A estrangeiridade da infancia em Por que a criança cozinha na polenta, de Aglaja Veteranyi

Abstract

It is in an unstable scenario, where the circus arena and the circus lights look more like a nightmare, that the narrative of Por que a criança cozinha na polenta (2004), written by Romanian artist and poet Aglaja Veteranyi, is set. In it, a family of circus performers travels through Central Europe, like nomads, fleeing the dictatorial regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu in Romania. The narrator, a little girl, gives voice to her childhood fears and fantasies, while discovering that growing up is also about dealing with what is hostile, decadent, and disturbing around her. The circus, where the protagonist lives, is not a place of dazzle, mockery, and fun – an image to which we have become accustomed, through representations so strongly perpetuated in our imagination – but as a chaotic space of permanent threat and horror, in the limits of which the child creates survival strategies, rebuilding, through imagination, an individual refuge. In this work, we seek to provoke readings in order to understand how the circus and nomadic experience activate childhood in Por que a criança cozinha na polenta. Using the notions of “deviation”, “margin” and “frontiers”, present in both thematic and formal aspects of the poetics of Aglaja Veteranyi, the dissertation will follow the routes of the Deleuzian cartographic model, in the exercise of a becoming-childhood – which is effective to the extent that it connects the particularities and potentialities of being a child to the condition of an artist at the margins and foreigner.