“I have the letter, but i don't have the number”: the fight for human rights in Brazil by “Torto arado”

Abstract

This article analyzes the difficulties felt by historically oppressed communities to be recognized in terms of rights and dignity, especially marked by the colonial oppression that persists in Brazil. From the critical literary jus analysis of the novel Torto arado, written by Itamar Vieira Junior, which narrates the oppression experienced and the struggle for dignified living conditions of a quilombola community in Chapada Diamantina - Bahia, it is argued that, in order to face the forms of oppression, it is essential for the oppressed groups to build an intersubjectivity that articulates them as a community and that equips them with letters, numbers and emancipatory praxis. As a support to articulate the literary imaginary to the concrete conditions of the brasis in Brazil, we use the provocations of the decolonial thought as substrate for a critical proposition of the human rights. Finally, the work links, both from literature and from law, reality and fiction, desire and facticity, the antagonisms of a right that oppresses, of an enslaved freedom, but also of a struggle, of life and death , for conditions of dignity and for rights that liberate.