Escrevivências entre-mundos: práticas de sustentação da vida de pessoas negras e periferizadas na sua relação com o Candomblé

Abstract

This research highlights life-sustaining practices woven into the relationship between black and peripheralized people and Candomblé. To do this, it draws on theoretical perspectives in Social Psychology and related areas that discuss race relations, glimpsing in Conceição Evaristo's writing a possibility of writing that allows us to highlight the life experiences of black and peripheralized people with Candomblé, beyond the perspective of survival and reactivity to racial violence. The general objective of the research was: To analyse how living in Candomblé terreiros produces life-sustaining practices in the trajectories of black and peripheralized people. Its specific objectives were as follows: 1) To construct, in dialogue with black and peripheralized people, narratives about their life stories and racialization processes; 2) To discuss, in dialogue with elders, the knowledge and life-sustaining practices that are produced in the terreiros; 3) To write, with initiated people, about healing practices that sustain the lives of black and peripheralized people based on their relationship with Candomblé. The research was based on a qualitative perspective, adopting the methodological strategies of the survivor diary and non-directive biographical narrative interviews. The locus of the research was the Ilê Ibá Àsé Kpósú Aziri terreiro. The participants were chosen according to the following criteria: self-declared black, aged 18 or over, living or having lived on the outskirts of the city and being a child of the terreiro. To analyze the data, we used episodic analysis in dialogue with the writing experience, which made it possible to delve into the experiences of racism in all its complexity, focusing on the biographies narrated. The results indicate that, in the confluences with the elders, the terreiro is a territory of care, protection and subjective elaboration, sustained by its own epistemology, based on the circularity of time, the sacredness of the body and the centrality of the community. These are ancestral technologies of enchantment that confront and resist colonial logics. In narrating their life stories and processes of racialization, the participants showed that the process of becoming black is crossed by pain, but also by power, healing and reinvention. They also revealed other conceptions of mental health, centered on bonds, rites and care for the ori. Candomblé is understood here as a territory of subjective and political elaboration of care, where the body is sacred and the bearer of knowledge. It is hoped that this research will contribute to the visibility of knowledge produced on the margins, recognizing Candomblé as a territory for the production of knowledge, care and resistance. Thus, what was woven into this research was a living memory that insists on blooming against coloniality and a bet on a Psychology that is decentered from the pact of whiteness and is afroscentered.