emergent literatures and ethnohistories
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Historically speaking, Portugal was the first early-modern maritime empire to explore and colonize Africa. Soon did it suffer fierce competition of other European powers, so that by the time of Berlin Conference few territories remained in Portuguese possession. The Portuguese colonial empire was nonetheless one of the last to go; the decolonization of the African territories happened in 1975, months after the Carnation Revolution in the metropolis. Lusophone literatures of Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde followed the dynamics of the postcolonial wave of writing. Smaller countries, such as the archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe, as well as Guinea Bissau have gathered relatively modest literary patrimonies. Nonetheless, they also appeared on the map of global literature.
I made my first steps in Lusophone African studies at the University of Lisbon in 1993-1996. I was a student of Alberto Carvalho, an old-style Portuguese professor who might smoke his cachimbo right in the classroom, teaching the premises of African culture as he saw it. On the other hand, I had classes with Inocência Mata, a São Tomé female scholar who was to become a conspicuous intellectual figure later on, in the late 1990s, with the advent of the Lusophony as an official political project. I also had contact with other people who shaped the early landscape of the so-called "literaturas de expressão portuguesa" in Lisbon. At the early stage of my career, I worked mainly with the Portuguese metropolitan writing, but later on, I progressively developed more consistent research interest in the Portuguese-speaking African literatures and their impact on the literary life of the former colonial metropolis. I was especially intrested in new ways of conceptualizing their recent development, disrupting the established boundaries of the postcolonial theory. At the time when I was working from Warsaw, it was not always logistically easy. One of the significant steps was my participation in the research project “Silent Intelligentsia. A study of civilizational oppression” financed by the Polish National Science Centre (NCN) in 2006-2009; I contributed to it giving a comparative outlook on the formation of new intellectual elites in different parts of Africa after the breakdown of the Portuguese colonial empire. More recently, in 2016/2017, I've profited from my 10-month-long stay in Portugal as a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation's fellow to develop my Africanist competence, studying in particular the literature of Guinea-Bissau. In December 2016 I travelled to this country for a short term research. Although I've published on the most resounding Lusophone names, such as Pepetela, Mia Couto, and Ondjaki, my Africanist passion lies with the emergent, little known, inconspicuous writing in Guinea Bissau. I ask questions concerning the conditions of its survival and its place in the general landscape of global literary studies. Overall, my African research and reflection has been intertwined with other topics, forming a variety of comparativist approaches striving to bring forth West African exemplification into the discussion concerning universal topics, such as the interplay of local and global languages or the impact of minor creators beyond their local cultures. This is why I've usually presented it in a World Literature contexts rather than typically Africanist one, for instance at the 21st Congress of International Comparative Literature Association in Vienna (in June 2016), where I contributed with a paper on the intertextual relationship of the Mozambican writer Honwana and the Angolan writer Ondjaki. I also wrote on the emergence of the written culture and the figure of transcolonial intellectual. I've also included the results of my research on African topics in my Polish monographs, such as Imperium i nostalgia (2015) and Humanistyka, która nadchodzi (2018) as they served me to put in the lime-light the development of the hegemonic conception of the Portuguese culture and to consolidate my theoretical idiom. The comparative approaches I've developed serve me to build a transcolonial vision, not only mimicking the frontiers of the former Portuguese empire, but also in the regional context of West Africa. I'm also interested in building parallels and comparisons between the cultural dynamics in the sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb. Overall, I've been busy quite a lot with African materials during my recent research stays in Lisbon (2022) and beyond. Currently, I'm working on the colonial interplay of various cultural factors, such as Islamicate literacy in West Africa. I've intensely studied a forgotten colonial author, Fausto Duarte and the representation of the Fula in his novels. I've also studied the colonial scholarship trying to establish an outlook of Fulani ethnography and ethnohistory in the final decades of the Portuguese colonial presence in Guinea Bissau. I'm also working on transcolonial Afrotopia, collaborating with a project promoted at the University of Bayreuth in Germany. In October 2023, I spoke about my West African findings at the meeting of the Commission on Modern Languages of the Polish Academy of Learning (PAU). In November 2023, I presented the literature of Guinea-Bissau in a guest lecture at the University of Warsaw and participate in the 'Afrotopian' workshop at the University of Bayreuth. 
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ongoing research
The quest for Afrotopia in the literature of Guinea-Bissau
Possibly, there is a necessary connection between striving for an Afrotopia and the emergence of a literary system. The literature of Guinea-Bissau is the youngest among the Lusophone African literatures. Guinean novels that appeared in the late 1990s (Mistida by Abdulai Silá, Kikia Matcho by Filinto de Barros) speak of the difficulties in formulating a clear Afrotopic vision, contrasting with the enthusiastic years of the decolonial fight against the Portuguese. The difficulty consists in the protagonists' inability of performing the crucial step from the revolutionary identity (“combatente”) to a new, constructive male role.
At various stages of this quest for an Afrotopia, the trans-colonial renegotiation, i.e. the liberation from dysfunctional symbolic schemes, becomes the pivotal element. With the death of the “combatente”, Guinea-Bissau should sever its link to decolonial schemes of male activity that found a disastrous sequel with a series of coups destabilising the local politics. It should also sever its dependence on external aid and abandon the prospects of emigration. A consistent Afrotopia must imply a profound trans-colonial reorganisation of symbolic coordinates, in such a way that the Africans may abandon the ways of thinking and acting according to the obsolete paradigms inherited both from the colonialism and the dysfunctional reality of the post-colonial decades. This is why it is so difficult to formulate it. The challenge of transformation nonetheless remains valid and is perhaps consubstantial with the challenge of writing under the conditions of material indigence, in the void of mobilising project.
Most importantly, Guinea Bissau, even in its condition of helplessness and failure, may be shown as a laboratory of transformative literature that may serve as an exemplification of processes going on in different parts of the trans-colonial world, struggling to heal the wounds of past symbolic oppression, and to move forward - against all the odds.
At various stages of this quest for an Afrotopia, the trans-colonial renegotiation, i.e. the liberation from dysfunctional symbolic schemes, becomes the pivotal element. With the death of the “combatente”, Guinea-Bissau should sever its link to decolonial schemes of male activity that found a disastrous sequel with a series of coups destabilising the local politics. It should also sever its dependence on external aid and abandon the prospects of emigration. A consistent Afrotopia must imply a profound trans-colonial reorganisation of symbolic coordinates, in such a way that the Africans may abandon the ways of thinking and acting according to the obsolete paradigms inherited both from the colonialism and the dysfunctional reality of the post-colonial decades. This is why it is so difficult to formulate it. The challenge of transformation nonetheless remains valid and is perhaps consubstantial with the challenge of writing under the conditions of material indigence, in the void of mobilising project.
Most importantly, Guinea Bissau, even in its condition of helplessness and failure, may be shown as a laboratory of transformative literature that may serve as an exemplification of processes going on in different parts of the trans-colonial world, struggling to heal the wounds of past symbolic oppression, and to move forward - against all the odds.
Em busca dum idioma ausente.
O projeto literário inacabado de Fausto Duarte
[in progress]
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Fausto Duarte é um autor ausente do cânone da literatura lusófona, por vezes mencionado apenas como um antenato esquecido da literatura da Guiné Bissau. A sua obra, não reeditada, foi lida e estudada muito raramente. Não é de estranhar. Fausto Duarte não foi um escritor decolonial. Antes pelo contrário, foi um escritor colonial declarado, convencido até ao fim de que o projeto ao qual dedicou praticamente toda a sua vida professional foi essencialmente necessário e justo. No entanto, foram decoloniais as atitudes e astucias dos colonizados e das colonizadas que observou e transmitiu com veracidade suficiente para justificar uma leitura. Certamente, os seus romances de temática guineense, Auá, A Revolta e O Negro sem alma, são muito marcados pelo seu tempo e devem ser tomadas cum grano salis. Por outro lado, devem ser vistos como fragmentos dum projeto literário inacabado, em que o escritor tentava inventar um idioma ausente na literatura lusófona do seu tempo.
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(in progress:) "Ser homem na Guiné Portuguesa. O retrato das masculinidades coloniais nos romances de Fausto Duarte
A apreciação crítica da obra de Fausto Duarte traça uma inevitável controvérsia acerca da sua escrita, também relacionada, sem dúvida, com a mudança dos critérios e paradigmas ao longo do tempo. Em 1984, Russell Hamilton estava prestes a reconhecer as boas intenções do autor que, apesar da sua inscrição colonial evidente, tentou presentar as culturas africanas sob uma luz favorável. Em 2007, Moema Parente Augel confessou, em tom muito mais crítico e desiludido: “Considero bastante sintomáticas as referências estereotipadas e reducionistas de Fausto Duarte às diferentes etnias”. Por isso não hesitava em incluí-lo na categoria de autores de literatura colonial, “quase sempre funcionários da administração portuguesa, ou militares ou missionários, todos marcados logicamente pela convicção da missão civilizatória do branco”. Certamente, este juízo não carece de fundamentação. No entanto, a escrita de Fausto Duarte, tomada com o benefício da sua inscrição colonial, revela um questionamento da condição masculina, da virilidade que não se reafirma nas condições de supremacia colonial, mas que, antes pelo contrário, depara com novas fontes de incerteza, hesitação, depreciação, amargura. É esta qualidade de questionador da codificação ibérica da masculinidade que mais me surpreende e que justifica um retorno a Fausto Duarte no presente ensaio.
A apreciação crítica da obra de Fausto Duarte traça uma inevitável controvérsia acerca da sua escrita, também relacionada, sem dúvida, com a mudança dos critérios e paradigmas ao longo do tempo. Em 1984, Russell Hamilton estava prestes a reconhecer as boas intenções do autor que, apesar da sua inscrição colonial evidente, tentou presentar as culturas africanas sob uma luz favorável. Em 2007, Moema Parente Augel confessou, em tom muito mais crítico e desiludido: “Considero bastante sintomáticas as referências estereotipadas e reducionistas de Fausto Duarte às diferentes etnias”. Por isso não hesitava em incluí-lo na categoria de autores de literatura colonial, “quase sempre funcionários da administração portuguesa, ou militares ou missionários, todos marcados logicamente pela convicção da missão civilizatória do branco”. Certamente, este juízo não carece de fundamentação. No entanto, a escrita de Fausto Duarte, tomada com o benefício da sua inscrição colonial, revela um questionamento da condição masculina, da virilidade que não se reafirma nas condições de supremacia colonial, mas que, antes pelo contrário, depara com novas fontes de incerteza, hesitação, depreciação, amargura. É esta qualidade de questionador da codificação ibérica da masculinidade que mais me surpreende e que justifica um retorno a Fausto Duarte no presente ensaio.
selected papers & chapters
Collective awareness and lyrical poetry.
The emergence of Creole literary culture in the archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe
Interlitteraria, vol. 28, No. 2 (2023). ISSN 1406-0701 (print), ISSN 2228-4729 (online)
ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/IL/article/view/23520
The problem discussed in the article is the emergence of the autonomous literary system on the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe, a former Portuguese slave emporium, as well as coffee and cocoa producing colony. Several concurrent narrations concerning the emergence of the Santomense literary system are presented. One of them accentuates the groundbreaking role of a particular institution, Casa dos Estudantes do Império; other narrations inscribe the literature of the tiny archipelago in a larger system of Portuguese-speaking literature (Lusophony). The author of the present article postulates a radical enlargement of the chronological and cultural perspective, including the legacy of the Angolars (rebellious slaves) and their collective awareness in the genesis of the local literary tradition, in parity with such elements as the legacy of the Portuguese colonizers and free Creole social groups (Forros). It could be a way of overcoming the Eurocentric “chronopolitics” that remained valid also in the postcolonial studies, associating the decolonial processes not only with the metropolis as a place where the decolonial thought took shape but also with the chronology and rhythms of its literary evolution.
ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/IL/article/view/23520
The problem discussed in the article is the emergence of the autonomous literary system on the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe, a former Portuguese slave emporium, as well as coffee and cocoa producing colony. Several concurrent narrations concerning the emergence of the Santomense literary system are presented. One of them accentuates the groundbreaking role of a particular institution, Casa dos Estudantes do Império; other narrations inscribe the literature of the tiny archipelago in a larger system of Portuguese-speaking literature (Lusophony). The author of the present article postulates a radical enlargement of the chronological and cultural perspective, including the legacy of the Angolars (rebellious slaves) and their collective awareness in the genesis of the local literary tradition, in parity with such elements as the legacy of the Portuguese colonizers and free Creole social groups (Forros). It could be a way of overcoming the Eurocentric “chronopolitics” that remained valid also in the postcolonial studies, associating the decolonial processes not only with the metropolis as a place where the decolonial thought took shape but also with the chronology and rhythms of its literary evolution.
Entre o Império do Mali e o «Islão marítimo».
O impacto dos legados e das literacias islâmicas na África portuguesa
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Studia Romanica Posnaniensia, 50 (2)/2023.
pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/srp/article/view/39605/33490 The article presents the impact of the Islamicate populations and literacies in Portuguese colonial literature and scholarship. The main ethnic group that focused the attention of the colonisers were the aggressive, dominant Fulani portrayed in the novels of Fausto Duarte, Auá and A Revolta. Their usages and traditions were studied by the first Portuguese ethnographers and ethnohistorians with almost satisfactory results. On the other hand, Islam in the oriental part of the Portuguese colonial empire (Mozambique) was much less understood. The Portuguese paid greater attention to the aggressive, jihadist movements in West Africa than to the relatively less conspicuous Sufi movements that developed in the port cities and islands along the East African coast. Overall, the process of Islamicization of the territories controlled by the Portuguese went on unhindered or even accelerated during the colonial period. |
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Aparentemente, as populações nativas do império colonial português viviam imersas numa existência exclusivamente local, a que faltava a consciência de inscrição numa geografia cultural mais vasta do que o horizonte tribal dumas poucas aldeias comunicadas por uma rede de santuários animistas, e numa cronologia mal estruturada, sem o sentido da história e sem projetos mobilizadores do porvir. No entanto, o Islão constituía, na vida das populações colonizadas, um fator significativo que a historiografia colonial menosprezava ou silenciava, seja por ignorância, seja deliberadamente, já que uma dimensão cultural alternativa não favorecia a “missão civilizadora” dos portugueses. A presença muçulmana possuía várias características ausentes no animismo, tal como uma forte dimensão translocal (estruturada pela importância do santuário global, a Meca), o potencial duma literacia alternativa à escrita do colonizador, uma consciência duma dimensão temporal bem estruturada e o sentido do porvir histórico, os projetos mobilizadores para uma ação militar coordenada (a guerra santa). Por isso constituía uma forma de mobilização garantindo uma sobrevivência cultural autónoma ao longo do período colonial, desenvolvendo-se e, paradoxalmente, florescendo na sombra do cristianíssimo império português.
Por isso vale a pena esboçar o caráter e as formas dessa literacia cultural alternativa em relação ao projeto civilizacional português, inscrevendo as populações nativas nas redes translocais e transcoloniais. O artigo presenta a diversidade das inspirações presentes em vários pontos da África que os portugueses tentavam controlar, na segunda metade do século XIX e no início do século XX. Nomeadamente, fala-se dos Mandinga e dos Fula enquanto povos islamizados, do impacto dos movimentos jihadistas na região de Futa Djalom na Guiné Portuguesa e, por outro lado, do chamado «islam maritime» em Moçambique (as confrarias sufís de inspiração ibadita, tal a Uwaysiyya, islamizando as populações bantu a partir da ilha de Zanzibar, dos portos, etc.). É igualmente interessante de observar em que forma essas realidades culturais e legados históricos foram refletidas e|ou silenciadas na literatura colonial, tal como Auá e A Revolta de Fausto Duarte.
(Post)colonial chronopolitics and mapping the depth of local time(s) in global literary studies: an itinerary to Guinea-Bissau
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Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, no 7.2/2021, p. 69-83. ISSN 2457-8827.
https://www.metacriticjournal.com/article/203/postcolonial-chronopolitics-and-mapping-the-depth-of-local-times-in-global-literary-studies-an-itinerary-to-guinea-bissau This article is an attempt at deconstructing the chronopolitics inherent to the (post)colonial way of thinking about the world. As it is argued, what should replace it is a vision of multiple, overlying temporalities and forms of time awareness, reaching deeper than a literary history reduced to the cycle of colonisation – decolonisation – postcolonial becoming, originating from just a single maritime event: the European exploration and conquest of the world. The essay brings forth a choice of interwoven examples illustrating the variability of local time depths, associated with a plurality of origins, narrations, forms of awareness and cultivation of cultural belonging. It shows the lack of coincidence between the dominant and non-dominant perceptions of the past in such places as the archipelagos of São Tomé and Príncipe, Maldives, the Gambia, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. Their ways of living the global time, as well as embodying significant texts (rather than simply preserving them) stretch far beyond the frameworks created by competing colonial empires, such as the Portuguese or the British one. |
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Mia Couto and his African context:
Invention of an origin
The Worlds of Mia Couto, Kristian Van Haesendonck (ed.), Oxford – Bern – Berlin – Bruxelles – New York – Wien, Peter Lang, 2020, p. 41-59. ISBN 978-1-78874-594-9
The main line of argumentation in this chapter traces the process of “invention of an origin” performed by a white, blue-eyed descendant of the colonisers. In response to the criticism voiced by his African interlocutors at the moment of the publication of Vozes Anoitecidas (1986), Mia Couto legitimises his existence as a forerunner of a genuinely African intellectual, whose advent is announced in Um rio chamado tempo, uma casa chamada terra (2002). The literary construction of autochthonism brings him close to other Lusophone writers such as Pepetela, facing the same racial situation as descendants of the colonisers rather than the colonised. This process involves a creative redefinition of the notions of kinship, paternity and transmission, as well as the work on the Portuguese language. Mia Couto tries to rebuild it in such a way that it might render the African vision of the reality, creating a highly peculiar and recognisable style, implying a translingual dimension of the text. At the same time, this endeavour is interpreted as an echo of the centuries-old Portuguese millenarianist vision of the recuperation of the ideal, pre-Babelian speech of man. Nonetheless, the chapter's conclusion focuses on the paradoxical outcome of Couto's struggle for “Africanization”, putting in the limelight precisely the lowly, maculate origin of language and community.
The main line of argumentation in this chapter traces the process of “invention of an origin” performed by a white, blue-eyed descendant of the colonisers. In response to the criticism voiced by his African interlocutors at the moment of the publication of Vozes Anoitecidas (1986), Mia Couto legitimises his existence as a forerunner of a genuinely African intellectual, whose advent is announced in Um rio chamado tempo, uma casa chamada terra (2002). The literary construction of autochthonism brings him close to other Lusophone writers such as Pepetela, facing the same racial situation as descendants of the colonisers rather than the colonised. This process involves a creative redefinition of the notions of kinship, paternity and transmission, as well as the work on the Portuguese language. Mia Couto tries to rebuild it in such a way that it might render the African vision of the reality, creating a highly peculiar and recognisable style, implying a translingual dimension of the text. At the same time, this endeavour is interpreted as an echo of the centuries-old Portuguese millenarianist vision of the recuperation of the ideal, pre-Babelian speech of man. Nonetheless, the chapter's conclusion focuses on the paradoxical outcome of Couto's struggle for “Africanization”, putting in the limelight precisely the lowly, maculate origin of language and community.
Ondjaki's classmates read Honwana.
Towards a transcolonial theory
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World Literature and the Postcolonial: Narratives of (Neo)Colonialization in a Globalized World, Elke Sturm-Trigonakis (ed.), J.B. Metzler, 2020, p. 171-180. ISBN 978-3-662-61785-4
In order to trace the stakes of transcolonial theory, the chapter explores the relationship between the colonial text of Luís Bernardo Honwana, Nós Matámos o Cão Tinhoso, and its reading in Ondjaki's short-story Nós Chorámos pelo Cão Tinhoso. The aim of transcolonial creative and interpretative practice is to search for innovative ways of deconstructing and replacing the hierarchical patterns, inherited from the colonial past and reproduced in the postcolonial reality, that frame the individuals as subordinate and superordinate. Instead, patterns of partnership and cooperation between equal, autonomous persons should be conceived and promoted. Such a new mentality is designed by Ondjaki in the narration depicting collective reading of Honwana's text by Angolan schoolchildren. The reinvented ritual of sacrificing the Mangy Dog (as a textual representation and not as a substitutive victim) is supposed to foster the formation of new communitarian bonds, healthier than those that characterized the “coming of age” of the colonial assimilados. |
Amargas mistidas. O desalento africano em Desesperança no chão de medo e dor de Tony Tcheka
Bitter mistidas. The African despair in Desesperança no chão de medo e dor of Tony Tcheka, Studia Romanica Posnaniensia, no 46(3)/2019, p. 7-18.
The essay focuses on selected poems from the volume Desesperança no chão de medo e dor published in 2015. Tony Tcheka offers a bitter comment on the reality of his native Guinea-Bissau that, for analytical sake, is confronted with other voices of the country. The topics discussed are: the crisis of collective identity, as well as such values as freedom and solidarity; the deficient status of Kriol as a supposed "national" language; sexuality and gender issues, such as promiscuity and insufficiency of male role models; the status of traditional beliefs and tribal identifications.
The essay focuses on selected poems from the volume Desesperança no chão de medo e dor published in 2015. Tony Tcheka offers a bitter comment on the reality of his native Guinea-Bissau that, for analytical sake, is confronted with other voices of the country. The topics discussed are: the crisis of collective identity, as well as such values as freedom and solidarity; the deficient status of Kriol as a supposed "national" language; sexuality and gender issues, such as promiscuity and insufficiency of male role models; the status of traditional beliefs and tribal identifications.
New triangulations.
The literature in Portuguese after the Lusophony
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“Nowe triangulacje. Literatura portugalskojęzyczna po luzofonii”, Literatury mniejsze Europy romańskiej 3: Pośród literatur świata, Barbara Łuczak (ed.), Poznań, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Adama Mickiewicza, 2017, p. 25-39. ISBN 978-83-232-3270-4 |
The hegemonic status of the Portuguese literature may be regarded as doubtful, due to the permanent, painful consciousness of being minor in the European context, resumed by Eça de Queirós in the figure of Fradique Mendes, redeemed by José Eduardo Agualusa in the novel Nação Crioula. The future of the literature in Portuguese is presented in trans-indigenous terms, exemplified not by the Lusophone project nor by the white African authors, such as Agualusa or Mia Couto, but by those of Guinea Bissau, creating a language inlay composed by a Portuguese matrix and Creole inlay elements, as well as residual signs of the ethnic diversity existing in the country.
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recent reserch & events
What is the literature of Guinea-Bissau?
Guest lecture, Institute of Iberian and Iberoamerican Studies,
University of Warsaw.
Nov. 6th, 2023.
Starting with a rapid glance on the post-structural and post-modern state-of-the-art concerning the ways of defining 'literature', my presentation aims to show the broad, plural picture of Guinea-Bissau in a regional and global context of interweaving histories, identities, languages, and strands of oral and written tradition. To sketch this fractal picture, that breaks down into tiny ethnic groups, several rough strands are identified: the Mandinga culture, Fula culture, the colonial presence of the Portuguese, and the synthetic category of "animists" that serves, however awkwardly, to deal with the plural legacies of Balanta, Mandjaco, Pepel, Nalu, and other ethnic groups that remained alien to and marginalized by the Islamicate pressure of Mandinga and Fula. At a given stage of colonial history, Kriol as a new language as well as Creole identity emerge. Parallel to the decolonial process, the search for the trans-tribal category of 'Guinean-ness' (Guinendadi) continues.
In my presentation, I stress that colonial literacy is far from being a revelation of writing or the idea of literature in the region. It coexisted, since the beginning of the colonial era, with Islamic literacy, writing in Arabic as well as writing in vernacular languages such as Fula using Arabic script. This literacy that started to thrive in the 18th century and went parallel to colonial dominance is a phenomenon that relativizes the importance of colonial literacies. Overall, the memory of Mandinga griots, the historical writings of the Fula, and the emergent Kriol identity make plural roots of the literary system that cannot be presented uniquely in the shallow time of postcolonial writing. The Kriol and Lusophone poetry as well as Lusophone novels written in the 1990s are not just incipient forms of literature, but results of a long maturation of the superposed layers and plural strands of cultural awareness.
Writers of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau
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The aim of the project is to study the ways how the aporia of untranslatability of a specific culture and the necessity of appealing to the global reader's comprehension is solved at the level of the writers' strategies implied in the literary texts. Contemporary authors belonging to the minor linguistic and cultural context of the former Portuguese West Africa wish to engage the global readership and build up diverse approaches to the problem of auto-translating their idiosyncratic message. These strategies go from the incrustation of some key terms taken from the minor (Kriol, as well as any of the native African tongues) into the framework of the dominant speech (Portuguese) to the authorial translation of the entire text from the minor into the major language. On the other hand, the phenomenon of translingualism in the literary communication is present both in terms of the literary writing across the languages with which the author is familiar and in terms of the competence of the ideal reader implied in the text. As I claim, translingual texts build up their own audience, transmitting to the readers a certain degree of familiarity with the cultural key notions expressed in minor languages that the writers represent and strive to bring to the limelight of global awareness. The stake of such a literary practice is the formation of a common sphere of literary communication characterised by a non-hegemonic universalism, differing qualitatively from the often criticised, falsified universalisation of the Europocentric values.
The literature of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde is a neglected reality, even in the studies dealing with the West-African context, in which French and English postcolonial expression is predominant. Both countries not only gained their independence relatively late, as the outcome of a devastating colonial war and the Portuguese Carnation Revolution (1975), but also developed their original literary voice only in the recent decades. Even if the beginnings of literary activity in Cape Verde may be related to the review “Claridade” (1936), the statement is valid especially for Guinea-Bissau. Fully articulated literary system arguably appeared in this country as late as the last decade of the 20th century, with the novelistic work of Abdulá Silá and Filinto de Barros. The literary projects of both countries build up a tension between the search for the idiosyncratic expression in local Kriol languages (similar, yet divergent in the archipelago and in the mainland Guinea-Bissau) and the integration in a larger Portuguese-speaking world. While the development of Kriol played an important role in the nationalistic projects of the early postcolonial period, the return to Portuguese – paradoxically or not – is to be observed in the first decades of the 21st century; a constant oscillation between the local dimension of Kriol and the globalising standard Portuguese is visible. Strategies of auto-translation are typical for such authors as Odete Costa Semedo or Tony Tcheka. While the former published the parallel versions of her poems simultaneously, in a bilingual volume, the latter often creates them across years and decades of his literary evolution, rather as creative rewriting than literal translations. A subtle modulation of the poetic voice is to be observed, as the author does not say exactly the same in both linguistic versions. This procedure gives thus a large margin for critical interpretation of the interplay between both tongues of literary expression, as well as their relation to the “silent” African languages. Especially in the case of Guinea-Bissau, this background is very reach, as the country is a hot-spot of linguistic diversity, with more than 20 native tongues attested. Although virtually no written literature has ever been published in any of these (except samples of oral literature collected by the Portuguese in the beginning of the 20th century), their presence manifests itself through key terms invoking crucial culture-specific meanings, encrusted in both Portuguese and Kriol texts. The analysis of the creative ways of granting their understandability for non-local readers will be inspired by the methodological contribution of global native literary studies (cf. Allen 2012). As I claim, the recent literary creation, tending to adopt standard Portuguese expression at least as the main framework enabling translingual experimentation, is not – or not exclusively – addressed to the former colonial metropolis and transcends the boundaries of the Lusophone project that has been promoted by Portugal since the late nineties. It appeals to new literary circuits, sometimes designated as “Atlantic convergence” (“convergência atlântica”), exploiting the historical routes of dislocation and resettlement across the Atlantic, both those of the West-African slaves and the colonial deportations from Guinea-Bissau and the archipelago of Cape Verde to the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe. At the same time, Cape-Verdean writers such as Filinto Elísio aspire to unhindered participation in World Literature as a limitless, universalistic sphere of global exchange. The scholarly context in which this research is inscribed has been determined by the influential criticism of Gayatri Spivak (2003), accentuating the divergence between, on the one hand, the exhaustive study and interpretation of cultures in the so called Area Studies and, on the other hand, the universalistic domain of Comparative Literature, forgetful of cultural singularity and specificity. What seems to be derived is a vision of the global literary space as built up by the scholarly discipline alone. In other words, Comparative Literature may appear as constructing its own object of studies (World Literature abusively taken for an organic whole, while the only reality is the pattern of specific local literatures embedded in mutually untranslatable cultures). Spivak's seminal book has inspired a new paradigm of Comparative Literature focusing on radical specificity and untranslatability, based on the claim that one culture “cannot access another directly and with a guarantee” (Spivak 2003: 30); it seems to over-accentuate the particularism of literatures inscribed in local conditions, as well as idiosyncrasy of languages beyond any perspective of full translatability (cf. Apter 2011). Nonetheless, these approaches overlook the effort of developing an intra-textual dimension of translatability, performed by the writers representing non-dominant languages and cultures. Even if, as Spivak admits, there is no “guaranteed accessibility” or automatic mutual comprehension between cultures, I claim that a consistent effort of building a common sphere of literary communication is promoted by the writers. It is through their original creation that the non-hegemonic universalism of World Literature comes true; a global literary system is a reality in which even radically marginalized writers such as those of Guinea-Bissau are embedded. Those minor global writers overcome the specificity of their backgrounds in a constant creative effort of transmitting precisely the most unexpected and idiosyncratic aspects of their cultural origins. Addressing the major questions of this scholarly debate through the lens of a novel, little studied exemplification that is usually out of the scope of the mainstream criticism. BIBLIOGRAPHY Allen, Chadwick, Trans-indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Apter, Emily, Against World Literature. On the Politics of Intranslatability, London – New York, Verso, 2013. Augel, Moema Parente, A nova literatura da Guiné-Bissau, Bissau: INEP, 1998. Augel, Moema Parente, O desafio do escombro. Nação, identidade e pós-colonialismo na literatura da Guiné-Bissau, Rio de Janeiro: Garamond, 2007. Elisio, Filinto, Zen Limites, Lisboa: Rosa de Porcelana Editora, 2016. Elisio, Filinto, Das Hespérides, Lisboa: Caminho, 2005. Elisio, Filinto, Li Cores & Ad Vinhos, Lisboa: Letras Várias, 2009. Barros, Filinto de, Kikia Matcho, Lisboa, Caminho, 1999. Damrosch, David, What is World Literature?, Princeton – Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003. Gomes, Simone Caputo, Cabo Verde: Literatura em Chão de Cultura, Praia: Instituto da Biblioteca e do Livro, 2008. Kellman, Steven G., Switching Languages: Translingual Writers Reflect on Their Craft, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Ribeiro, Margarida Calafate, Semedo, Odete Costa (ed.), Literaturas da Guiné-Bissau. Cantando os escritos da história, Porto: Afrontamento, 2011. Semedo, Odete Costa, Entre o Ser e o Amar, Bissau: INEP, 1996. Semedo, Rui Jorge, Sem intenção. Poesia e crítica literária, S.l.: Corubal, 2013. Silá, Abudulai, Mistida, Bissau: Ku Si Mon, 1997. Spivak, Gayatri, Death of a Discipline, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Tavares, Eugène, Littératures lusophones des archipels atlantiques : Açores, Madère, Cap-Vert, São Tomé e Príncipe, Paris: L'Harmattan, 2009. Tcheka, Tony, Desesperança no chão de medo e dor, S.l.: Corubal, 2015. Tcheka, Tony, Guiné sabura que dói, São Tomé e Príncipe: UNEAS, 2008. Tcheka, Tony, Noites de insónia na terra adormecida, Bissau: INEP, 1996. |
international journals for African studies
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