Tropical sol da liberdade: between the sea and almond trees, rescues and ruptures through narrative

As a living manifestation following the stream of history, literature has included, mainly after the sixties, attempts of recognition of social groups neglected so far. Constituted by the geographic, ethnic, and social (negroes, homossexuals, women ) periphery, this large human mass used literature as a stage for narrating their histories. In that disruptive context, novels were used to disclose the dissonant and disturbed reality of the XX century. Tropical sol da liberdade is the novel by Ana Maria Machado that aligns itself to that praxis of inquiring and unveiling historical truths . It shows us, from the female, deportee, and ex-centric point of view, facts from the 1964 Brazilian military dictatorship. Based on studies by the Canadian researcher Linda Hutcheon we intend to figure the place and the strength of those peripheral characters in the narrative developed by Machado. Aware that reality is continuously defying its representation, we have investigated into the vast universe embracing voluntary and involuntary departures, in the search for a literary representation of exile with emphasis on otherness issues. Given the theme's complexity, some background from psychology, sociology, cultural studies, was used for helping us to understand how Ana Maria Machado, as an excluded Latin American woman, has turned her experience into a discursive practice. While encompassing elements of a chaotic context, the analyzed novel does not evolve as a linear timeline following protagonist's consciousness time. It evolves otherwise, as time perception from a woman, tormented at same time, by the need to narrate things she saw and lived, and being bounded by the impossibility of doing that. Written in a delicate and exciting way, Tropical sol da liberdade doesn‟t speak about prison or torture. The novel narrates simple people's everyday life with their anguish and traumas. Through a metafictional narrative the traditional distance writer- reader is dissolved while we are kindly invited to participate in the creative act. That corroborates Umberto Eco's concept that a literary piece only completes with the participation of readers, in the same sense that victims of oppressive regimes reporting facts would only have therapeutic effect, as stated by Freud, when there is a concerned listener. From that starting point, we also investigate the importance of direct or indirect witnesses in reconstructing lives interrupted by dictatorships. What we've done through this study, can be considered a short walk through fictional woods, literary theories and spaces where the inexhaustible plurality resides. We have tried randomly to set an order by choosing thoughts, but never sticking on the illusory intention of exhausting reasons that incite us to keep investigating.

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