El testimonio de una mujer canudense en la Caderneta de Campo de Euclides da Cunha

Abstract

The Caderneta de Campo by Euclides da Cunha is one of the pre-texts preserved within a vast archive of chronicles, letters and diaries from which the author elaborated and published his masterpiece Os Sertões in 1902. I will approach a scene of this document in whose lines Cunha presents the interrogation of an anonymous Canudense woman in the middle of a warlike conflict. I will seek to read the scope and implications of certain spaces of the “popular” in the writing of the national writer who, with an ethnographic stamp, registers and puts on stage the voice of others. I will show that the declarations of the woman are far from emotional or “fanatical” manifestations and imply not only a form of resistance; but also, that these enunciations make it possible to visualize a different form, typical of the Canudens, of problematizing the experience that is present in the text of Cunha.