Questão 22 - UESB 1º dia 2024

O texto seguinte servirá de base para responder à questão.

 

Crooked Plow

 

Crooked Plow, the Brazilian novelist Itamar Vieira Junior's debut, opens with a shocking scene. A pair of young sisters, Bibiana and Belonísia, break their grandmother's rule against going in her room and, while snooping, find a knife. Out of the sort of mysteriously rebellious impulse to which children often yield, both girls put it in their mouths. One is essentially unharmed; one cuts her tongue so badly she never speaks again. Vieira waits until the novel's opening section ends to reveal which one is which, though it hardly matters: They come of age, as Johnny Lorenz writes in his gorgeous translation, "sharing the same tongue."

Crooked Plow is, centrally, about sharing and cooperation. Bibiana and Belonísia grow up in a Black sharecropping village, daughters of a midwife and a witch doctor who is the "spiritual father of the whole community." Both girls learn young that it is no bad thing to support or rely on others, and yet womanhood complicates that lesson. Bibiana falls in love with a union organizer who galvanizes the community, even as landowners' resistance to his work puts his family in danger. Meanwhile, Belonísia, chasing her curiosity about intimacy, goes to live with a loutish drunk who, at best, ignores her. Sex with him is "like cooking or sweeping the floor, just another chore," and yet Belonísia does not stop pursuing either pleasure or independence. Vieira brings both sisters to electric life, but Belonísia's narration is especially immediate and moving.

It would be a privilege to share a tongue with her.

MEYER, Lily. Books: Crooked Plow, On the Edge of Reason, The Forest Brims Over. NPR, Book Reviews, 19 ago. 2023.

Disponível em: . Acesso em: 19 nov. 2023. (Adaptado).

Considering the reference text and the novel "Crooked Plow" by Itamar Vieira Junior, what event involving Belonísia is central to her character development?