“Translat[ing] with words the eye of the hurricane”
the literary craft and the recollection of the past in Tropical Sol da Liberdade
Keywords:
Ana Maria Machado, fictional narrative, metanarrative, military dictatorship, historical peripheryAbstract
In Tropical Sol da Liberdade (1988), translated as Freedom Sun in the Tropics (2021), Ana Maria Machado reconstructs painful and impacting moments during the Military Dictatorship in Brazil. Such reconstruction happens through the point of view of Lena and Amália, characters who are positioned at the periphery of events. In this article, based on critical discussions by Fulford (1999), Seligmann-Silva (2003; 2008), Figueiredo (2017), Edugyan (2021; 2022), among others, I argue that Machado’s novel, through its use of metanarrative, reflects about literature’s singularity as a space for resistance, showing that art expresses a kind of truth that goes beyond historical facts, as it contextualizes and complements them. I also argue that, in Machado’s novel, remembering the past is a political act, which significantly resonates with the present moment, also marked by the return to antidemocratic practices and by the silencing of divergent voices.
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