A potência da palavra na escrita de Sérgio Vaz

Abstract

This thesis aims to develop the analytical study of the word’s potency in the writings of Sérgio Vaz, from the perspective that it is constituted from the reaction against the silence condition culturally imposed to the oppressed. The potencialization of language is understood towards the word that, reacting against silence, breaks through fear, through the crying in the throat, discovers itself as a weapon and intensifies itself mainly through the shouting. This shouting is in a continuous replacement fostered by dreaming, it swings on the sinuous border of possibility and finds out, in the small and potent miracles, a transitory place of potency and (re)building of the word and of in-process life itself. The discussion about shouting from the speech’s territory of the oppressed themselves lays way ahead from identifying speech inside or outside the hegemonic literary system; it points out to its implications in the sense of potent and intense movement between them both. This discussion is also related to constituting itself as strategies of destabilization of equations and the creation of other possibilities of and from the word. The articulation processes of word are substantiated in the perspective that reacting implies also on resisting and insisting, not only on the presence of the oppressed in the literary system but also on the occupation of restricted spaces, or rather, on the takeover of what has been culturally denied, highlighting the right to speak and, especially, to what is expressed through literature. In this sense, the works Colecionador de pedras (2007), Literatura, pão e poesia (2011) and Flores de alvenaria (2016) are discussed from experience shed into language, motivated either by dialogues with the literary and/or connections of language with something beyond itself. The idea is to highlight to what extent the voice that shouts appeals to the literary to (re)signify systems and reaffirm its own social and political space as a producer. We highlight the political use of literature, focusing on understanding the word as a creative and critical strategy that causes a disturbing reaction. Even if we take into consideration the potency with which ideologies move themselves through the words, the focus of our discussion is in the hypothesis of literature as an aesthetic-political instrument of counter power, at the same time that it boosts forces into unequal relationships – destabilizing them or not, resetting fields and/or partaking of them. But, most of all, we focus on literature’s disobedience towards the authorities of silence when it questions, in a creative, potent and rebellious way, who speaks and how to speak.