The past never leaves us: the struggle for land, historical continuity, and narrative voices in Torto Arado

Abstract

This paper analyzes Itamar Vieira Junior’s Torto Arado (2019) from the perspective of the sociology of literature, examining how the novel articulates the struggle for land, the historical continuity of expropriation, and the construction of quilombola belonging through its formal choices. The analysis focuses on the narrators Bibiana, Belonísia, and Santa Rita Pescadeira, considering how their first-person perspectives organize different ways of perceiving, remembering, and interpreting social experience in Água Negra. Methodologically, the study develops a textual and interpretive reading of selected passages from the novel in dialogue with the sociology of literature, rural studies, and Brazilian social thought. It argues that land constitutes a historical and symbolic axis of the narrative, shaped by the tension between legal property and lived belonging. The alternation of voices connects body, silence, and ancestry to the community’s collective memory, while the statement “we are quilombolas” reorganizes experiences of labor, permanence, and expropriation through a political language of self-identification and recognition. The novel thus articulates narrative form and social experience in the construction of a collective identity tied to territory.