Descolonizando o eu-autobiográfico feminino: a questão da memória e história nas narrativas da escravidão

Abstract

In this study I focus on the question of memory, history, autobiography and the importance of looking back on the past in order to revisit it and to give it a new meaning in the present. In the search for memories and in the attempt of a decolonial language I perform a decolonial reading of the novel I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1986), written by Caribbean author Maryse Condé. Through a feminist perspective and considering the triple agony of a woman who was slave, black and witch, the novel suggests a critical view of puritan values as well as its repressive role in the seventies. The protagonist Tituba is reborn through Condé’s imagination and gives her response to the patriarchy three centuries later. I explore the ways in which the female autobiographical self articulates itself in the literary space of empowerment in order to reconstruct a narrative that was once silenced. In reading Condé’s Tituba, we are able to see the past being reopened as a locus for imagination and interpretation through memory.