Três tempos da noite: aproximações entre a narrativa ancestral indígena, seu reconto e o livro

Abstract

As much as any other society, indigenous peoples also elaborated their existential questions about the origin of the world and the universe, where we came from and where we are going, using myths, legends and tales, from which literature germinated. Oral by nature, many of these narratives were lost over time, due to the extinction of a large part of the indigenous populations, marginalized by Western society in terms of their customs and culture. The original peoples had their voices suffocated for five centuries, until Brazilian legislation, slowly, constitutionally recognized their rights, although there are still those who question them. The creation of public policies for the protection and appreciation of ancestral knowledge as the intangible heritage that they are, came only later, notably with the enactment of Law no 11.645/2008, which made mandatory the study of Afro-Brazilian history and indigenous people's culture in all primary and secondary education establishments in the country, whether public or private. Faced with the enormous scarcity of works that seriously addressed indigenous cultures, the national publishing companies turned to the production of books by indigenous authors, dedicated to clarifying the cultural aspects of different ethnicities, as well as retelling their fables, which made it possible its records and, therefore, its perpetuation, in addition to providing its dissemination to a greater number of people. But why are myths important? Are they literature? What differentiates them from retellings? And what about children's books? Do indigenous children have access to myths? And what about books? How do they understand them? How are they understood? These questions permeated the paths this dissertation took to bring the myth, its retelling and the children's book closer together, in order to identify the poetic nature that exists in each of these ways of interpreting the world and translating it aesthetically. The theme's relevance lies in the recognition of indigenous fables as art, as well as creations coming from cultures considered canon. When studying indigenous children's literature, we turn our gaze to the sources of our culture and realize how hybrid art is and how much it can bring us closer to other cultures, as readers and human beings. To this end, we selected as corpus the myth of the advent of the night told by the shaman Yanomami Parahiteri, organized and translated from the xamatari by Anne Ballester Soares in the book O surgimento da noite (Editora Hedra, 2017), the retelling As serpentes que roubaram a noite, extracted from the book As serpentes que roubaram a noite: e outros mitos (Editora Peirópolis, 2001), by Daniel Munduruku, and the book A boca da noite, written by Cristino Wapichana and illustrated by Graça Lima (2016). Guiding our reflections, we were mainly with Philippe Ariès - História Social da Criança e da Família (2022), Marisa Lajolo and Regina Zilberman - Literatura infantil brasileira: história e histórias (2022), Graça Grauna - Contrapontos da Literatura Indígena Contemporânea (2013), and Janice Cristine Thiél - Pele silenciosa, pele sonora – A literatura indígena em destaque (2012)