Narration as an act of resistance in “The painter of birds”, by Lídia Jorge

Abstract

We present a novel reading of “The Painter of Birds” by Lídia Jorge, in which it is highlighted the role of the narrative as an act of resistance to forgetfulness and family silence. It is a narrative that mobilizes memories to consolidate an identity from the reframing of the past. For that, the identity is approached as an eminently discursive process attached to the memory, as it finds in the past one of its main constitutive sources. The means to appease the conflicts of the past are writing, narrating, because it is the anguish of knowing her identity as a daughter and the impossibility of bearing it that drives the protagonist narrator to revolve the past. Narrating a clandestine past, from which she was banned trough the familiar discourse, it is forged as an act of resistance.