THE ART BEHIND THE STAGE

CAMINHOS DOMÉSTICOS DO CANTADOR JOÃO SIQUEIRA DE AMORIM E A MEMÓRIA DE DONA RAIMUNDA SIQUEIRA DE AMORIM

Abstract

This article is the result of the work of a larger research, produced during my participation in scientific initiation scholarships on popular cultures and northeastern singing, which resulted in my course conclusion work in History, at the State University of Ceará, in 2016. Namely, the monograph is entitled “The Life Paths of João Siqueira de Amorim: construction of the singer-narrator of the imagined singing (1947-1967)”. What will be presented here is a fragment that led us to important reflections on the singer's life trajectory, revealed in the "hot" of doing by doing. From, above all, the desire to investigate the unsaid by the singer Siqueira de Amorim in his journalistic-literary public writings. Mapping the “domestic field” - opportunely omitted from his chronicles published in periodicals of the time - and listening to those who lived with and contributed to the construction of Siqueira's professional trajectory, raised the investigation to a greater complexity of analysis and guaranteed new contours to what was already cataloged as a primary source. There was a lack of living memory, speech aged by time, the confirmation of the selectivity of what was experienced. It was essential, therefore, to appropriate the interview made with Mrs Raimunda Mariano de Amorim, wife of the singer João Siqueira de Amorim, to understand the details and sensibilities of the historicity of our object. The path towards the interpretive possibilities of her choices and subjectivities became clearer when we assumed the need to document the widow's oral and mnemonic record. Here, we use the contributions suggested by Oral History as a tool that allowed us to expand the methodological and theoretical contribution from which we analyzed the life trajectory of this “song narrator” who did not make his way alone. On the contrary, he counted on the discreet, albeit strongly engaged, participation of his then wife to sustain the harshness found behind the scenes of João Siqueira's artistic work, on which there was no spotlight.