Gender representation: a comparative analysis of the Paiter Suruí narrative “As primeiras mulheres” and Mia Couto’s short story “Lenda de Namarói”

Abstract

Cosmogonic narratives of oral tradition function as mechanisms for transmitting a people’s cultural values across generations. Both Amerindian and African narratives share this close relationship with orality, which enables them to be examined comparatively. Within this framework, this article proposes a comparative analysis of the thematic intertextuality that runs through two narratives from geographically distant yet culturally analogous continents: the Americas, with “As primeiras mulheres”, a collectively authored oral narrative of the Brazilian Indigenous people Paiter Suruí, collected and translated by Betty Mindlin in Vozes da origem; and Africa, with the short story “Lenda de Namorói” by Mia Couto, published in Estórias abensonhadas, a narrative inspired by the oral tradition of northern Mozambican ethnic groups. The analysis aims to examine how femininity and masculinity are symbolically constructed in these two cosmogonic narratives and how they operate as determining elements in gender relations and the appropriation of social space. Drawing on contributions from gender studies, psychoanalysis, and myth theory to reflect on the symbolic dimensions of cosmogonic narratives, the analysis shows that the Amerindian narrative organizes the emergence of the feminine in a way that reaffirms a sexual hierarchy structuring the social order, while the Mozambican short story reinscribes oral tradition through symbolic displacements that challenge the phallocentric model. The comparative reading reveals how narratives with similar themes can perform distinct ideological functions, highlighting the critical potential of the literary rewriting of traditional cosmogonies embedded in the collective imagination.