In search of a land without evil: Violence, migration and resistance in Kaká Werá Jecupé and Eliane Potiguara

Abstract

This paper thematizes Brazilian indigenous literature produced since 1990s, looking specifically at the works of Kaká Werá Jecupé and Eliane Potiguara through the lens of historical violence, forced migration, loss of identity and the political struggle that is this literature's central theme. The main argument to be sustained is that these writers are deeply shaped and impacted by symbolical-material violence to which they were subjected given our conservative modernization. As such, the fear of death, the pain felt over the loss of their territories and the negation of cultural identity, the nostalgic and melancholic memory of the destruction of their home and of their people, as well as the forced migration, the social misrecognition and invisibilization, the hunger and misery lived in the city peripheries, lead to the construction of an autobiographical, testimonial and mnemonic account of their ethnical-anthropological singularity and of colonial violence. Such violence is highly political and politicizing. Therefore, what can be concluded from reading and studying Brazilian indigenous literature is exactly this political sense undertaken by the literature itself through social criticism, cultural resistance, political struggle and pedagogical praxis, a literature that goes beyond fiction and assumes directly the role of critic, made by the victims from and for themselves.