Infâncias secas: o flagelo da fome no Modernismo do Nordeste

Abstract

Supported by Antonio Candido´s aesthetic and analytical perspective, the academic paper Dried Childhoods: the scourge of hunger during the Modernism period in the Northeast of Brazil presents the study of the representations of the child's world under the scourge of hunger as a result from frequent droughts in the region that, associated to the indifference of the Brazilian state, condemns the Northeast people, especially its children, to food deprivation, painful and forced exodus, subjecting them to social breakdown, kidnapping them of their childhood and, in most cases, of their own lives. In this understanding, was elected, as analysis objects, Raquel de Queiroz novelistic discourse O Quinze (1930), and the narrative from Graciliano Ramos Vidas Secas published eight years after the novel from Raquel´s writer. The selected works are presented to us as privileged examples of hunger thematic, particularly, child hunger in Brazilian literature. At the same time, are constituted as paradigmatic texts of modernist strand of the Northeast, which opposes the optimistic views of romantic concerning the country, the notion of underdevelopment, poverty and domestic anomie, redirecting, a path of subversion, literary look at Brazil (Candido, 1989). The fictional complaint, the works selected, proceeds notably, through the descriptions of child migrants, robbed them of the natural right to food, or their own living. Such descriptions, prepared by the tragic tone, turn these novels into decisive statement showing another nationality´s project, illustrating, irrefutably, the diversity of Brazilian Modernism.