Morte e ancestralidade em O Crime do Cais do Valongo

Abstract

The work 'O Crime do Cais do Valongo' (2018), by Eliana Alves Cruz, constitutes an essential narrative for us to rethink the Brazilian slave society and, mainly, the customs and cultures of the people who came to Brazil in the condition of slavery. The writer and thinkers built a polyphonic text that questions Brazilian discursivity about slavery, assigning voice and the possibility of composing historical subjectivities in a historical narrative in which one crime determines others. One of the proposals of this work is questionable as the relationship between death and ancestry for Africans and what these elements do for those who died while still on the slave ship or when they arrived in the port region of Valongo, in Rio de Janeiro, the so-called new blacks. Furthermore, it is essential to point out the contemporary contributions of ancestry to the different narratives of the black population and their way of life, considering the ancestral Afro-diasporic cult of Egúngún as a strong manifestation of African cultural resistance in the diaspora. Thus, from the highlights, it is possible to consider a semantic operator of resistance, having the cult of ancestors as a vehicle for the continuity of vital cycles for the black population outside Africa. The number of black people that are killed in caring communities increases, reinforcing the social fetish for current research, the connection also with the necropolitical research of the State and the physical communities of these people. It is also highlighted the role of black women's narratives in the constitution of the cultural crossroads present in women's writing in Maria Firmina, Carolina Maria de Jesus, Conceição Evaristo, Ana Maria Gonçalves e Eliana Alves Cruz.