of black childhoods.