Ocupar o exílio: corpos profanos e o imaginário de sobrevivência em Eu, Tituba: Bruxa Negra de Salem, de Maryse Condé

Abstract

In Eu, Tituba: Bruxa Negra de Salem (2023[1986]), the francophone writer Maryse Condé portrays the trajectory of Tituba, a resistance story — in the diaspora, at the exile, at the death imaginary. In the novel, the Caribbean author combines fiction and reality depicting the life of this black enslaved character who was one of the first persecuted for witchcraft, in 1692, at the Salem witch trials. This dissertation aims to analyze, at the light of the postcolonial field, and, in particular, authors such as Sueli Carneiro, Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, and the researches of women and witchcraft, as in Silvia Federici and Mona Chollet, the literary devices used by Condé for constructing the subjectivity of the main character. Furthermore, this work intends to investigate in which ways, throughout the narrative, Tituba elaborates progressively a survival imaginary that allows her to fill in the various imposed exiles and create diverse ways to resist these and other obstacles. Additionally to the analysis highlighted above, on the basis of the studies of Saidyia Hartman it will be verified the different kinds of rebellions that constitute the numerous forms of resistances of the main character and how, based on the complex subjective creation and elaboration of the protagonist and her narrative, Maryse Condé inserts the contemporary, giving Tituba and her existence a historical permanence.