“The dead do not want back”

senses and uses of the past written in the work of Airton Maranhão

Abstract

Os mortos não querem volta (1999), was the third book of the writer and lawyer Airton Maranhão (1950-2015), but all his work presents this desire to stir the past, the dead and the dead. We will not take in this article Maranhão as an object of study, but rather we will pursue its writing as a constructor of memories to whom and to which it is not properly remembered, constituting itself in a writing formulating of senses for the past. The objective is to analyze the conception of the past, its utilities and its problems in the writing of Airton Maranhão. It seeks to understand how the author built new clerical "tombs" for the dead who do not want to return, but who must have their absences inscribed in the time of the living.