Homens anfíbios: os remeiros do São Francisco na literatura regionalista

Abstract

This paper aims to reveal the images of the underworld of the remeiros (rowers) in brazilian regionalist literature. I don\'t mean underworld in the sense of a backward world, a less developed world, or of a world below other worlds. What is meant by underworld is that within the whole river world there was a world of its own around the work in the ferries, the private world of the remeiro of San Francisco. Underworld, in this perspective, has its own settings and habits that are different from other existing underworlds, defined by the task of paddling downstream and upstream. Underworld is a world to be unveiled. However the term underworld, used on this perspective, worked as a hypothesis, whose validity was collected and analyzed in the conclusion. To do this, I focused my study object in the figure of the remeiro analyzed through the interview with John Felix, a former river\'s remeiro , and how the figure of the remeiro is represented by regionalist literature. This allowed me to analyze, from the narrative contrasts and from the different types of barranqueiros (riverside dwellers), two ways of narrating and experiencing the river: the remeiro that remembers and recounts his life, and the literate, the intellectual, the man of letters who fictionalizes in the margins of his text the social imaginary of the beiradeiro (who lives in the margins of the San Francisco river) world, where the boat passed by. Both discourses are equally important to the understanding of the social and cultural formation of the San Francisco region.