“Desenterrar ossadas da poeira dos tempos”: sentidos e usos do passado escrito na obra de Airton Maranhão

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the literary writing of Airton Maranhão (1950 – 2015) as a constructor of memories for those and that which is not (in the author's own conception) properly remembered, constituting itself as a writing that formulates meanings for the written past and for the various spatialities that were narrated, thus being a fictional art that desires to be able to "give time to space," since Maranhão's literary work (poems, novels, and chronicles) was dedicated to the city of Russas - CE and its people (living and dead). This study also analyzes Maranhão's relationships (possible tensions or encounters) within the "artistic field," which he helped build and was a part of, and his affiliation with and involvement in memory institutions that brought together intellectuals and artists in the city. It discusses the relationships between fiction, memory, temporality, and spatiality, as well as analyzing how an author is formed within a specific "field." We understand that Maranhão's writing remained "imprisoned" and "exercised" a particular way of "seeing and saying" about "Northeastern culture," or so-called "popular culture." We investigate the uses that Maranhão made, through literature, of the "fantastic/magical" and the folkloric to construct memories for a space. We analyzed why a space, or "reality," needed to be written in this way to be expressed. More than a job, it's an inalienable "mission" for those who are said to be (and also perceive themselves) as bearing the duty of not letting the "dust of the past" cover everything with its cloak of oblivion. In his literary writing, Maranhão primarily worked with absences, absent figures who became present in his narratives and took on the contours of the past. From this study, we understand how this writer constructed new “writing tombs” for the dead who do not want to return (1999), but whose absences need to be inscribed in the time of the living. We investigated how Maranhão's writing has operated "cuts" in time and how it (re)connected them in the literary representation of a space and time of saudade (a feeling of longing or nostalgia). The methodology is based on the analysis of the literary work of the aforementioned writer, but not an analysis with the intention of qualifying the work literarily, but rather to bring literature into thought alongside history, to reflect on how a writer, in "speaking" of the world, is also an "investigator," since we understand literature as a "form of knowledge." The research results indicate that in Maranhão's work, which sought to temporalize his hometown, time and space cannot be thought of as separate from each other, and that between history and literature there is a "porous boundary."