Memórias, vozes e saberes: narrativas orais de mulheres negras da comunidade quilombola do Monte Recôncavo

Abstract

This research analyzes oral narratives of black women born and raised in the Quilombola community of Monte Recôncavo, São Francisco do Conde. With this work, I seek to listen to these women, understanding them as bodies-memories, that have subjectivities, affection, voices and knowledge and that they want to share their experiences and escrevivências (Silva, 2020; Evaristo, 2020). In the narratives selected, I try to identify their afrografias, that is, their afrodiasporic repertoire composed by memories, languages, literacy and escrevivências. The research was based on a qualitative methodology, supported by bibliographic references previously listed and throughout the actions, which will serve as a theoretical support for the analysis of the data collected in the field research. During the research, six women aged from 39 to 78 were interviewed. In this study, the community of Monte Recôncavo is presented through the social-historical and geographic perspective, based on the views of Rubens Celestino (2023), Marise de Santana (2020) and José Jorge do Espírito Santo (1998), three personalities born in São Francisco do Conde, seeking to strengthen and preserve the local history. The concept of quilombo is discussed considering the studies of Givania Silva (2012, 2021), the Historian Beatriz Nascimento (2021) and the Quilombola leader, Nego Bispo. The oral narratives produced by these women constitute a basic foundation for this work and are linked to the concepts of afrografias da memória, by professor Leda Maria Martins; self-definition, by professor Patricia Hill Collins (2019 and 2016); self-recovery and talking back, by the black intellectual bell hooks (1995 and 2019). These narratives are analyzed through the concept escrevivência, developed by the writer Conceição Evaristo (2009, 2020, and 2021). I believe that the voices of the women evoked here can break silences and be heard in their communities, in academia and in other spaces, expanding, in the literary field, the understanding of the processes of writing the self, through these bodies-memories, leading central formative processes in the field of identities, no longer tied to the canonical tradition, but dialoguing with a series of other textual traditions, peripheral and black, which are developed within specific communities. These women make up this work as the protagonists of their stories, accounts and communities. Their memories and oral accounts contribute to studies on the epistemological production of black women and the deconstruction of subalternizing discourses in the field of literature and culture.