Imagens da mulher afro-brasileira em Olhos D’água de Conceição Evaristo

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the construction of the image of the Afro-Brazilian woman in two short stories from the book Water Eyes (2018) by the contemporary writer Conceição Evaristo. The work has fifteen short stories, from which we chose two: Water Eyes and Duzu-Querença. In them, we seek to investigate how the image of the woman-mother, woman-daughter, and woman-grandmother are constructed and represented from the perspective of ancestry and memory. In addition, Evaristo's writing is permeated by a diasporic feeling that brings a space of speech into the narrative process, a discursive space that gives voice to the black female characters by fictionalizing their daily experiences as a form of action and resistance. The methodology used was bibliographic research of a qualitative and phenomenological nature, as we delve into the writings as a phenomenon of the imaginary, highlighting the constellations of images in the analyzed short stories. For theoretical basis, the research was based on the notion of the anthropological trajectory of the imaginary by Gilbert Durand (2019), in the epistemology of Gaston Bachelard based on the work The Poetics of Space (2006), as well as the phenomenologist Merleau - Ponty (2018) in his work The Phenomenology of Perception (2018), in addition to Mazama (2009), Evaristo (2020), Ribeiro (2019), Gilroy (2001), Gonzalez (2020), among others. The results of the investigation indicate that Evaristian writings, through the analyses undertaken in the two short stories of the aforementioned work, transcend a discursive space since the daily actions and situations of the black and subaltern woman are highlighted based on memory and ancestry, bringing with them a field of symbolic images about the narrative actions of the female characters: the images of the woman-mother, the woman-daughter, and the woman-grandmother. In other words, life writing is a writing that brings feminine pluralities as a way of breaking paradigms through the perspective of writing, living, and acting, deconstructing the legacy of the Eurocentric patriarchal system and (re)affirming the (re)existence of the experiences of Afro-Brazilian women.