Resistência, literatura e a voz feminina de Eliane Potiguara em Metade cara, metade máscara

Abstract

Throughout the centuries, indigenous people needed to endure invasions, colonial processes, the erasure of their stories, and the silencing of their voices. As a way of endurance, the orality – an intrinsic trait of indigenous cultures – was adapted and modernized through writing, preserving indigenous knowledge, stories, and ancestry, and resisting over time and colonization. Eliane Potiguara, a groundbreaker in the scope of indigenous literary production, translates her ancestry by developing a literature of endurance and self-history, creating Metade cara, metade máscara (2018) a book that marks her debut in the Brazilian literary system. In the book, Potiguara presents poems, personal stories, and a diversity of texts that have, as the main objective, the presentation of indigenous struggles and their cultures; the book is an homage to the indigenous woman, who occupies the role of the protagonist during the book. Through Eliane’s journey, her resistance linked to her literature created a safe space to preserve her indigenous ancestry. Through the qualitative method, this research aims to present the identity questions inherent to Potiguara’s book and to show the feminine role within indigenous cultures and their struggles, presented throughout the literature created by indigenous authors and its characteristics. The research shows how Eliane’s written war opened spaces for new female indigenous writers to keep fighting this battle to preserve their cultures and identities. To enable this research, we used theoretical texts and researchers such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Rita Olivieri-Godet, Eni Orlandi, and Heliene Rosa da Costa, in addition to texts from indigenous authors such as Eliane Potiguara, Márcia Wayna Kambeba, Graça Graúna, Ellen Lima, among others; moreover, interviews, videos, podcasts, social media posts and blogs, booklets, and other texts about Eliane Potiguara's life and works were used.