Narrativas ancestrais de Auritha Tabajara e Eliane Potiguara: memória, cosmovisão e polifonia nas literaturas indígenas

Abstract

This essay studies the literatures of indigenous authorship in contemporary Brazil. For that, we chose the works Coração na aldeia, pés no mundo (2018) and A cura da terra (2015), from the indigenous writers Auritha Tabajara and Eliane Potiguara, respectively, to highlight how the indigenous narratives set up new ways of observing the indigenous people themselves in the literary scene, either as a character or as an author. Therefore, the traditional reality of Brazilian literature is confronted, in which these subjects were always put on the sidelines, represented as wild, barbarian and outdated. The corpora works reflect memorial and ancestral marks, as well as they offer space for the theoretical debate about polyphony and worldview. Coração na aldeia, pés no mundo (2018) is a poetic narrative in cordel format that reveals a text with autobiographical marks in popular verse. Work that breaks with the canonical proposal in several ways: it's about an indigenous woman who produces cordel literature and, moreover, fictionalizes herself. On the other hand, A cura da terra (2015) shows the harm of colonial domination, at the same time it highlights the resistance and the identity, memorial and ancestral formation of the indigenous child. The theoretical reference used in this research is largely formed by indigenous reserchers – taking Graça Graúna, Márcia Kambeba and Daniel Munduruku as an example – and non indigenous Brazilians who support the fight of those peoples, taking Maria Inês de Almeida, Heliene Costa and Janice Thiél as an example. Other scholars of literature and culture, even if coming from the Eurocentric universe, will be called upon to compose an effectively dialogic thought, such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Paul Zumthor, Paul Hiebert, among others, in order to weave a polyphonic arena of voices committed to the recognition and appreciation of the literatures of indigenous peoples.