De colonialismos e memórias sitiadas: história, antropofagia e tecnologia bélica nas guerras guianenses

Abstract

This study consists in the exercise of documentation, translation and interpretation of the war narratives of four peoples who inhabit the Lower Oiapoque River. Through ethnographic, mnemonic and narrative methods, the text discusses the Colonization that furrows the History of the invasion of a territory of the peripheral Caribbean located in the Oiapoque River region. We assume that the possibilities for the production of Ethnic History, narrated in its own terms, are straightly associated to the knowledge and interpretation of the original memory. However, this is so only if we consider that the production of an Afro and Indigenous history presents itself, in many ways, as a history of impossibilities, and given the theoretical and methodological difficulties of the Social Sciences to deal with a past characterized by the absence of written records. In academic production, the exercise of reinterpretation and/or correction of collective memory based upon historiographical production is common, nevertheless, data obtained from this research give rise to an inverted question: can afro and indigenous memories help correct and/or complement the historiographical canons? On the pursuit for answering such a question, this study seeks to identify and translate recurring aspects in the memories of ethnically differentiated people marked by the advent of the Colony, where categories such as war, exercise of alterity, Inter-ethnic alliance and violation and subsequent recomposition of territorial rights seem to be part of a same dynamics. The hermeneutics of these four peoples´ war narratives converges in terms of their agreeing that the colonial invasion is one of the founding landmarks of Afro and indigenous historicity. In this sense, the interpretation highlights that the colonization carried out by different European peoples and agencies in the Guyana region - colonialisms that prevail in different ways in the present - constitutes an entangling thread that allows for not only recomposing, but also intertwining recent and past Memories and Histories of those peoples and narrators. Finally, such hermeneutics reveals how each ethnic group understands and represents hierarchies, alliances and dissonances inscribed in the neocolonial world.