Exu's Poetics

The most joyful of the tragic

Abstract

In this article I make a philosophical reflection on Exu, one of the most complex gods of Nagô mythology to displace this demonizing idea forged by whiteness and decolonize the idea that we know that the only true mythology emerged in Greece. It was a whole process of erasing popular narratives and knowledge that were subalternized by the hegemonic culture, of white supremacy and euro centered to the point of inferiorizing, bestializing and erasing the memory of the black people, the result of a whole denial of Afro-Brazilian thought as not legitimate, thus pointing to a certain epidermal, ontological and epistemological inferiorization. For this movement, I have in hand an interpretation of Exu as the birth of Afro-Brazilian tragedy itself, to displace tragedy from this Greek place that the West privileged as the north, or legitimate place of knowledge production to reflect on theater as crossroads of creation, emerging there a tragic poetics that is affirmed under the sign not of pain, of the negative, but of joy as an event, as a revolutionary force and affirmation of life. Exu, tragic sign par excellence, will be drawn here as a decolonial turn that tensions, in turn, the white, Greek myth, hegemonically accepted by the West.