In the South-South context, forced migration triggers pain and countless transformations for those who experience it. It is a movement that, in addition to involving losses of economic and symbolic capital, imposes on the migrant scenarios of violence on their bodies and identities, conditioning their agency to the logic of the dominant system. It is also important to note that courses in Portuguese as a host language (in Portuguese 'Português como Língua de Acolhimento' - PLAc), aimed at the public composed of crisis migrants, are concerned with the teaching-learning of the majority language of the host country. Therefore, the contemplation of the linguistic and cultural baggage and the experiences of these students, as well as the reflection on how these individuals also transform the new place of residence, are disregarded from the classroom. However, for Bakhtin (2015), language is a social activity that constitutes individuals, in the same way that it is registered by them. In other words, upon arriving in a particular country, migrants modify their own linguistic and cultural repertoire as much as they influence and are influenced by local languages and practices.
Therefore, our contribution starts from the Bakhtinian perspective with the objective of bringing the teaching-learning of PLAc closer to artistic methods. More specifically, we are interested in reflecting on how autobiographical literary writing allowed five migrants (who have already completed their journey in learning Portuguese in PLAc courses in Brazil) to perceive their identity (re)configuration from the acquisition of Portuguese and, also, awakening to how they also influence the majority language of Brazil and its social practices. For this purpose, we will present as object of our reflection the e-book Narrativas: Exílios e Encontros, an autobiographical, plurilingual, multi-genre and multimodal book, written by those five crisis migrants mentioned above, former students of Portuguese as a host language courses at the Federal University of Paraná, in Brazil.
Thus, we will analyze extracts from the book aiming to show how the authors realize their relationship with Brazilian language and culture and how they see their own identities reconstructed. Our methodology is based on the ideas of critical interculturality (WALSH, 2009), in which the search for social transformations comes through action. For that we will bring autobiographical literary writing as an alternative for the creation of a second space (CAMPANO, 2007), in which the writer has the possibility to walk a path of becoming aware of himself, understanding his own questions regarding the lived experiences, as well as influencing and being influenced by local languages and practices.
References
Bakhtin, M. (2015). Teoria do Romance I. A estilística. São Paulo: Editora 34.
Campano. G. (2007). Immigrant students and literacy: reading, writing and remembering. Nova York: Teachers College Press.
Kalaja, P. & Melo-Pfeifer, S. (2019). Visualising multilingual lives. More than words. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Walsh, C. (2009). Interculturalidade Crítica e Pedagogia Decolonial: in-surgir, re-existir e re-viver. In: CANDAU, V. M. et al. Educação Intercultural na América Latina: entre concepções, tensões e propostas. Rio de Janeiro: 7 Letras.
