Narrativas orais do Rio do Engenho – Ilhéus/Bahia: performance, memória e patrimônio

Abstract

This study is the result of research carried out on oral narratives in the rural district of Rio do Engenho, Ilhéus/ Bahia, during the doctoral years. It aims to analyze the oral narratives of poetic voices, which are produced in the daily life of the community, in its symbolic practices, aiming at preserving the memory of the storytellers, main depositories of the cultural tradition of Rio do Engenho. This is an interdisciplinary study developed in the space of Comparative Literature where conceptual convergences of Literary Theory and Criticism, Cultural Studies, Decolonial Studies and New History are established. The research presents the literary production of the poetic voices of Rio do Engenho as a political act of resistance to the imposed invisibility, a form of struggle against the status quo of hegemonic patterns that convey a vision of the world that serves the dominant interests, where hegemony prevails. of writing. It understands the body of the narrators, as another writing environment, which brings printed in its morphology, knowledge based on the ancestry of their own poetics, which generates, transmits knowledge and writes other epistemes. It defends memory as a construction, a political gesture of resistance; and highlights how the materials of memory, driven by the struggles of social groups, are important narratives for explaining the world, no longer based on the interpretation of historical facts that are selected, but on the formation of self-consciousness in History. It emphasizes cultural practices, symbolized in collective experiences, traditions, ways of living and the knowledge and practices of rural life, as cultural heritage. It also discusses how knowledge practices (SANTOS, 2010) and knowledge operate on tactical principles (CERTEAU, 2005), as a way of responding, resisting and producing agencies. The research results highlight the need to preserve the literary expression of poetic voices that, simultaneously, unite the vocalized word and memory - individual and collective life experiences - the past and the present, revealing the tradition, represented by the imaginary contained in the stories. and testimony from the rural community of Rio do Engenho, remnant of the first nuclei of occupation of the former hereditary captaincy of São Jorge dos Ilhéus.