Racism Features in the Tale “Pixaim”, by Cristiane Sobral

Abstract

This article analyzes the story “Pixaim”, extracted from the collection Espelhos, miradouros, dialéticas da percepção (2011), by Cristiane Sobral. In this story, there is a conflict between the black protagonist and her white mother. In this relationship, the act of the mother’s subjection of her daughter’s hair to several straightening processes, trying to tame the rebellion of the curly strands, metaphorizes the struggle of white women to accept the phenotype of black children. In this analysis, we tried to understand the narrative strategies used by the author to stage the violence of racism that is manifested in the context of an interracial family. We aimed at an in-depth investigation of the subject approached in the narrative of Sobral, resorting to studies of different fields of knowledge, especially, Psychology and Psychoanalysis.