childhood's waters: child and memory in poetry of jáder de carvalho

Abstract

Jáder de Carvalho has the child as a constant motif in his poetry. By means of the relation with the land of origin (the hinterland), the author's poetic production, activated by memory resources, tracks the paths of childhood mediated by experience and an educational process. Between the family abandonment and the precocious understanding of the world, we visualize a boy who interacts with himself and the world by a singularized perspective of childhood. Thus, the concepts of childhood and education are essential to understand the lyricism of the author, because there’s a strong connotation in the forms of learning by which the child passes. In contrast to educational narratives (bildungsroman) that follows a sequenced route to present the characters’ life line, we realize that line in a fragmented and dispersed way in poetry. The child representation in poems by Jáder de Carvalho presents itself poetically trough the word without concern for the temporal logicality. A state of childhood surpasses the chronology because adult and child are in the same plane of discoveries and concerns, indicating an educational process that remains in the poet in his old age. Thus, this study aims to examine the images of childhood in Jáder de Carvalho’s poetry and its relation to elements that are present in his childhood, like hinterland, family, loneliness and time. From considerations about the categories presented, we investigate how the hinterland, original landscape of author's experiences, acts in a relational way with the child who appears in the poems and how childhood and old age make a continuous flow of relations, pointing to a mobile and active dialogue between ages. With contributions from theoretical currents of Philosophy of Education (Montaigne, Walter Benjamin, Lyotard, Agamben), Theory of Literature (Mikhail Bakhtin) and Psychoanalysis (Ferenczi), we analyze how childhood and its journeys participate in Jáder de Carvalho’s poetics.