A descoberta do frio

testimony and collective trauma of racism in Oswaldo de Camargo’s narrative

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the relationship between testimony and the collective trauma of racism in the soap opera A Descobrimento do Frio (2011 [1979]), by Oswaldo de Camargo, seeking to understand to what extent the violence of the European colonial enterprise, marked by the forced diaspora , mass enslavement and the invisibilization of the Black are represented as limiting events in a literature in which the Black emerges not as the other, the one spoken of, but in the position of the subject of his own history. Based on concepts from post-colonial studies and an interweaving between the notion of testimony and history against the grain, I seek to present how Black writing, of which Oswaldo de Camargo is one of the most influential authors, operates a work of brushing up its own literature against the grain, contesting the so-called official truths propagated by the so-called winners and denouncing the perverse and violent logic of colonization. Through the remembrance of these traumatic events, Camargo's writing puts his finger on the wound and represents the task of (re)building the collective memory of Blacks and Blacks in Brazil, pointing out, in an incisive way, the uncomfortable truth of racism.