Slavery and insanity: a reading of the short story “A escrava” [The slave], by Maria Firmina dos Reis

Abstract

This paper refers to a study about the short story A escrava [The slave], from the Brazilian writer Maria Firmina dos Reis, published in the Revista Maranhense (1887:1 nº3), which addresses the issue of racial discrimination in our country, still in the era of slavery. There are three categories of voices of discourse in the short story: the voice of the enslavers, in which the figure of the lord appears; the voice of the abolitionists, in which the lady appears, the initial narrator; and the voice of the enslaved, who is Joana, the slave. There is, in the story, the lack of agreement between the religious discourse of equality/solidarity and the voices of discourse of the power relation between masters and enslaved people. The aim of this paper is to analyze the metaphors of dehumanization: the black figure who speaks of Africa, who finds himself free when he looks at the past lived in the African lands. The approach is inserted in the theoretical-methodological framework of Frantz Fanon's alienation metaphor, in which insanity is revealed as a consequence of the colonial process.