COLLECTIVE AUTHORSHIP: THE AUTHOR’S SURVIVAL IN ORALITY AND THE CONTRIBUTION TO WRITING

Resumen

In The Death of the Author, from 1967, Roland Barthes perceived the erasure of the author in writing. Walter Benjamin saw no more life for the art of narration after the novel genre. And Michel Foucault questioned Who is the Author, in 1969. Following the directions pointed out by these authors, we look at a singular figure: the griot. A griot, in the African tradition, is a polymath who, to a certain extent, is recognizable in quilombola leaders in Brazil. We are interested in Dona Nilce Helena. Based on fragments of an interview she gave to television, we will analyze the survival of authorship in the discourse of one of the quilombola leaders of the Conceição de Aleluia community in Campos dos Goytacazes/RJ and what kind of author she might be. Dona Nilce communicates orally, a tradition she preserves and which comes from Africa, a continent not taken into account by the scholars mentioned above. Barthes, Benjamin, and Foucault serve to draw a parallel between themselves and this reflection on authorship and African oral tradition. The starting point was the question: how can this form of ancestral communication help maintain authorship in writing? In the concept of ancestry, the discourse of the ancestors remains in the living; the author is collective. Discourse analysis found this collectivity in the audiovisual record of the griot, generating indications for searching for these signs also in written works. According to Krenak (2019), a philosopher attentive to the preparation of the subject in community’s alternative to the status quo, these communities generate collective persons. Through ancestry, the author can survive the writing process (elements seen in the "writing-experiences" of Conceição Evaristo, for example), contrasting with the method most used in contemporary times: information. This situation allows the receiver (reader or listener) to go beyond the reception of information and reach the level of knowledge about the topic addressed by the author.