With Antigone: The Struggle for Mourning in Two Contemporary Brazilian Narratives

Abstract

The fertile myth of Antigone has been evoked in contemporary Brazilian literary space, both in creation and criticism, especially within the literary series that explores the fictional representation of the damage resulting from the violence of the civil-military dictatorship (1964- 1985). The trauma of the politically disappeared, tied to the prohibition of funeral rites and the resulting deprivation of grief and mourning for their families, has driven 21st-century Brazilian fiction writers and scholars to revisit the gesture of Ismene’s sister in Sophocles’ tragedy, who challenges the authority of Thebes in defense of the inalienable right to bury a loved one. Portugal celebrates Antigone’s defiance as a symbol of the “50 years of April.” In Brazil, however, the sense of justice that Antigone embodies takes on a darker resonance as we mark 60 years since our April, when a coup d’état shattered the democratic order, leaving deep wounds in the nation’s social fabric that have yet to heal. I propose a critical reading of the political meaning in the novels K., relato de uma busca (2011) by Bernardo Kucinski and Antes do passado (2012) by Liniane Haag Brum, wherein both writers, echoing Antigone’s act of love, create a symbolic grave through their words. This allows them to bid an honorable farewell to their respective disappeared loved ones—Kucinski’s sister and Brum’s uncle. Based on the concept of “restitutive poetics” (Vecchi, 2014), I analyze how the narratives weave fictional fractures and gaps within historical discourse. This enables literature, through its unique resources, to piece together fragments of the social memory of crimes from a past that remains repressed in the national imagination, and which therefore returns as a ghost to haunt political life in the present.