Maritime crossings, dialogues of ancient pain

a proposal for reading the short story “My sea (faith)”, by Itamar Vieira Júnior

Abstract

This article attempts a reading gesture of the short story “Meu mar (fé)”, present in the book Doramar ou a Odisseia (2021), by the Bahian writer Itamar Vieira Júnior, one of the exponents of contemporary Brazilian fiction, author of the award-winning novel Torto arado (2019). Eighth of the twelve stories that make up the book, the story under analysis is orbited by questions that are still very latent in the contemporary geopolitical, historical and social agenda: illegal immigration, broken identities, ethnic-social difference supplanted in the Brazilian reality, enunciation of the subalternized subject reporting /denouncing ways of existing on the margins, diasporic experience and violence. Skilled in descriptive constructions in his texts, the author reveals images of pain, anguish, hope and resistance, through the testimony-report of a narrator who, like her husband, are unnamed in the narrative. The tale seems to evoke elements present in other works by the Bahian literary confraternity, such as: Navio negreiro (1869), by Castro Alves; the sea in Jorge Amado, above all in Mar Morto (1936) and Luanda-Beira-Bahia (1971), by Adonias Filho. In this profusion of possibilities for dialogue, our reading here seeks to highlight the traces of intertextualities present in the production of Itamar Vieira Júnior, and reflect on the force of updating that Brazilian literature has.