“Eu vim de lá pequenininho, alguém me avisou pra pisar neste chão devagarinho”: diálogos diaspóricos entre Um Defeito de Cor, de Ana Maria Gonçalves e Beloved, de Toni Morrison

Abstract

This Master thesis aims at comparatively reading the novels Um Defeito de Cor, by Ana Maria Gonçalves and Beloved, by Toni Morrison. Through Kehinde and Sethe, main characters, we observe aspects such as: slave familiar constitution, body and sexuality, heritages and memories. We analyze the conditions for the exercise of motherhood in slavery context (in which different ways the characters were prevented from performing it), as well as the consequences mother-love achieved in a scenery in which crime was the act that humanized the slave. To our understanding the novels rescue non-European narratives of the colonization of Americas, providing space for the voices that echoed in the Slave Ship‟s basement, and that, nowadays, make loud the “resonance, the echo of life and freedom” (EVARISTO, 2008, p. 10-11). Therefore, we discuss fiction and „true facts‟, as a mean of building a net of credibility to the plot. In the Introduction, we delimit the themes and approaches to the novels. In the first chapter, we observe the theoretical aspects that ground this work, such as: authorship; Black Diaspora; (Black) Feminism and Transnational Feminism. The second chapter will be dedicated to Um Defeito de Cor, focusing on: Luiz Gama; the Foreword; the Novel; Body and Sexuality; Slave Family and Heritages and Memory. Beloved will be worked in the third chapter, analyzing: Margaret Garner; the Foreword; the Novel; Body and Sexuality; Slave Family and Heritages e Memory. The fourth chapter, the conclusion, is dedicated to approaching similarities and highlighting differences, especially concerning: Familiar Constitution/Motherhood; Infanticide; the Crossing through the Atlantic; Memories. Ana Maria Gonçalves and Toni Morrison, then, fill in the role of the storyteller, who keeps alive the narrative tradition through rescuing forgotten stories and giving way to the solution of ethnical and gender conflicts.