Memória, testemunho, trauma e luto em Você vai voltar pra Mim e outros contos, de Bernardo Kucinski

Abstract

This work discusses the issue of memory, testimony, trauma and mourning in the work Você vai voltar pra mim e outros contos, by Bernardo Kucinski. In the initial considerations, which I call "O corte", I deal with the historical context in which the civil-military dictatorship has settled, the role of the National Truth Commission, and how the work analyzed here arose through the reports contained in the CNV sessions. In the first chapter, I bring to the reader a little of Bernardo Kucinski's biography, his life as a journalist, a university professor, and the subsequent transformation into a writer of literature. Soon after, I make a brief summary of the literary works published by the author. I also deal with the theoretical concept of Memory, working with the issue of collective memory in Lucena (2014), of memory strength in Sarlo (2007), non-preservation of memory and its consequences in Costa (2011) and the speech of Hobsbawn (2011) on the continuous present to which young people are subjected. On the testimony, I use the concept of Salgueiro (2012) to define what a witness is in a broad sense; from Selligmann-Silva (2006), on the problem of testimony in Agamben (2008) and Avelar (2003). I also mention the importance of testimony in Sarlo (2007) and on the use of literature to testify in Valéria de Marco (2004). Soon after, I speak properly about the trauma, having as theoretical base the psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi. To deepen the theme, I use the theorists Avelar (2003), Antonello (2016), Santos (2010) and Selligmann-Silva (2008). In order to point out more specifically about the repression, initially developed by Freud, I use Maria Paiva's speech (2011). On resilience, I highlight what Brandão (2009) postulates, which says that the concept of resilience has become quite diverse, since its interpretation has changed over time, just as Rudge (2009) warns us about how trauma has taken the same way, and it is difficult to characterize it because of the various conceptual currents that have formed over time. In the last topic of the first chapter, I talk about mourning and turn to Freud's reflections (2006) again. I use Paulo Endo (2013) and Zucolo (2014) to deepen the concept on the subject and Teles (2017) to reflect on how silence, non-mourning, still makes Brazil a country that does not solve its historical traumas. Entering the three subsequent chapters, all of analysis, I bring in each of them a specific theme, namely: woman, family and clandestinity. In the chapter on the role of women in the dictatorship, I construct the discussion from the short stories “Você vai voltar pra mim”, “Joana” and “A beata Vavá”. In the first narrative, the most visible aspect is that of women in prison, abuses and the collaboration of the judiciary to legitimize human rights abuses. In "Joana", the major focus is on the search for an answer about her husband who was arrested, tortured and disappeared during the years of political repression. In “A beata Vavá” the work focuses on the mother's struggle to save the child from the hands of the torturers, a short story in which Kucinski differ from the rest of the work and flirts with the genre Fantástico. In the chapter on the family issue, the stories analyzed are: “O velório”, “Tio André” and “A mãe rezadeira”. In the first, we have the pain of a father who "buries" the missing child as a form of resilience and / or protest in the face of the events of the last decades and the finitude of his life; in the second, Kucinski writes of a survivor after the trauma of being tortured by political repression, denouncing the state and its negligence with whom it fell victim to the dictatorship; in the third, I reflect on the pain of a mother who has her son arrested, being tested on knowing that the son can be released after the kidnapping of an authority, but being taken by the fear of the son, if released, to be killed by the forces of repression. In the chapter on clandestinity, I bring the short stories: “Sobre a natureza do homem”, “A troca” and “Dodora”. The first is a narrative that shows the destruction of a left-wing militant after the tortures and their consequences; the second express the difficult decision to serve a sentence, to renounce the struggle and return to a normal life or continue to rebel against the dictatorship; and the third deals with the pressure and treachery of life on clandestinity. In the final considerations, which I named " A ferida" I discuss the question of the revisionism of the dictatorship by the population, the discourse of "Ditabranda", which was defended in an editorial of a vehicle of great national circulation and the ascension of militaristic speech in our society.