Fragments of Identity, Destructuring of the Self: Violence and Trauma in Corpo Desfeito

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss how trauma interferes with the relationship between memory and the construction of identity, both individual and collective, based on Jarid Arraes’s work Corpo desfeito (2022). The novel tells the story of Amanda, a girl who lives in Juazeiro do Norte with her mother, Fabiane, and her maternal grandparents, Jorge and Marlene. After Fabiane’s fatal accident, Amanda is left in the full care of her grandmother, who invents a cult around her deceased daughter, imposing various rules on her granddaughter, marked by religious fanaticism and various situations of violence. With regard to collective identity, we investigate how the culture of Juazeiro do Norte not only shapes the space but also establishes a religious ethic that influences the behavior of the characters as members of a community. As for individual identity, based on Amanda’s experience, we analyze how trauma is a factor that interferes with identity construction, inescapable from the social and family culture that surrounds the subject, causing ruptures in memory and episodes of dissociation in the narrator. As theoretical support, we used Stuart Hall (2006), Jan Assmann (2016), Aleida Assmann (2011), Maurice Halbwachs (1990), and Sigmund Freud (1996a, 2011).