what is Angolan literature?
The Lusophone literature of Angola stands out in its own global linguistic area, with such postcolonial authors as Pepetela, Agualusa, and - in a new generation - Ondjaki. Especially the most recent literature from Angola has a pronounced Afrocosmopolitan flavour. Yet it is important to remember that this literary universe is deeply rooted in multilingual, oral traditions. Apart from Portuguese, there are five major Bantu tongues spoken in Angola: Kimbundu, Umbundu, Kikongo, Chokwe and Ovambo, each of them cherishing a rich oral tradition. No wonder that misoso (from Kimbundu: a story, short narration) and storytelling had a strong influence on Angolan literature throughout its complex colonial-decolonial-postcolonial cycle. The African life and poverty is often treated as a matter that balances humour and dignity in the description of episodes that might otherwise be treated as images of destitution and abasement, like in that story from the volume Luuanda, by José Luandino Vieira, where a pregnant woman, moved by the urgency related to her condition, tries to acquire an egg.
The fight for independence from Portuguese rule (1961-1974) played a crucial role in shaping Angolan literature. Writers became actively involved in the political struggle, using their works to critique colonial oppression and advocate for national liberation. Some authors, like Agostinho Neto, were not only prominent literary figures but also key political leaders.
The decolonial war, passing without a rupture of continuity into a postcolonial one, offered aboundant matter for writers. Among the epic works inspired by Angolan civil conflict, the classical ones are Mayombe, by Pepetela (1980) and O signo do fogo, by Boaventura Cardoso (1992). The important turning point in the streak of Angolan conflicts were the events of 27th May, 1977, when the main decolonial movement, MPLA, attacked its own internal opposition in the aftermath of a failed coup against the government of Agostinho Neto. For a long time, both the coup and the repression was a taboo in Anngola. Finally, the silence was broken and the purge was thematized in the novels Os anões e os mendigos, by Manuel dos Santos Lima (1984) and Maio, mês de Maria, by Boaventura Cardoso (1997). On the other hand, Ruy Duarte de Carvalho choses to create an experimental literary device to show the everyday experience of the conflict. In Actas da Maianga: dizer das guerras, em Angola (2003), he brings together the heterogenous, fragmentary matter of chronicles, diaries, and various personal musings.
As the postcolonial Angolan literature was often written by white Africans, it often dealt with the complex relations between colonizers and colonized forming the same family line. Such is the case of Alexandre Semedo, the silent patriarch of Pepetela's Yaka. Also José Eduardo Agualusa treated the armed conflict as an occasion to portraying the complexity of human circumstances. On the other hand, due to the civil war that followed independence, many Angolan people and writers went into exile, contributing to a body of diaspora literature. Such works as the novels of Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, suspended between Angola and Portugal, often reflect on the experiences of displacement, loss, and the challenges of maintaining or renegotiating one's cultural identity.
Contemporary Angolan literature also addresses gender dynamics and social issues. Women writers, such as Ana Paula Tavares, have contributed significantly to the literary scene, offering perspectives on gender roles, relationships, and the impact of societal norms.
Kraków, February 2024 - Lisbon, December 2024.
The fight for independence from Portuguese rule (1961-1974) played a crucial role in shaping Angolan literature. Writers became actively involved in the political struggle, using their works to critique colonial oppression and advocate for national liberation. Some authors, like Agostinho Neto, were not only prominent literary figures but also key political leaders.
The decolonial war, passing without a rupture of continuity into a postcolonial one, offered aboundant matter for writers. Among the epic works inspired by Angolan civil conflict, the classical ones are Mayombe, by Pepetela (1980) and O signo do fogo, by Boaventura Cardoso (1992). The important turning point in the streak of Angolan conflicts were the events of 27th May, 1977, when the main decolonial movement, MPLA, attacked its own internal opposition in the aftermath of a failed coup against the government of Agostinho Neto. For a long time, both the coup and the repression was a taboo in Anngola. Finally, the silence was broken and the purge was thematized in the novels Os anões e os mendigos, by Manuel dos Santos Lima (1984) and Maio, mês de Maria, by Boaventura Cardoso (1997). On the other hand, Ruy Duarte de Carvalho choses to create an experimental literary device to show the everyday experience of the conflict. In Actas da Maianga: dizer das guerras, em Angola (2003), he brings together the heterogenous, fragmentary matter of chronicles, diaries, and various personal musings.
As the postcolonial Angolan literature was often written by white Africans, it often dealt with the complex relations between colonizers and colonized forming the same family line. Such is the case of Alexandre Semedo, the silent patriarch of Pepetela's Yaka. Also José Eduardo Agualusa treated the armed conflict as an occasion to portraying the complexity of human circumstances. On the other hand, due to the civil war that followed independence, many Angolan people and writers went into exile, contributing to a body of diaspora literature. Such works as the novels of Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, suspended between Angola and Portugal, often reflect on the experiences of displacement, loss, and the challenges of maintaining or renegotiating one's cultural identity.
Contemporary Angolan literature also addresses gender dynamics and social issues. Women writers, such as Ana Paula Tavares, have contributed significantly to the literary scene, offering perspectives on gender roles, relationships, and the impact of societal norms.
Kraków, February 2024 - Lisbon, December 2024.
I have readJosé Eduardo Agualusa, Mestre dos batuques (2024), Vidas e mortes de Abel Chivukuvuku (2023), O vendedor dos passados, O ano em que Zumbi tomou o Rio...
Ondjaki, Os da minha rua (2007) Pepetela, Yaka Ryszard Kapuściński, Jeszcze dzień życia (1975) |
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I have written |
rythms (& flavours)
How is the new book of Agualusa? Carefully written to be a global bestseller, a perfect example of World Literature. I explain. It is rather a traditional kind of narration, it means well-written and easy to follow. The way it counts its love story in a colonial setting makes me think of good old Wilbur Smith (although there is the final twitch when we discover the identity of the narrator). But of course, there is a novelty, or better say, an adaptation to its time: the romantic couple is mixed, and even I would say: contrasting, since Jan Pinto (together with a name spelled in Dutch) has the milk&blood complexion after his Boer mother. He commits a suicide after the death of his Angolan princess (who dies from tuberculosis on their way to a European sanatorium; I would only object that there is no mountains in Prussia). Overall, Lucrécia is notheless a 'modern', independent woman much akin of Smith's Flight of the Falcon heroine, Robyn.
Another sparcle of interest is the kitchen. The text is well-seasoned with muzonguê (an Angolan dish made of fish) and gindungo (a local chili sauce with ginger). But most centrally, the novel thematizes the rythms; the whole plot is built up on them. Henjengo, the master of batuques (African drums) rediscovers an ancient art of hypnotising or causing suicides through extatic rythms. This is how he manages to overcome the Portuguese soldiers, yet also, this is how he becomes a danger for the reigning soba, Mutu-ya-Kevela, who decides to get rid of him. Utterly, the Henjengo has no other choice than to kill the soba and occupy his place, which opens a space for a shift of attitude toward the Portuguese rule. Bailundo has a chance to become an independent kingdom in the interstice between the colonial empires, the Portuguese in Angola and the British on the southern tip of Africa. The project implies a diplomatic service for which Jan is called.
This story (I ignore if based on any facts or purely invented) develops between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Toward the book's end pages it develops as a family saga, sketching the way how Jan's orphaned son was educated by an early LGBT+ couple formed by his aunt and her African female friend, another batuque master (or mistress) and Bailundo spy. This is how, in the next generation, the skill is passed on to the narrator, another female drum player who uses her legacy just as a contemporary DJ and musician. And this is how the story ends, easy to swallow, attractive, and free, as I see it, of any major racial, gender, or 'civilizational' dilemmas. Bailundo survives the Angolan civil war more or less unscathed and thrives at the threshold of the global age. It's a happy end of a happy novel.
José Eduardo Agualusa, Mestre dos batuques, Lisboa: Quetzal, 2024.
Lisbon, 3th December, 2024.
Another sparcle of interest is the kitchen. The text is well-seasoned with muzonguê (an Angolan dish made of fish) and gindungo (a local chili sauce with ginger). But most centrally, the novel thematizes the rythms; the whole plot is built up on them. Henjengo, the master of batuques (African drums) rediscovers an ancient art of hypnotising or causing suicides through extatic rythms. This is how he manages to overcome the Portuguese soldiers, yet also, this is how he becomes a danger for the reigning soba, Mutu-ya-Kevela, who decides to get rid of him. Utterly, the Henjengo has no other choice than to kill the soba and occupy his place, which opens a space for a shift of attitude toward the Portuguese rule. Bailundo has a chance to become an independent kingdom in the interstice between the colonial empires, the Portuguese in Angola and the British on the southern tip of Africa. The project implies a diplomatic service for which Jan is called.
This story (I ignore if based on any facts or purely invented) develops between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Toward the book's end pages it develops as a family saga, sketching the way how Jan's orphaned son was educated by an early LGBT+ couple formed by his aunt and her African female friend, another batuque master (or mistress) and Bailundo spy. This is how, in the next generation, the skill is passed on to the narrator, another female drum player who uses her legacy just as a contemporary DJ and musician. And this is how the story ends, easy to swallow, attractive, and free, as I see it, of any major racial, gender, or 'civilizational' dilemmas. Bailundo survives the Angolan civil war more or less unscathed and thrives at the threshold of the global age. It's a happy end of a happy novel.
José Eduardo Agualusa, Mestre dos batuques, Lisboa: Quetzal, 2024.
Lisbon, 3th December, 2024.
scars of war & laughter epidemics
Viver não se escreve. Viver é pessoa, é coisa, é música dentro do ovo da fala. Quem tem ouvidos, lê o som das melodias, o compasso dos ritmos, o bater da chuva no coração das pedras. Viver não se escreve. Viver fala mais alto do que os livros. (p. 11; the aesthetic program of a ghostly narrator)
rAfrican books are funny. Even when they are sad, they are funny. Mendonça's As Metamorfoses do Elefante starts with an epidemics of laughter. Do you remember the beginning of O Ensaio sobre a Ceguiera? When a driver got blind waiting for the green light? Here a girl becomes the first case of the new desease seated on the bank of a candongueiro, i.e. collective taxi. Although the desease's main symptom is laughter, it may be interpreted as a kind of African equivalent of Saramaguian white blindness; it is a response to things that can no longer be seen. In the background, there is a story of Joana, a young bride of António Caiande kidnapped by the members of a guerrilla in 1977, whose fate is still unknown, yet her portrait still hanging on the wall. Her remembrance, the unsolved case of her death and possible transformation into a ghost is still present in the thoughts of Caiande: "Nem gosto de pensar que és cazumbi, meu amor" (p. 19).
There is a parallel topic in the book, too; that of dreams. The first of the seven dreams dreamed by Hermes Sussumuku, is about three colourful elephants drinking maruvo (palm wine). Two of them fight among themselves and get injured, the third remains seated on a throne. Possibly, their colours indicate Angolan parties, and the dream speaks of politics and power. The elephant changes its status and character in subsequent dreams, revolving among other fantastic animals, such as chameleons and flying goats with wings made of old newspapers.
Another particularity of the book is that each chapter bears the indication of a piece of Angolan music that should accompany it (I've found those songs on Youtube). Just to give an example, Chapter I is associated with the smoothly melancholic "Chofer de Praça" by Luiz Visconde, and Chapter II appears under the auspices of Jovens do Prenda's lively and rythmic "Farra da madrugada"). No need to say that those relaxing rythms contrast sharply with the content of the narration, speaking of kidnapped youths, reeducation camps, and a Makarov pistol used in a botched suicide attempt. Also, as the author admitted in an interview, one of those popular songs (the elegiac "Volódia", by Santocas, popular at the time of Angolan independence) was at the origin of the book's concept: that of showing the close resemblance of colonial and postcolonial reality that the sacrifice of war victims did not manage to resolve (a luta continua). There is no justice and no equality in Angola, just as there is no equality of power between the mighty elephant and smaller animals. Nonetheless, as the Bakongo proverb put at the beginning of the book advises, it is better for the elephant to respect his friends, for all creatures end up interconnected and interdependent on one another.
Tony Caiande, who becomes a drunkard and a drug addict, is thus not responsible for his misery. He is not a saint, but there are just too many tragedies in his life to go on with the song: the kidnapping of his girlfiend, the death of his father, the nervous breakdown of his mother, Mamã Zabele, already possessed by many penitent souls, as she hears about women prisoners forced to eat their menstrual sanitary towels (p. 93).
Finally, in the seveth and last dream of Hermes Sussumuku, a bicefalous elephant grows a third head, and this head grows a tooth on the end of the trunk: a dente de guerra, made not of ivory but of steel (p. 145). After many magical operations involving a falcon, a cow, a stone, a diamond cup, an angel, and a raffia basket suspended on a golden chain, the heads launch an attack against each other. It's time to wake up and start talking, or rather, coantar. Even if no one is to believe the tale.
The closure music for the reader to listen is Manu Dibangu's melancholic and reflexive "Besoka".
José Luís Mendonça, As Metamorfoses do Elefante. Fábula angolense, Lisboa: Guerra & Paz, 2022.
Lizbon, 13th December, 2024.
There is a parallel topic in the book, too; that of dreams. The first of the seven dreams dreamed by Hermes Sussumuku, is about three colourful elephants drinking maruvo (palm wine). Two of them fight among themselves and get injured, the third remains seated on a throne. Possibly, their colours indicate Angolan parties, and the dream speaks of politics and power. The elephant changes its status and character in subsequent dreams, revolving among other fantastic animals, such as chameleons and flying goats with wings made of old newspapers.
Another particularity of the book is that each chapter bears the indication of a piece of Angolan music that should accompany it (I've found those songs on Youtube). Just to give an example, Chapter I is associated with the smoothly melancholic "Chofer de Praça" by Luiz Visconde, and Chapter II appears under the auspices of Jovens do Prenda's lively and rythmic "Farra da madrugada"). No need to say that those relaxing rythms contrast sharply with the content of the narration, speaking of kidnapped youths, reeducation camps, and a Makarov pistol used in a botched suicide attempt. Also, as the author admitted in an interview, one of those popular songs (the elegiac "Volódia", by Santocas, popular at the time of Angolan independence) was at the origin of the book's concept: that of showing the close resemblance of colonial and postcolonial reality that the sacrifice of war victims did not manage to resolve (a luta continua). There is no justice and no equality in Angola, just as there is no equality of power between the mighty elephant and smaller animals. Nonetheless, as the Bakongo proverb put at the beginning of the book advises, it is better for the elephant to respect his friends, for all creatures end up interconnected and interdependent on one another.
Tony Caiande, who becomes a drunkard and a drug addict, is thus not responsible for his misery. He is not a saint, but there are just too many tragedies in his life to go on with the song: the kidnapping of his girlfiend, the death of his father, the nervous breakdown of his mother, Mamã Zabele, already possessed by many penitent souls, as she hears about women prisoners forced to eat their menstrual sanitary towels (p. 93).
Finally, in the seveth and last dream of Hermes Sussumuku, a bicefalous elephant grows a third head, and this head grows a tooth on the end of the trunk: a dente de guerra, made not of ivory but of steel (p. 145). After many magical operations involving a falcon, a cow, a stone, a diamond cup, an angel, and a raffia basket suspended on a golden chain, the heads launch an attack against each other. It's time to wake up and start talking, or rather, coantar. Even if no one is to believe the tale.
The closure music for the reader to listen is Manu Dibangu's melancholic and reflexive "Besoka".
José Luís Mendonça, As Metamorfoses do Elefante. Fábula angolense, Lisboa: Guerra & Paz, 2022.
Lizbon, 13th December, 2024.
memory
The writing of Ondjaki is a persistent elaboration of a prime matter: personal memory. The same may be said about various books published along more than two decades: Bom dia, camaradas (2003), Os da minha rua (2007), Avó dezanove e o segredo soviético (2008). In 2020, O livro do deslembramento, he returns to the time of "antes" ("antes eram os dias de antes", p. 211), the universe of infancy irretrievably gone with the war. What belongs to that reality in plusquamperfectum is the exploration of specific sensibility characterising the child, in this case, an Angolan child Ndalu. He is sensitive to scents and odors, as well as fonetic particularities of the words. He notes the peculiarity of the pronounciation of the wife of his father's friend Mogofores, who is Portuguese (p. 12). On another occasion, he asks the doctor if stetoscope is the same as horoscope (p. 146). An elaborate episode of a box of chocolates (p. 77-80) exploits the irretrivable excitement of the things tasted for the first time in one's life.
Overall, the characteristic feature of Ondjaki's visions of subaltern colonial childhoods is their undisturbed happiness. The child has no idea of poverty, exploitation, symbolic violence, hegemony and subalternity, etc. Cultural difference is a petty, rather funny thing, just like the moment when Ndalu is scandalised that the infant Jesus laying in his crib in the nativity scene displayed in the house of a French couple is completely naked, rather than dressed in his little shirt (p. 67). If the life of Ndalu misses something in material splendor, he is completely unaware of the fact; the occasions inviting to compare are too few and far in between. There is rice with some kind of local sauce, and lots of love. The child may count with the support of his extended family to overcome the fear of a bad dream or the first day at school. Whatever happens, is an occasion to laughter. Till the war comes, of course, and makes this entire world become a world of "before".
Ondjaki, O livro do deslembramento, Lisboa: Caminho, 2020.
Lisbon, 12th December, 2024.
Overall, the characteristic feature of Ondjaki's visions of subaltern colonial childhoods is their undisturbed happiness. The child has no idea of poverty, exploitation, symbolic violence, hegemony and subalternity, etc. Cultural difference is a petty, rather funny thing, just like the moment when Ndalu is scandalised that the infant Jesus laying in his crib in the nativity scene displayed in the house of a French couple is completely naked, rather than dressed in his little shirt (p. 67). If the life of Ndalu misses something in material splendor, he is completely unaware of the fact; the occasions inviting to compare are too few and far in between. There is rice with some kind of local sauce, and lots of love. The child may count with the support of his extended family to overcome the fear of a bad dream or the first day at school. Whatever happens, is an occasion to laughter. Till the war comes, of course, and makes this entire world become a world of "before".
Ondjaki, O livro do deslembramento, Lisboa: Caminho, 2020.
Lisbon, 12th December, 2024.
the telephone is a woman
I don't know how to interpret the title of Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida's novel, As telefones. Normally, in Portuguese, the noun "telefone" is masculine. Yet the main idea of the book is quite simple: the whole fragmentary text is made of transcontinental telephone conversations between a mother and a daughter. Filomena, the mother, lives in Angola, while her daughter, Solange, lives in Portugal. The topic is so typical for the globalized world, and the story accompanies them through successive technical changes that appear to make the communication easier: from traditional telephone to smartphone, to skype. Certainly, there is a tragic story behind: Filomena had sent her daughter to live with her aunt due to a hunger crisis: "Depois veio fome, eh, fome mesmo de verdade, tive de te mandar para a casa da tua tia Benedita, a minha irma tinha uma casa bem posta, comida na mesa" (p. 29). In vain she tries to keep in mind the features of her little face. The memory of the child, and of the joys of maternity, gradually fade. What remains is the voice on the telephone.
Mother and daughter are reunited many years later, in another reality, that already brings quite different material and technical opportunities but remains shaped by such deeply hidden traumas of separation. The reality of both Portugal and Angola is shaped by such intimate dramas, rather than any typical postcolonial stories. It is the story of mothers and daughters that comes to the fore. Now, the empire no longer writes back, it calls home. And it is home that they try to recover, against their mutual disillusion. The fantasy of separation made them imagine each other's home as greater, cozier, more beautiful than it was in reality: "Nem a casa onde a filha vivia era como a mae a sonhara, nem a sua era o lugar bonito que sonhara vir a ter quando era menina" (p. 72). Homes and maternities are woven from dreams and longing, and moments imprinted in memory, like that happy instant of bathing the child on a varanda that haunts the mother with its lost sweetness.
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, As telefones, Lisboa: Relógio de Água, 2020.
Lisbon, 12th December, 2024.
Mother and daughter are reunited many years later, in another reality, that already brings quite different material and technical opportunities but remains shaped by such deeply hidden traumas of separation. The reality of both Portugal and Angola is shaped by such intimate dramas, rather than any typical postcolonial stories. It is the story of mothers and daughters that comes to the fore. Now, the empire no longer writes back, it calls home. And it is home that they try to recover, against their mutual disillusion. The fantasy of separation made them imagine each other's home as greater, cozier, more beautiful than it was in reality: "Nem a casa onde a filha vivia era como a mae a sonhara, nem a sua era o lugar bonito que sonhara vir a ter quando era menina" (p. 72). Homes and maternities are woven from dreams and longing, and moments imprinted in memory, like that happy instant of bathing the child on a varanda that haunts the mother with its lost sweetness.
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, As telefones, Lisboa: Relógio de Água, 2020.
Lisbon, 12th December, 2024.
assimilado
As the postcolonial era comes to its natural end, there is one last figure that must appear in the limelight: the assimilado. Not the decolonial fighter (o combatente), not a proud African. No, those destinies have already been sufficiently explored. The remaining one is petty and inglorious.
Cartola de Sousa, the protagonist of Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida's novel Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso, is the looser of Angolan independence. He is typically an assimilado: a male nurse accompanying (and imitating the gestures) of a Portuguese, Dr. Barbosa da Cunha. Arguably, it is a bad luck that his world crumbles after the independence. Or do his private tribulations have a symbolic meaning? It is not quite a political issue that his wife Glória falls ill and is immobilised in her bed, while his son is born with a defect in his heel. Yet it is a typical assimilado response to name him Aquiles for this reason. As if, like this, he might become something more than "um preto coxo". He is already an adolescent when his father decides to take him to Portugal for a sirurgical intervention.
Nonetheless, the imaginings and hopes of an assimilado have little to do with reality. The operation in a Portuguese hospital fails to cure his son. Both of them fall into the spiral of debts, and end up forced to work on building sites while living in Paraíso (Paradise) that in their case is just a slum district of the city destined to people like them. They do have their small consolations: the friendship of poor Galician Pepe or the short visit of Justina (their respective daughter and sister). But this little life also disintegrates: their poor house burns, Justina departs, Pepe dies.
The post-imperial Portugal is the locus of loss, not only for the Portuguese, but also for the others, their subalterns, that continue to believe in the excellence of their former metropolis. Cartola de Sousa, who wanted -- and in his time actually managed -- to acquire a higher social stance through aculturation, loses his professional status. Despite his heroic name, there is no glorious future for Aquiles. The assimilado never got rid of his mental empire, and lives in its ruins.
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso, Lisboa: Companhia das Letras, 2019.
Lisbon, 4th December, 2024.
Cartola de Sousa, the protagonist of Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida's novel Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso, is the looser of Angolan independence. He is typically an assimilado: a male nurse accompanying (and imitating the gestures) of a Portuguese, Dr. Barbosa da Cunha. Arguably, it is a bad luck that his world crumbles after the independence. Or do his private tribulations have a symbolic meaning? It is not quite a political issue that his wife Glória falls ill and is immobilised in her bed, while his son is born with a defect in his heel. Yet it is a typical assimilado response to name him Aquiles for this reason. As if, like this, he might become something more than "um preto coxo". He is already an adolescent when his father decides to take him to Portugal for a sirurgical intervention.
Nonetheless, the imaginings and hopes of an assimilado have little to do with reality. The operation in a Portuguese hospital fails to cure his son. Both of them fall into the spiral of debts, and end up forced to work on building sites while living in Paraíso (Paradise) that in their case is just a slum district of the city destined to people like them. They do have their small consolations: the friendship of poor Galician Pepe or the short visit of Justina (their respective daughter and sister). But this little life also disintegrates: their poor house burns, Justina departs, Pepe dies.
The post-imperial Portugal is the locus of loss, not only for the Portuguese, but also for the others, their subalterns, that continue to believe in the excellence of their former metropolis. Cartola de Sousa, who wanted -- and in his time actually managed -- to acquire a higher social stance through aculturation, loses his professional status. Despite his heroic name, there is no glorious future for Aquiles. The assimilado never got rid of his mental empire, and lives in its ruins.
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso, Lisboa: Companhia das Letras, 2019.
Lisbon, 4th December, 2024.
o paraíso e outros infernos
Certainly I know a couple of things about Angolan literature; it makes part of my Lusitanist profession. I've written a couple of texts on Ondjaki and Agualusa. And now, staying in Lisbon for the pandemic, I try to put this knowledge up-to-date, hopefully having some new texts in view. This is why I bought this book, O Paraíso e Outros Infernos, although I immediately felt a bit sorry; I thought it would be a novel. It is a sort of diary, quite close to the genre I cultivate myself in my online journal. A bit more developed, time consuming; of course, if he could hope to publish it in volume later on, it was a good investment. While I write mainly to keep the track of my own intellectual and psychological progress.
Agualusa's notes cover largely the year 2015, in which some innocent people were imprisoned, allegedly for preparing a coup d'état in Angola. The writer speaks for them, gives voice for their hunger strike. But he also speaks of Kalaf Epalanga, and of that moment in which Angolan new rich bough properties in the ex-metropolis. Getting rich and having democracy are two distinct things that does not necessarily come together.
Some of those things he says come in the direction of my own transcolonial thinking and what I call the new horizontal diagram of relationships, instead of the old, hierarchical diagram internalised by the colonial and post-colonial subalterns. He speaks of "horizontal Lusophony", which is exactly what I want to study.
Lisbon, 9.05.2020.
Agualusa's notes cover largely the year 2015, in which some innocent people were imprisoned, allegedly for preparing a coup d'état in Angola. The writer speaks for them, gives voice for their hunger strike. But he also speaks of Kalaf Epalanga, and of that moment in which Angolan new rich bough properties in the ex-metropolis. Getting rich and having democracy are two distinct things that does not necessarily come together.
Some of those things he says come in the direction of my own transcolonial thinking and what I call the new horizontal diagram of relationships, instead of the old, hierarchical diagram internalised by the colonial and post-colonial subalterns. He speaks of "horizontal Lusophony", which is exactly what I want to study.
Lisbon, 9.05.2020.
