Memory and history of women during the dictatorship in Brazil

O corpo interminável, de Cláudia Lage

Abstract

This text discusses O corpo interminável, a novel in contemporary Brazilian literature that highlights the role of women in the context of resistance against the military dictatorship in Brazil, taking it as a representative pro memory of one of the many forms of mediation with the past of oppression and violence. It thus discusses the narrative process, the characters and the relationships that emerge in the search for answers to facts and information that can only be retrieved in a lacunar, imprecise way, often impossible to confirm, but also how the present is continually being asked to take responsibility, to take a stand, like the writing of the novel itself, as a narrative representative of both the need not to forget and the possibility of offering a powerful metaphor, an endless body, for the transgenerational transfer of the traumatic memory that currently inhabits a field of clashes and disputes in Brazil. Through a metaliterary (self)reflection that combines history, reality, imagination and highlights women’s bodies, Lage (2019) emphasizes the collective nature of the inheritance to be remembered and transmitted to new generations.