Literatura e história em Mãe Sereia, Awon Baba e Cachorro Velho, de Teresa Cárdenas

Abstract

This research investigates the dialogue between literature and history in the works Mãe Sereia (2018), Awon Baba (2022), and Cachorro Velho (2010) by the Cuban writer Teresa Cárdenas, considering literature not only in its aesthetic dimension but also as a form of historiographical knowledge, especially when focused on rewriting experiences silenced by a project of systematic extermination that marks what we can call the "colonial genome of death." Cachorro Velho constitutes a metaphor for dehumanization and forgetting; Mãe Sereia combines the marvelous real with the memory of the first transatlantic slave trade ship; and Awon Baba, inspired by the Yoruba worldview, reveals how memory resists the logic of exclusion and historical erasure. The methodology involves bibliographic analysis and critical reading of the works from post-colonial and decolonial perspectives, supported by authors such as Aníbal Quijano, María Lugones, Leoné Astride Barzotto, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Ramón Grosfoguel, and Hugo Achugar. Regarding the historical dimension, accounts of slavery and cultural and transcultural aspects are examined in light of Fernando Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera, Rebecca Scott, Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, and Silviano Santiago. The research also incorporates Comparative Literature Studies, based on Eduardo F. Coutinho, and prioritizes the dialogue between literature and history in the Latin American context. Paul Ricoeur's reflections on memory and history, as well as the contributions of other theorists of literary memory, underpin the analysis. Literary hermeneutics, grounded in Wolfgang Iser and Antoine Compagnon, guides the interpretative reading and explores the multiplicity of meanings and the social relevance of the works. This work is organized into four chapters: the first establishes the theoretical foundations and critical reception of the author; the second reconstructs the historical context of slavery in Cuba, discusses Black women's writing as a form of (anti)memoricide, and analyzes Mãe Sereia, highlighting Iemanjá as a witness to the slave trade and guardian of ancestral African memory; the third deals with the transition from Eurocentric narratives to intercultural perspectives, recognizes literature as a legitimate historical archive, and analyzes Awon Baba as a rescue of names, traditions, and stories of Afro-descendant resistance; the fourth discusses the threshold between truth and fiction, defends literature as an artifact of survival and resistance against systematic oppression, and analyzes Cachorro Velho as a testimony to the cultural devastation imposed by slavery and the memories forbidden by trauma and oblivion. This dissertation introduces Cárdenas to a trajectory that traverses historical fiction and realism, demonstrating how her work constructs, through these different narrative forms, a vanguard literary project in 21st-century Latin American literature.