Inside A cabeça do Santo There Is No Drought or Sugarcane Field: Countercolonial Representations and Belonging in Socorro Acioli’s Novel

Abstract

In A cabeça do santo, by Socorro Acioli, the narrative path is traced by the migration of the character Samuel to Candeia, his father's hometown. The character's geographic and emotional paths characterize a northeastern and backlands’ setting. This work aims to verify whether or not the narrative reinforces common stereotypes about the backlands, as well as identifying strategies that make up the verified narrative style and possibilities of literary reception. The research is based on sociological literary criticism (Candido, 2006), using references about the backlands geopolitical category, such as Trindade Lima (1998) and Albuquerque Júnior (2012), about migrations, memories (Pollak, 1992), and the constitution of subjectivities and counter-hegemonic cultures of belonging and resistance, such as hooks (2022), Bispo dos Santos (2023) and Krenak (2020). Northeasterners and backlands’ people, affected by regional inequalities intersecting with oppressions of different orders, face erasure and misrepresentations of their culture nationally. The novel opposes the stereotypes conceived by the national intelligentsia (Trindade Lima, 1998) based on countercolonial representations of the backlands’ setting and characters, including collective resistance. Therefore, it strengthens a culture of belonging within the narrative, which can reverberate in the aesthetic experiences of readers, distancing itself from a reductionist literary regionalism.