Sertão em festa: da narradora em travessia

Abstract

This dissertation reflects on the human condition starting from the sertão of João Guimarães Rosa, revisiting memories submerged in veredas and entering the cerrado through the work Corpo de Baile. This study analyzes the relationship between festivity in the literature of the writer João Guimarães Rosa, in the novella Uma estória de amor (Festa de Manuelzão), and festivity in O Caminho do Sertão, a socio-eco-literary immersion. This event takes place in the valleys of the Urucuia and Carinhanha rivers, the creative universe of the Minas Gerais writer, beginning in 2014 and encompassing the geographical territory located in part of northwestern Minas Gerais, along the border with the states of Bahia and Goiás. The specific objectives are: 1) To understand the relationships between the literature of Guimarães Rosa and the event O Caminho do Sertão in a cartography of the territory; 2) To analyze the theme of festivity in the novella Uma estória de amor (Festa de Manuelzão); and 3) To analyze the theme of festivity in O Caminho do Sertão. Based on the concepts of “experience” and “narrator” (Benjamin, 1994), we look at the territory of the Rosian sertão in order to understand what underpins the experiences of traditional peoples (Kopenawa, 2015; Krenak, 2020; Santos, 2023), observing the importance of festivities, movement, and the body in the territory (Martins, 2023; Miranda, 2023). We therefore brought into this reflection the festivities, the narratives of the people who live in the territory, as well as the experience of the researcher as a walker and observer of this crossing of O Caminho do Sertão. We seek to understand the characters and the people of the sertão from within, who live in the in-between, a geography of crossroads that lies between reality and literature, between Bahia, Minas Gerais, and Goiás, between agribusiness and the cerrado, between lived and celebrated life and the crushing superstructure of capitalism. The research revealed the learning process through the experience of the researcher-walker, at the same time that it brought an understanding of the processes of struggle of the people of the Rosian sertão against the exploitation of agribusiness. The struggle and resistance of the people who live in this territory necessarily pass through festivity.