Son of a mother: a feminist reading of “Meu tio o Iauaretê”

Abstract

This article aims at a short analysis of ‘Meu tio o Iauaretê’, João Guimarães Rosa’s novel published for the first time in 1961. It seeks to construct possible meanings to the relation that Rosa’s text imposes through its form – a dialogue – and to the relation as a device that generates the narrator’s individuality. Moreover, I will argue that ‘Meu tio o Iauaretê’ performs the narrator’s choice for the maternal indigenous ancestry, that is, he becomes a jaguar as a way of belonging to his mother’s, and not his father’s, lineage. His being is beyond the hybridism between human being and animal, constructed by a narrative that claims for the specific materiality of a body transforming itself into a jaguar. In order to accomplish this, I will dialogue with contemporary feminist philosophers and with concepts from Anthropology. I will attempt, thus, to create a political reading of ‘Meu tio o Iauaretê’.