Corpos em luto, palavras em luta: literatura e direitos humanos na obra Mulheres empilhadas, de Patrícia Melo

Abstract

Within the contemporary context of Latin America, especially in the last two decades, women authored literary productions have been seeking to disrupt discourses sacralized by the colonial/modern gender system. In Pilled up women, published in 2019, Brazilian authoress Patrícia Melo thematizes violence against women to think about today’s society through lenses that focus on a different perspective from the one that has been built for centuries in relation to women. In this sense, this research mobilizes the novel at issue in order to highlight and analyze the narrative strategies used by the authoress, with emphasis on the diversity of discursive forms and speeches – which operate on the limits between reality and fiction – and the contact with Brazilian indigenous cultures, motivated by the narrator’s journey between the urban and the forest, from São Paulo to Acre. Toward this direction, we intend to estimate to what degree and in what way women-authored literature strengthens decolonial feminist thinking and how social movements contribute to women writing and being read; we investigate how the triple narration process of Pilled up women is constituted, with the objective of understanding the weaving of the plot when it comes to form and content in sync; and we underline the protagonism of indigenous women, mainly based on the presence of myths of Brazilian native peoples, with emphasis on the Amazonian mythology, throughout the narrative. The contemplated discussions stem from Comparative Literature, with Tania Franco Carvalhal (2003) and Zilá Bernd (2013a); Feminist Literary Criticism, with Lúcia Zolin (2019a; 2019b) and Rita Laura Segato (2003), as she contextualizes the structural elements of violence; and from decolonial feminisms, with María Lugones (2008; 2010) and Françoise Vergès (2020; 2021). In addition to being grounded first and foremost on Latin American female scholars and highlighting the voices of indigenous women, this research intends to give visibility to women writers who oppose the categorical and essentialist logic of the colonial/modern gender system and who, with their literary production, potentiate feminist resistance and the fight for human rights and women’s rights. The established and confirmed hypothesis is that Pilled up women challenges colonial, misogynistic and patriarchal conceptions that reduce women to a submissive position and that make indigenous communities in Brazil invisible, therefore contemplating the purpose of decolonization and decoloniality of Latin American literature.