Cartas para minha mãe, de Teresa Cárdenas: racismo e resistência na voz de uma literata negra

Abstract

The aim of this work is to analyze racism from the perspective of the main character —a child, black and orphaned— from the novel Cartas para minha mãe, by contemporary Cuban writer Teresa Cárdenas. The narrative develops around a character who did not have what we call childhood today, and who thus enters adolescence. However, our focus will be on the black condition of the narrator, who at all times suffers from the most diverse types of prejudices, in addition to having to deal with a difficult phase: the transition from childhood to puberty. In this way, this work intends to discuss the issues involving childhood surrounded by prejudices of the main character of Cárdenas' novel, while we will observe the reactions and perceptions of the child in face of racism. For the analysis of the novel, the narrator's childhood, the historical contextualization of the colonization process in Latin America and the psychosocial process of the feeling of inferiority of blacks and of superiority of white, we will use the texts of the following scholars: Cabo Aseguinolaza (2001); Ariès (1981); Fanon (2008); Gates (2014) and Souza (2015), among other theoretical texts. In the end, we realized that in the novel by Teresa Cárdenas the weight of racism leads the narrator to seek help in the letters she writes to her dead mother. The racism present in the text builds as a sample of what several people go through every day of their lives.