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

Abstract

This work analyzes the fictional tale Mamí had reason, by João Meirelles Filho (2017), as a literary discourse that reframed the liberal, republican and capitalist thought that historically prevails in the conduct of the destinies of the Brazilian Amazon. The first hypothesis raised for investigation is that this short narrative puts 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 tale by a flood that submerges the city of Belém and part of the eastern lands of the plain. Leitmotiv of the 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 that we have raised, provides Mamí with a different regime of writing, that of catastrophe, which is discursively articulated with the allegorization of the reality of contemporary Amazonia.