O terreiro não calou: memória, apagamento e resistência nos discursos sobre um terreiro de candomblé em uma comunidade quilombola

Abstract

This study aims to analyze how the memories and meanings attributed to the existence of an extinct Candomblé terreiro are discursively constructed, silenced, and re-signified in the narratives of two older residents of the quilombola community of Piquete, in the municipality of Colinas, Maranhão, Brazil. The research is grounded in the Frenchoriented Discourse Analysis framework, based on the theoretical assumptions of Michel Pêcheux and Eni Orlandi, which understand discourse as an effect of meaning produced through the articulation of language, history, and ideology, considering silence and the unsaid as constitutive dimensions of signification.The methodology adopted is qualitative in nature and consists of the analysis of narrative interviews conducted with the two research participants, taking as discursive material not only what is said, but also pauses, hesitations, interruptions, and vague formulations present in the accounts. The analysis indicates that the current absence of the terreiro does not correspond to complete forgetting, but rather to a discursive process of silencing and displacement of meanings, identified in the interviewees’ narratives, without allowing for generalizations beyond the analyzed corpus.Paradoxically, it is observed that although the terreiro no longer exists materially and appears in a fragmented or minimized way in the narratives, memories of it emerge as a symbolic reference associated with ancestry and quilombola identity, revealing forms of discursive resistance. It is concluded that these memories remain operative in the present as an effect of disputes of meaning between erasure and permanence, contributing to the understanding of how collective memory is discursively constructed within the quilombola community of Piquete