O lazer na/da encruzilhada e as narrativas do tornar-se negra

Abstract

Exu - I ask permission to say that he is the significant structural principle of black culture, the lord of the crossroads, a semantic operator of African otherness in the cultural insertion of the Americas. It is he who narrates the discourses of black culture and invites us to learn about the life story of ancestral memory. Identity is not only assumed through phenotypical aspects. Skin color, hair, the shape of the mouth, nose and eyes make up the visible (spoken) aesthetic, which marks the differences from the hegemonic reference, which is white.The feeling of racial belonging linked to black culture (unspoken) lies in life history and reveals, in fact, who we are. And in this process, family, street life, religion, work and leisure are some of the important experiences of becoming black. Therefore, black women who perform art engaged with black culture re-purpose, re-appropriate and re-actualize the exusiac language, which represents the ancestral memories inscribed in the body and voice, which can recover the history of black identity. With this in mind, I ask: How do the life stories, training processes and leisure activities of black women relate to their black artistic performances? What are the narratives, spoken and unspoken, about the black race and how do they relate to black artistic performances and leisure? The general aim of this thesis is to describe and analyze the life stories of the black women in the Coletivo Negras Autoras, as well as their formative processes, their professional experiences and performances with leisure and the narratives they say and don't say about the black race. To do this, I carried out a qualitative study, using the epistemological path of life history, with a narrative and (auto)biographical research approach, using a method that combines oral narratives (narrative interviews), images (photographs) and writings (musical compositions). The reflections in this thesis point to some clues and suggestions for epistemological crossings, indicating that leisure makes new experiences possible, so that the ideal of the ego, whose mainstays were raised in the family context, is reinforced, achieving meanings and benefits as an ideal model for black people. Leisure as a performance for the future of black women is circumscribed in black culture as a place of inscription of knowledge written on the body and in the voice, which is repeated in the past, present and future as recreation, transmission and revision of ancestry. In this way, leisure is written as a memory in the life stories of black women, making it possible to expand awareness of becoming black. The power of leisure “at” and “from” the crossroads lies in the intersection, the unfinishedness, the ambivalence, the erasure of exusiac language, which is anchored in the ancestral memories that inhabit the black body and contradict the single, linear history imposed by the coloniality of power and gender. The black body, in turn, is the archive of a collectivity, presents a cultural repertoire and carries with it the dynamic memory of the continuum between Africa and the Americas, which translates into a form of cultural resistance. This “body-archive” brings cultural expressions inspired by the way of life of the quilombos, which find in leisure “at” and “from” the crossroads the lines of escape that spin movements of exusiac language and that seek the recovery of the lost black identity in Brazilian black history yet to be made.