Histórias quilombolas: análise das narrativas de tradição oral da comunidade remanescente do Quilombo Peafú – Monte Alegre - PA./

Abstract

The main objective of this research is to analyze the set of oral tradition narratives from the Peafú Quilombo Remnant Community, located in the city of Monte Alegre/PA, focusing on their sociocultural, aesthetic, poetic, political, religious, and discursive specificities. Thus, considering the analytical and methodological positioning of Cândido (2006), in which the external factor (the history and culture of the quilombo territory) takes part in the organization and structuring of the narratives within the aesthetic dimensions of these texts, as well as their dialogues with social history, the formation of the territory, and quilombola identity and resistance. The work is organized into four chapters: the first chapter presents the processes of constructing the research object and its implications regarding pedagogical practice in Basic Education, the main reason that motivated the investigation of other possibilities of literature at the core of the collective memory of the Peafú Quilombo in Monte Alegre. The second chapter, based on Hampâté-Bá (2010), Moura (2010), Bispo (2015), Funes (2022), Carvalho and Pires (2021), Maia (2012), Carvalho and Vaz Filho (2023), systematizes the importance of the “Living Tradition” represented in the figure of the elders — storytellers of the quilombo, emphasizing the social function of the narrators, the general characteristics of oral narrative, and the categories and typologies that critics have used to address the quilombola narrative. In the third chapter, I provide an overview of the profiles of the storytellers interviewed during the fieldwork: who they are, what they do, their relationship with the territory, and also with the collected oral narratives. Finally, the fourth chapter is dedicated to the analysis of the oral narratives, where I present a literary repertoire of thirty-five stories heard, recorded, and transcribed, told by seven quilombola narrators (four women and three men). In these stories, I analyze the structural elements: narrator, fable organization, character, spatiality, temporality, and also demonstrate how the social element—quilombo territory (with its symbols, ethics, languages, themes, cultures, identities) is an integral part of the aesthetic meaning. For this work of aesthetic analysis, I grouped the studied texts by theme and structural organization and distributed them into the following quilombo narrative typologies: Traditional Knowledge Stories; Stories of Mysteries, Enchanted Beings, and Apparitions; Stories of Stubbornness; Religious Stories. In summary, the analyzed narratives belonging to each typology materialize historicity, religious and spiritual values, territoriality, and the cultural identities of collective memory, while simultaneously assuming a determining function between the social factor and the aesthetic composition of the texts. The social context, that is, the quilombola reality and all the elements that compose social life in the territory, are integral and functional parts of the aesthetic meaning of the narratives.