Fólio (May 2023)
AFROFUTURISM AND BLACK UTOPIA IN BRAZILIAN (POST)MODERNITY
Abstract
Disenchanting realities of black life in Brazil often compel writers such as Aline França, Ana Paula Maia, and Elisa Lucinda, among others, to opt for radical magical realism as a coping strategy. By embracing Afrofuturism and utopia, the daily existential experiences of oppression, repression, violence, brutality, and social death are subverted through the creative imagination. Despite these traumatic conditions of dehumanization, the three writers find consolatory outlets in fantasy and science fiction as in A Mulher de Aleduma [Woman of Aleduma] (1981) by Aline França; bestification and apocalyptical allusions of the trilogy in Saga of Brutes (2016), De Gados e Homens [On Cattles and Men] (2013), Enterre Seus Mortos [Bury Your Dead] (2018), and Assim na Terra como Embaixo da Terra [Same on Earth as it is Under the Earth] (2020) by Ana Paula Maia; and compassion within nihilism as in Vozes Guardadas [Voices Kept] (2016) and Fernando Pessoa: o Cavaleiro de Nada [Fernando Pessoa: The Horseman of Nothingness] (2015) by Elisa Lucinda. Anchored on the creative power of innovative cultural mythmaking, each writer creates protagonists that are partly human, partly bestial, and partly divine in order to evoke their anti-heroic qualities as essential characteristics for their transcendence. In addition, the heroic protagonists of these writers are endowed with supernatural powers that lend credence to their ritual provenance from the labyrinth of myth and history in order to teach eternal morals. Through the prism of the mythic transformation of reality, as embodied in França’s protagonist, Aleduma, the imagined planet of Ignum sings as if to recuperate Africa’s religious values and glories: “The waters of Oxalá / Will wash my head / The children of Africa / Are coming to look for me. / I am going, I am going to Africa to dance / To my father Oxalá.” Beyond this celebratory yet romantic ancestral connection with Africa, the transitory nature of life as tragically and apocalyptically presented by the narrator in one of Maia’s narratives, especially Carvão Animal [Animal Char], where soil and water are contaminated by the toxic liquid draining from human bodies in decomposition, appeals to our sense of human indignation in the face of horror: “Some decades or centuries from now there will be more bodies beneath the earth than on it. We’ll be stepping on our ancestors, neighbors, relatives, and enemies, as we step on dry grass: without even noticing it.” Finally, when absurdity seems to have lost all of its potential to shock, Lucinda finds compelling inspiration not in the Afro-Brazilian condition, but in the classic personality of multifaceted Fernando Pessoa for whom according to Mia Couto, audacity can compel us to “write like someone who is feverish, and who comes close to the fire in order to engulf himself with its warmth.” Through the cogent lenses of these cursory snippets of existential realities, I argue that the three Afro-Brazilian women writers under analysis in this chapter, strike a common chord with estranging absurdities of the human condition, while their works seek to transcend that estranging and alienating condition through creative escapism.
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