"Um eterno reproduzir dos mesmos fatos": trauma, violência política e o movimento dos trabalhadores rurais sem terra

Abstract

This research stems from the experience of working with a settlement of the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) in the Agreste region of the state of Alagoas, and takes as its guiding principle the issue of political violence in rural areas and its relationship with the psychoanalytic notion of trauma. We collected interviews with MST militants, excerpts from field diaries, and notes from visits to the settlement. The analysis follows the method of reading-writing, where the established text undergoes various revisions, aiming to extract the remainder that marks the work of the psychoanalyst with the unconscious. Other fields of knowledge are invoked, aiming to outline a background to understand how the unconscious is forged in the Global South. The research begins with the contextualization of the MST in Brazil from the notion of internal colonialism and highlights the colonial legacy updated in the political, economic, and subjective realms. Next, political violence is discussed through psychoanalysis, bringing the colonial past and unconscious narratives updated in the rural space. In the barbarism expressed through evictions, threats, and murders, a scenario similar to war begins to emerge, and trauma emerges as a fundamental concept, with the notion of traumatic war neurosis and its relationship with its sociopolitical context. In a decolonial ellipse, psychoanalysis touches on the singularities found in the research field and tensions the trauma theory based on the model of what occurred in the post-war period of the 1920s. Finally, we collected various expressions of trauma in the context of the land struggle: through the lens of discontinuous temporality; repetition in dream-nightmares; expressions specific to the MST; colonial remnants; and the clinical opening of its treatment. The marks of geopolitics emerge as an ethical-political horizon for the psychoanalysis practiced in the Global South. Amidst the marks of political violence, the emergence of the traumatic underscores the importance of speech and the need to do something with what remains, fostering solutions to mitigate symptoms. Thus, the Movement's struggle can continue in the search for a future that does not resemble the past so much.