“Muito mais humano será pensar no sofrimento do pobre”: as faces da subalternidade no romance “A Barragem”, de Ignez Mariz (1937).

Abstract

The emergency fronts of the Federal Inspectorate of Works Against Droughts (Inspetoria Federal de Obras Contra as Secas) were part of the salvationalist policies of the government and represented one of the main routes taken by peasants, during periods of drought in the Brazilian Northeast, in the first decades of the 20th century. In the novel A Barragem (1937), the writer from Paraíba, Maria Ignez Marques Mariz (1905-1952), fictionalizes the construction process of the São Gonçalo dam, located in a district of the city of Sousa, in Paraíba. This work and its author remain little known and are seldom mentioned in research concerning the so-called Romance de 1930 and the service fronts of the IFOCS, which we understand to be the result of the historical erasure of women writers over time (Telles, 2004). Considering the need to address this erasure and recover the literary contributions of Ignez Mariz, this study aimed to investigate the possibilities and limitations offered by the author’s novel to think about the poor and subaltern individuals living in the São Gonçalo settlement and the forms of violence that permeated their experiences in this space. To theoretically support this discussion, we relied on some central concepts, such as canon (Reis, 1992), feminization of writing (Richard, 2002), subaltern (Spivak, 1985), hunger (Ribeiro Júnior, 2021), and modernization (Castilho, 2010). We engaged with Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Júnior's (2007) proposals to examine our primary source from the perspective of History and Literature, and we based our analysis on Tânia Regina de Luca's (2008) reflections to assess newspaper articles from the 1930s, which included critiques of Ignez Mariz and her novel A Barragem (1937).