“OS GURIS DE DOLORES FELICIANA”: O AMOR E O LUTO DAS MÃES NEGRAS NA LITERATURA DE CONCEIÇÃO EVARISTO

Abstract

Black motherhood has always been treated as unimportant in canonical literary works and academic research. If we look at the narratives of classical literature, we can see the appreciation of the treatment of black women towards the children of white women at the expense of their own offspring. In this context, the objective of this research is to study another representation of the black mother, based on the analysis of the short story “Os guris de Dolores Feliciana”, extracted from the work Histórias de leves enganos e parecenças (2016), by Conceição Evaristo. In the course of the study, we will approach the love of black mothers for their children and the bonds that unite them; we will analyze the pain of these mothers, doubly violated, for losing their children and not having the right to experience grief, as the racist society dehumanizes these bodies and delegitimizes the pain of these mothers, propagating the fallacy that black women are more resistant to pain physical and psychological than white women. We also present the study of the fictional text, comparing it to some facts of everyday reality that reveal the many forms of violence to which black women-mothers are subjected. We concluded, at the end of the research, that the pain of bereaved black mothers - women who lost their children to genocidal State violence - should not be considered an individual problem, but a structural problem that should be the responsibility of the whole society to seek alternatives. to prevent these atrocities from happening, and, at the same time, creating public policies to support mothers who have lost their children. In the development of the analyses, we used as a theoretical-critical basis: