The endless childhood: memories and voices of the cultural traditions of the backlands of Bahia

Abstract

This article aims to discuss how memories transmitted by ancestral knowledge of popular culture are constituted as spaces for the formation/reflection of subjects in their individual and collective experiences. Based on chronicles written by Eumara Maciel (2018), present in the book O sem-fim da infância, the aim is to reflect on how self-writing takes up elements of the land of the backlands, favoring the perpetuation of cultures inherent to this space-time. There is also the hypothesis that, despite being written literary productions, these chronicles bring characteristic elements of oral tradition literature, constituting hybrid texts full of subjectivities and representative of the memory of popular culture. The methodology used is qualitative, considering the importance of the relationships between subjects and the world around them and the social representations constructed from this relationship. The development of the proposed reflections relies on theoretical support from discussions on memory, self-writing, identity, popular culture, orality, and voice. Thus, it is possible to conclude by way of conclusion that the knowledge produced by popular culture plays a very important role in the constitution of the subjective identities of the subjects involved in it, making them at the same time authors and co-authors of this historically reproduced knowledge that per-forms the experience itself, taking up various voices from the margins that together construct a collective identity.