Metade cara, metade máscara: collective memory and indigenous identity in the work of Eliane Potiguara

Abstract

This text invests in a discussion about the existing relations between collective memory and indigenous identity in Metade Cara, Metade Máscara (2004), by contemporary indigenous writer Eliane Potiguara. Metade Cara, Metade Máscara is an autobiographical work, of a hybrid genre, interspersing legends, fiction, testimonies, depositions and poems. Through the displacement narrative and diasporic process of the writer, we highlight how individual/collective memories and identities are incorporated and acted out poetically. The work shows how the poems operate in favor of preserving the collective memory and identity of indigenous people. In the writer's poetics, the performed memories and identities support others knowledges about indigenous people, which differ from the versions disseminated by Eurocentric epistemologies. Finally, the text conducts a theoretical-critical study that dialogues with the following authors: Halbwachs (1990); Hall (2006); Munduruku (2018), among others.