Writing, Orality and Poetic-praxis in Crooked Plow

Abstract

This paper aims to explore one of the first and most decisive scenes in Itamar Vieira Junior’s novel Crooked Plow (2019): the cutting and mutilation of the tongues of Bibiana and Belonísia, respectively. Our goal is to unravel, through the symbolic power of the scene and its unfolding, as well as the position of these characters, the importance of orality, which throughout the history of brazilian literature has been subjugated as a folkloric and inferior element of our formation as a country. However, the narrative’s malleability and symbolic and practical potential, beyond its mnemonic powers of orality, confronts the role of writing as a device historically considered superior, showing that it can be appropriated and subverted. Our objective is to show how quilombola oral memory infiltrates the form of the novel to exude ancestral voices and cosmogonies, contemplating concepts of justice that also serve as social “glue” in moments of heightened danger, such as the one we have continued to experience over the last ten years in Brazil. Although Crooked Plow presents a robust form of written literature, the actions that plot the practice of jarê, as well as the final outcomes, call for concepts that go beyond merely expectations.