A Criança negra na literatura brasileira: uma leitura educativa

Abstract

Social identity, daily practices (speeches, religion, habits and values), hopes (feelings and emotions), the constant struggle for survival and against discrimination, stemmed from the slavery period, has always been part of the black people universe since their early years of life. Each of theses actions have distinct meanings and are noticed or related in di fferent ways, as they come up in a certain period and social context. Based on these assumptions it was sketched the targets of this study whose main point is to explicit how those actions were constructed, the relation among black and non-black children along the time, besides their ethnical identities in Brazil. This investigation was guided by the need to situate the black child in the Brazilian historiography, to make them visible from their childhood concept, as a social construction, to study about the presence of black children/childhood in the Brazilian literature, and to suggest resources for an education concerned to the respect to the diversity. For discussing about the black child and their social relations, it was taken literary texts produced by Machado de Assis, “Memórias Póstumas de Braz Cubas”, 1881 (After Death Memories of Braz Cubas); José Lins do Rego, “Menino do Engenho”,1932 (A Boy of the Mill); Gilberto Freire, “Casa Grande e Senzala: Formação da família brasileira sob o regime da economia patriarchal”, 1933 (The House and the Slave House: Brazilian family under a patriarchal economic regime); “Sobrados e Mucambos: decadência do patriarcado rural no Brasil”,1936 (A Mansion and a Hut: rural patriarchal decadency in Brazil); and Graciliano Ramos, “Infância”,1945 (Childhood). The aim of using these specific texts was, mainly, to reflect about the childhood of the black child along their slavery time, taking into account its unfortunate development currently. It was proposed, in this way, to present some possibilities of using children‟s literature in the process of building the identity of the black child. For an ethnical racial reference, the following texts were chosen for analysis: “A Bonequinha Preta”, 1938 (The Black Little Doll) by Alaíde Lisboa de Oliveira; “Menina Bonita de Laço de Fita”, 1986 (Pretty Girl with a Ribbon) by Ana Maria Machado; “O Menino Marrom”,1986 (The Brown Boy) by Ziraldo Alves Pinto; “A Cor da Vida”,1997 (The Color of Life) by Semíramis Paterno; and “O Cabelo de Lelê”, 2007 by Valéria Belém. The study was developed in three chapters in order to better reach the proposed aims. The first chapter, entitled “A Criança Negra na Historiografia Educacional Brasileira” (The Black Child in the Brazilian Historiography Educational) is a literature review about the conceptions of black childhood, questions and objectives, besides the groundwork on methodological basis. The second chapter “Sob o Olhar dos Literatos” (Under the Litterateur Looking) whose aim is to reflect upon a black child in Brazil. In the third chapter “A Literatura Infanto-Juvenil Brasileira e a Identidade Étnica”(The Brazilian Juvenile-Children Literature and Ethnical Identity) on which there was an effort to adduce a range of juvenile -children literature materials of ethnical bias as an essential reference in the process of building identities and positive inter-relations among social individuals. The findings showed that the present productions, under a social struggle influence, has proposed new ways of representing the black child in the literature, including symbols and traits of a black culture, highlighting the resistance mechanisms to the racism and prejudice. It was understood that there was the value of identity and ethnical cultural differences. Moreover, there is an undeniable interest by the juvenile-children literature authors in doing discursiveness constructs whose contents are able to deconstruct negative stereotypes. They are literature whose proposals are aimed to bring a positive construction of ethnical identity of the Brazilian black child in the classroom.