O Devir-rio: Reflexões sobre o vazio em Ponciá Vicêncio, de Conceição Evaristo

Abstract

This dissertation reflects on the subjective drawing of the character Poncia Vicencio analyzing her emotionality from the notion of a “sensation of emptiness”, described in the novel of the same name, written by Conceição Evaristo and published in 2003. The analysis starts from emptiness as psychic suffering. as pain; but also as “(re)existence” (SOUZA, A. 2009). The text navigates between the constitution of the Self or (as we prefer to call it) the character's identity “rivergraphs” (NATALIA, 2017), thinking mainly about her childhood experiences, her identification with her grandfather and mother and the importance of ancestry in this process that is always in motion; follows for reflections on the character's diasporic processes (which we have identified as three) and how they affect her emotionality and contribute to the character's increased feelings of emptiness; and finally, but seeking to keep the fluid and uninterrupted movement evoked by Evaristo's work, this dissertation takes “emptiness” as psychic suffering and as (re)existence - mainly from the notion of “banzo” (NUNES, 2008) - and argues that this “emptiness”, full of “life force” (OLIVEIRA, 2005), gives rise to Ponciá's becoming river. To discuss Ponciá Vicencio's constitution of the Self, as well as the effects of racism and chauvinismo on its psychic constitution, psychoanalysis was fundamental. However, we will be beyond Freud since the subject of Freudian psychoanalysis is intended to be universal and the white universality of Western reason does not reach the subjectivity of black women. Psychoanalysis will be accessed mainly from Virginia Bicudo (2010), Neuza Souza (1983) and Isildinha Nogueira (2017) - black psychoanalysts who subverted the subject of psychoanalysis, thinking the subjectivity of black people. Franz Fanon (2008) will also be essential to the analysis intended here. In addition, we weave psychoanalytic, feminist, and postcolonial “seams” to understand how Poncia Vicencio (re)exists in and out of the empty. After all, at the end of the narrative it is in “pure becoming” (DELEUZE, 2015), it becomes becoming river. Ponciá Vicencio's return to the river, his and his ancestry gives us clues about the possibilities of healing for the psychic sufferings of the black population (effects of racism), as well as of the creation world to come; a world of full humanity.