Destinos do sofrimento: testemunho sobre morte, luto e violência

Abstract

In this research, we seek to understand the mourning experiences of women who have had sons, brothers, and nephews murdered in contexts of state violence and armed violence, investigating how such losses permeate their daily lives and which strategies of care and resistance they have developed. We emphasize the systematic, selective, and persistent ways through which violence operates, with greater incidence on poor and Black youth, shaping what we call persecutions of death, directed at specific social groups. The genocide of Black youth, intertwined with state violence and armed violence, emerges as one of the gravest human rights violations in Brazil, evidencing the presence of a racist and deadly policy that naturalizes the extermination of certain subjects. This is a qualitative study conducted with women living in territories marked by armed lethality, in which we used narrative interviews and field notes as methodological tools. The testimonies presented here revealed the following central elements: the ways in which violence invades everyday life; the radical inequality in the distribution of dangers; the emergence of modes of subjectivation marked by suffering; resistance and care as strategies spanning from the intimate to the political sphere; and the elaboration of mourning as a singular, political, and collective expression. We also observed that these women, even when subjected to continuous processes of vulnerability, produce strategies of care and protection aimed at preserving their families, cultivating a meticulous attention to everyday details as a way of sustaining the continuity of life in the face of constant threats. By reclaiming the memory of their sons, nephews, and brothers, they produce narratives that challenge official versions and assert themselves as witnesses of an ongoing policy of violence and death in the country, while also positioning themselves as political subjects who demand recognition, justice, and dignity.