The pains of wounded motherhood in songs by Chico Buarque

Abstract

Recognizing the artistic potential of the poet-singer Chico Buarque de Holanda, we seek to identify the borrowing of his lyrical-poetic voice in representing women in their different ways of existing in the world. To do this, we will investigate the unfolding of the faces of the feminine projected in the songs “Angélica” (1981) and “O meu guri” (1981), with the aim of analyzing the lyrical self constructed from the figure of the mother in its tragic unfolding after the announcement of the death of her children. Therefore, the text aims to identify the poetic and symbolic elements inscribed in the songs that support a lyric or narrative that reveals the pain of motherhood in its encounter with the loss of a child, an unnatural and distressing process in its various layers. In the first song, the aim is to find possible relationships with the archetype of the Great Mother and other myths proposed by Erick Neumann (2021), Adélia Bezerra de Meneses (2001), Marta Robles (2006), Luiz Tatit (2014) and others. However, in the second song, the social marks of “being on the margins” are read from the theoretical framework of Adélia Bezerra de Meneses (2001) and Rinaldo Fernandes (2013).