O afinador de silêncios: memória e esquecimento em "Antes de nascer o mundo", de Mia Couto

Abstract

The objective of the research is to observe the memory and forgetting issues in the Mia Couto´s novel Jesusalém, translated in Brazil as Antes de Nascer o Mundo, taking as main direction the speech of one of his narrators: Mwanito. The historical context in which the work of Mia Couto is located is riddled post-colonization marks and their non less perverse effects, in some cases, allowing draw the profile of the narrator-character, representative of "modern epic hero" and at the same time bringing the same resentment of the old exiled. The trauma caused by the ban has not become less harmful. Exiled only with men, tapering silences to clear the memory, the character tries to gather testimonies to remember the mother and reinvent its history. The analysis was theoretically based on in multidisciplinary studies: MárcioSeligmann-Silva, Jacques Le Goff, Harald Weinrich, Julia Kristeva, Maria José Queiroz, Zuleide Duarte, Beatriz Sarlo and Maurice Halbwachs, among others.