Fidelidade telúrica de Silva Freire : poética em fluxo decolonial

Abstract

In this Doctoral dissertation we analyse the literary work of the poet Benedito Sant'Ana da Silva Freire, as poet from Mato Grosso, Brazil. We base our study on the context of Latin American literature and culture and the assumptions of postcoloniality /decoloniality. From this perspective, we read the poet as a critic of culture, observing the effects of a possible colonial wound and the experience of colonial difference, experienced in his process of self-constitution. His work reveals the bond established with Cuiabá´s space-territory-city (enunciator of speech and locus of enunciation) and the dynamics between life and work. We consider that the thought and poetics of Silva Freire are among the contributions of authors who break with the logic of coloniality, opening up other avenues which , poetically, problematize the colonized condition of Cuiaba and Latin America. Our argument is based on the hypothesis that, in the path of prose and poetic experimentation, Silva Freirean work is constituted in a worldview that is configured in a critical-cultural system insofar as it narrates, producing a dialogue with a neo-baroque proposal, the cuiabana reality and raises questions to think Brazil and Latin America from Cuiabá and the borders of Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul. Through a poetics of research, a qualitative and interdisciplinary approach, our study identifies indications of the presuppositions of decoloniality and neo-baroque elements, by analyzing Silva Freire´s cultural critique of the modernization process experienced by the city of Cuiabá from 1970 to 1990. We can also perceive in Silva Freire´s work the challenge of the occupation of the post-divided territory of the State of Mato Grosso and the process of modernization of Cuiabá under the advance of the capitalist frontier. In this sense, in his work the poet and writer elaborates a critique of culture that proposes a kind of pact between the traditional and the modern, a kind of response to the coloniality patterns of cultural and social power that is constituted as a fractured utterance, a liminal thought. There is a dramatic line that permeates the relationship among the poet, the city and the commitment to write in this context. We argue that this results in a "telluric fidelity" as a preponderant factor of the vector of its poetic creation understood as "defense" of the "cuiabano civilization" process - "struggle for cuiabania" and "roots of the race" as a possible decolonial strategy, contribution to rethinking the limits of the world / colonial / modern system through the invention of a path of neo-baroque characteristics, claiming an autonomous cultural position of the country and Latin America, liberating itself from colonialist imposition and contributing to cultural decolonization in its literature.