My weeping, your singing: possible correspondences between the works of Carolina Maria de Jesus and Françoise Ega.
Brazilian literature, Caribbean literature, autobiography, African diaspora, Carolina Maria de Jesus, Françoise Ega.
This thesis investigates the autobiographical narratives of the writers Carolina Maria de Jesus and Françoise Ega. From the first, I analyze the books Quarto de Despejo (1960) and Diário de Bitita (1986). From the second, Le temps des madras (1966) and Lettres a une noire (1978). The aim is to analyze the correspondences between the works of Jesus and Ega from aspects present in the paratexts of the works, such as issues of editing and publication, in the light of theories about the literary field, as well as exploring structuring elements of the narratives (incipit, time, spaces, characters, themes), in addition to approaching the construction of narrative identities that reveal diasporic transits and affinities. I am interested in knowing how the works question patterns of authorship, in relation to literary fields, as well as how they dialogue with the literary tradition. I also seek to understand how the conditions of the authors - working-class women, mothers and blacks - interfere in literary production, from the selection of the themes addressed, through the reconstruction of times that recover and re-update traumatic experiences, the creation of spaces that denounce failures of democratic projects in Brazil, France and Martinique, while presenting resilient and creative ways of occupying both the countryside and the city, as well as occupying the literary text. All these questions are placed in comparative perspective in order to identify similarities and differences between works, authors, narrators and their realities. To support the entire analysis, an investigation of literary genres and the issue of authorship allows us to draw horizons of reading that cross the narratives and also guide the investigations present in this thesis. Furthermore, the careful observation of the internal elements of the narrative construction highlighted above is related to issues of gender, race and class, linking the literary construction to its historical time. I seek to analyze both the literary object, in its aesthetic and poetic aspects, as well as to offer interpretations of the reality that emerge from it. This thesis also researches how the literary narrative produced by Carolina Maria de Jesus in Brazil and that of Françoise Ega, Martinican living in France, authors outside the white male middle class standard, give literary body and voice to the effects of the colonial enterprise in contemporary times, disputing spaces with other narratives of interpretation of Brazil, Martinique and France, places in which they are inserted, still revealing kinship based on diasporic experience.