RESISTANCE AND CATASTROPHE IN THE CONTEMPORARY AMAZON: A DISCURSIVE ANALYSIS OF THE SHORT STORY MAMÍ TINHA RAZÃO, BY JOÃO MEIRELLES FILHO

Abstract

This paper analyzes the fictional short story Mamí tinha razão, by João Meirelles Filho (2017), as a literary discourse that restructured the liberal, republican and capitalist thinking that historically prevails in the conduct of the Brazilian Amazon's destinies. The first hypothesis raised for investigation is that this short narrative places the excluded at the center of the symbolic process, shaping a discourse of resistance to the traumatic incorporation of the region by the civilization of capital. The analytical axis is the representation of the space-time experience of the Amazonian subject oppressed by unfair and conflicting social relations, impacted and fractured in the story by a flood that submerges the city of Belém and part of the eastern lands of the plain. Leitmotiv of the short story, this hydrological accident breaks the paradigm of natural disaster and configures itself as a sociopolitical catastrophe. And this movement, according to the second hypothesis we raised, provides Mamí tinha razão with a differentiated writing regime, that of catastrophe, which is articulated discursively with the allegorization of the reality of contemporary Amazonia. The authors who reference the discussions are, among others, BOSI (2002), CANDIDO (2011), BENJAMIN (2016), GAGNEBIN (2013) and LOUREIRO (2001).