Vestígios de uma voz: testemunho e ficção em A costa dos murmúrios, de Lídia Jorge

Abstract

This research aims to investigate the "testimonial tenor" of the novel A costa dos murmúrios (1988), by the Portuguese writer Lídia Jorge. The research focuses on the relationship between experiences of historical catastrophe and its manifestation in literary language. For this it was necessary a brief recovery of the theory about the relation between literature and history to highlight the configuration of a historic event in a literary text. The study has the testimony notion as theoretical contribution, including: Beatriz Sarlo and Seligmann-Silva. In A costa dos murmúrios the political transience of the narrative voice reconfigures its historical experience in order to show a part of Colonial War that concerns the extermination of black Mozambican civilians by Portuguese soldiers during the colonial policy of Estado Novo dictatorship. Testimony in A costa dos murmúrios concerns the own discussion about setting an aesthetic representation that assumes its relation with reality by understanding that passage to the literary form undertakes an ambiguous recovery process whose tenor of truth is in the form how reality is understood, developed and communicated. The study contributes to the comprehension that fictional way may include a form of testimony that can help in processing traumatic historical events.