Scripture and Memory in Jayme Griz’s Work

Abstract

This article aims to offer a view of the folklorist Jayme de Barros Griz’ work, whose performance as a writer, poet and essayist is unknown to criticism in contemporary times. By the way, is relevant to rescue his literary and historical production, in which the black way of life on the Zona da Mata Sul of Pernambuco and the decline of sugar mills emerging as the main thematic motives. By dialoguing with Gilberto Freyre, for the sociological of his theorizations, and with Luis da Camara Cascudo, based on the apprehension of folklore as a science to understand the societies, his intellectual career records advances and retreats in relation to the aesthetic and cultural point of view defended by these authors. While his poetics is divided between what was done by the Generation of 1870 and the modernists, and the essays recover, under a memorialistic prism, the presence of the black people and the decline of the sugar civilization, with the fantastic tales, Jayme Griz reaches originality and aesthetic projection by focusing on legends, beliefs and the supernatural through agrarian myths and mysticism of african culture.