MEMORIAL NARRATIVES: : THE POLITICAL DUTY OF TELLING A STORY

Isak Dinesen, quoted by Hannah Arendt, asserts that all misfortunes can be borne when a story is told about them. This assertion will serve as the pole star of this article which, based on the conceptual framework of Arendt, Walter Benjamin and Beatriz Sarlo, will seek to explain the relationship between narrative and the construction of collective memory and how this relationship brings at its core a political duty: to keep alive the memory of dark times that elapsed during states of exception, such as totalitarianism and civil-military dictatorships that devastated some Latin American countries. I will use the work of Primo Levi, If this is a man and Assis Brasil, Os que bebem como os cães, to exemplify the potency that exists within the literary genre, the focus of my reflections: the narrative. Thus, I will try to explain how the memorial narratives collaborate in the redemocratization process, by exposing the atrocious actions committed against Democratic States of Law. In this argumentative fringe, we ask ourselves: what is the locus that the narrative occupies within the Brazilian public space in the post-military civil dictatorship period? Were the narratives able to contribute to the realization of the imperative: “so that it does not forget, so that it never happens again”?