Reports of subjectivity

Subaltern characters in Milton Hatoum’s work

Abstract

The reports about the Amazon suffered, in socio-economic and historical processes, a subordinate association with regard to national and international discourses. Milton Hatoum's literature emerges as a resistant voice in this context, reconstructing the discussion of the Brazilian Amazon exotic image. His characters, from privileged positions, use memory to orchestrate perspectives that are fragmented in time and space. The storytellers of the first works, the innominated storyteller of Relato de um Oriente, Nael from Dois Irmãos, Lavo from Cinzas do Norte, and Arminto from Órfãos do Eldorado, living on the main house (and society) margins, claim, through writing, orality and stylization – modalities provided by prose. In these works, the report, a mark of Hatounian writing, establishes the voices reconstruction for the subjectivities consolidation. We will analyze, promptly, the subaltern characters Anastácia Socorro, from Relato de um certo Oriente, and Domingas, from Dois irmãos, who live, since their birth, in a social submission context - subalterned figures by brazilian society and forced to remove themselves from their otherness. To understand this process, in addition to Gramsci and Spivak, we turn to Walter Benjamin to map how these voices become autonomous and consciously inhabit the culture history.