Invented memory and the feminine in the fiction of Ronaldo Correia de Brito

between exclusion and return

Abstract

This work aims to discuss, in Ronaldo Correia de Brito's trilogy, whose setting is the northeastern backlands, the attempt at exclusion and the return of the feminine, via invented memory.A common thread unites the trilogy, composed of the short story Faca (2003); and two novels, Galileia (2008) and Rio Sangue (2024). A common thread unites the trilogy, a crime of femicide told and retold in different ways. This event, which occurred in the author's own family, at the time of the founding of the Inhamuns backlands, in Ceará, was heard by him when he was still a child, haunted him and spread as local mythology, through oral culture. Reworked in literary terms, this narrative unfolds in Brito's writing in a recurring and transformed manner. The crime of feminicide, as it is told, points to a masculine jouissance that prevails in the backlands, and which denounces the attempt to foreclose the feminine. But, in addition, it points to the insistence of this crime in the repetition of the narrative, which, because it is reworked, never seems to be resolved. We propose reading this in light of the notion of the feminine and the real in psychoanalysis, a real that returns resisting symbolization, marking the narrative with the weight of a trauma that never ceases to be inscribed. Throughout the trilogy, Brito strains the boundaries between history, memory and fiction, producing a literature traversed by echoes of a past that insists on remaining.