“Our generation had little time, it started at the end”

Alfredo Sirkis' autobiographical writing after the 1979 amnesty and the memories of the lost guerrilla.

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the autobiographical production of Alfredo Sirkis based on the book, its original edition and reissues, Os Carbonários. The central problem of this analysis, using Chartier's work with books as historical documents as its primary methodology, is the relationship between Sirkis' autobiographical writing and Brazil's re-democratization and the mobilization of memory about the 1964 civil-military dictatorship. To do this, we use Philippe Lejeune's concept of the “autobiographical pact” and its relationship with the production of writing about the past that deals with the idea of representing the real. The main question, then, is to historicize the place of autobiography as a representation of the past in Brazilian society, and how this “pact” suffers tensions, ruptures and continuities from the processes of amnesty and redemocratization within Sirkis' work.