Testimony of childhood experience in exile and its representation in the children's tale Currupaco Papaco, by Ana Maria Machado

Abstract

In this article, we analyze the testimony of the childhood experience in the exile of children of persecuted and disappeared politicians of the Military Dictatorship of 1964, in Brazil, and the form with this experience was represented in the literary field. For this, we selected two objects of study: 1) the testimonial narrative, titled The exile of my father was our farewell, by the survivor Suely Coqueiro (2014); 2) fictional narrative Currupaco Papaco, by writer Ana Maria Machado (1982). We used as a theoretical reference the studies about exile and exile narratives (Said, 2003; Vidal, 2004; Montañes, 2006) and the concept of state of exception (Agamben, 2004), survival (Pelbart, 2016) and Utopia (Szachi, 1972). In this research, we examine the possibility of discussing “narrative of exile”, from the understanding of exile as a utopian place, space of freedom and resistance, but also as a survival device.