“Tudo é um jogo” different contours of the relationship between violence and football in two writers from the Brazilian Amazon

Abstract

One of the most prominent characteristics of literature produced in recent decades is the sharing relationship that fiction establishes with historiographical materials, whether to aggregate and give new meaning to historical data, or to highlight precariousness or violence as social phenomena, cut out from certain realities, aspects that seem quite suitable for a reflection – always current – ​​on football as a speculative mediator. In this sense, the present study analyzes the production of two writers who bring different social scenarios from the Brazilian Amazon to their literary narratives, combined with capturing the football universe. These writers are Clei Souza, with the short story “O Jogo”, which is part of the collection O suicidado e outras histórias (2021) and Ademir Braz, with the short story “Finalzinho de carreira”, which is in the collection A bela dos moinhos azuis (2015). Be it in the meticulous treatment that Braz gives to the precariousness that plagues the Amazonian way of life; whether in the unbearable experiences, glued to the (violently) interrupted life, in the case of the excerpts proposed by Souza; In both stories, football communicates or is communicated through diatribes of some form of violence, easily identified in integration with social scenarios and, therefore, positioned in a residual and spectral key in Brazilian culture and society.