Angolan Literature

In his novel, The Book of Chameleons, Angolan author, José Eduardo Agualusa, goes well beyond the stage of apology (or defense) of Afrocentric societies, the need to rescue pre-colonial cultural paradigms, or have well-defined national identities, which tend to be common preoccupations in many African post-colonial societies. Such concerns are often reactionary, emerging out of the need to form, create, and display nationhood in the face of the burden of European colonialism and its cultural impositions, which suppress African socio-cultural and political systems, downgrading them to a status of an inferior " other. " Yet, the very idea of nationhood tends to annihilate difference and otherness to construct monolithic identities based on unified (and Western) notions of statehood, thus forcing multiplicity into sameness so that African nationalistic projects often end up committing the same sins Europe committed in relation to Africa—notwithstanding the fact, of course, that pre-colonial Africa, as any society, had its own " nations, " too, that could also suppress difference through conquest. The central argument in this article is that Agualusa sees ethnic, racial, and national identity—whatever it may be, whether Eurocentric, or Afro-centric, or a mix of both, etc.—and the physical, cultural and ideological marks and frameworks that it carries or transmits as problematic. As I illustrate, Agualusa considers identities based on these essentialist parameters as something that causes deep suffering, violence, and division, and is pushing the reader to conceive identities and their respective ideological affiliation/s as fluid, ephemeral conditions, and to accept " non-identity " as the best path for human beings to follow. This different framework of seeing the Self (or the nation) generates a symbolic opening that allows for various ethnicities and races to live (or envisage living) in peace in a single space, as it emphasizes a relational collective consciousness and pushes humans to a superior state of being that transcends the finite materiality of life and the socio-political discourses that frame that materiality. I demonstrate how The Book of Chameleons is replete with metaphors of what I call the " non-self, " or " supra-self, " or even " God, " which are commonly found in Zen Buddhist thought, classical African epistemological and ontological paradigms, and more specifically, the idea of African Personality as put forward by Léopold S. Senghor or even in some of Emmanuel Lévinas's philosophical principles related to the dialectic between self and other or otherness (the non-human) and the divine. This use of multiple cross-cultural frameworks serves to reveal how different paradigms (from West to East, North to South) display parallel ontological visions, thus pointing to the idea that humans (wherever they are) yearn to exit their " small self " and expand their selfhood.

El cielo no sabe bailar solo / Ondjaki; traducción, prólogo y notas Ana María García Iglesias. – Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Artes y Humanidades, Departamento de Humanidades y Literatura, Ediciones Uniandes, 2018.
404 páginas; 15 x 24cm. – (Colección Labirinto)
ISBN 978-958-774-642-6

Tu libro cuenta cómo crecen en secreto los niños. Es como el milagro de las flores del baobab, que habitan el mundo en un capullo durante breves momentos y ven a través de la luz el milagro de las pequeñas cosas: una lagartija, las improbables zapatillas rojas de un niño en el desfile del Primero de Mayo y las voces de las estrellas. Imprimen lo sublime en las ciudades imposibles, hablan antes que el futuro, caminan sin prisa sobre el agua.
Carta de Ana Paula Tavares, Los de mi calle

El cielo no sabe bailar solo reúne dos novelas —Buenos días, camaradas y La AbuelaDiecinueve y el secreto del soviético— y un libro de cuentos —Los de mi calle—, publicados en portugués por separado, los cuales, sin embargo, se orquestan sobre una misma temática: las vivencias de un niño, ambientadas en los años ochenta en la ciudad de Luanda, Angola. Ondjaki, por medio de su narrador infantil, nos lleva de la mano a través de un panorama íntimo y autobiográfico, marcada- mente consciente y con la justa medida de lirismo.

Poca es la literatura angoleña que podemos encontrar en el Estado español y casi toda traducida del portugués al castellano, con excepción de un par de títulos asociados al público infantil-juvenil en euskera, algumos textos en catalán y diversas ediciones monolingües, en el idioma original, aparecidas en Galicia. Siguiendo la pista literaria de Angola en el siglo XXI, con respecto a la poesía se constata que disponemos únicamente de una decena de textos traducidos y que en ellos surge la marcada presencia de la poesía de (Ana) Paula Tavares. En este trabajo, procedemos a introducir brevemente la palabra poética de Angola y algunos de los aspectos más característicos de la obra de Tavares, ofreciendo, al mismo tiempo, la traducción de algunos de sus textos.

Essa Dama Bate Bué and the Angolan Literary Canon. A relevant topic for the history of literature, the literary canon has been widely questioned and the Angolan literary canon is no exception, being constantly susceptible to changes. The current paper aims at challenging the Angolan literary canon and defending the necessity of including the novel Essa Dama Bate Bué by Yara Monteiro. Published in 2018, it represents an example of silenced literature about women and guerrilla movements during the war for national independence, the subsequent civil war, and the post-conflict period. The book problematizes the presence of women in national wars, the countless roles they played, but also their integration in the post-colonial society, giving insights into a topic largely ignored in Angolan literature.

Volume Editors: Maria João Dodman (York University) and Inês Cardoso (Universidade de Aveiro & Politécnico de Leiria)

Full view (OPAC), available by 'Open Access' agreement with the issue Sponsors (York University and The Government of the Azores), and taking into account library access difficulties during the COVID-19 crisis. You can also obtain the same file by going to the PSR Back Issues webpage at http;//maproom44.com/psr

This research offers an interdisciplinary investigation of the intricate relations between literature, history and politics in Angola, focusing more specifically on the concepts of literary and political resistance and their instrumentalization since the anticolonial conflict.

The thesis is mostly devoted to novels written after independence in 1975, encompassing a wide range of authors such as Pepetela, José Eduardo Agualusa, Ondjaki, Manuel Rui, Manuel Dos Santos Lima, Sousa Jamba and Boaventura Cardoso. This allows for a comparative perspective on the literary coverage of key topics, such as religion, the civil war or the 27th of May coup attempt, and highlights continuities and disjunctions within the forming novelistic canon of Angola. Comparing these works of fiction with academic sources on Angola and political discourses developed by the regime, this research assesses the contribution of autochthonous writers to debates on national identity, political authority and historical legacy in post-independence Angola.

Through close reading and intertextual analysis, particular attention is devoted to the ways in which fiction has fed and shaped historical narratives and consciousness in Angola. I show how the novel has become a privileged site from which to address issues of collective memory and history-writing, in spite or because of the regime’s repeated attempts at tightly controlling the production of historical knowledge in the country. The strong relations uniting most Angolan writers to the MPLA, the ruling party since 1975, and the evolution of this complicity between artists and politicians at the highest levels of the nationalist party and the independent state allow for an original reflection on creativity, violence, race and class in a country still characterised nowadays by abysmal levels of inequality and authoritarian politics.

Com base na recolha feita por um aluno de licenciatura, relativa ao cancioneiro tradicional umbundo do Lobito e do Monte Belo (Província de Benguela - Angola), com apoio em traduções feitas por um ex-aluno de licenciatura e escritor, elaborei este curto cancioneiro e comentei os textos, quase todos relativos à defesa contra o colonialismo e à defesa de valores colectivos.

This is the introduction to <Narrating the Postcolonial Nation: Mapping Angola and Mozambique>. The book was edited by  Ana Mafalda Leite, Hilary Owen,  Rita Chaves and Livia Apa. I am presenting the text as the translator of the text, and not as one of its authors.

The article aims to address the literary production of the weekly supplement “Artes e Letras” of ABC, Diário de Angola, published in Luanda between 1958 and 1974. Following the progressive intensification of Angola’s white settlement and the outbreak of armed conflict in the country in 1961, the literary debates that swirled across the pages of the supplement tried to elude the censorship apparatus, thus providing valuable information on Angola’s cultural climate in those years.

This book serves as a study of poets' reflections on the use of the Portuguese language as a tool for the nation building project of Angola during and after the war of independence. The writers studied fall into two categories: those of a first phase, in the context of the war of independence, during which time poets often focused on linguistic unity as a reflection of the nation's plurality through the inscribing of notions of singular identity simultaneous to the incorporation of elements of linguistic plurality; and those of the second phase, within the context of the postwar and ensuing civil strife which, if taken as a more or less continuous Civil War, lasted from 1975 to 2002, and during which writers would use techniques seen in many postmodern poets to deconstruct the utopian discourse of poets from the previous generation. Its ultimate purpose is to elucidate an alternative approach both to existing arguments regarding political and social movement in the country as well as to less-recognized arguments regarding literary evolution in Angola during this period.

Because nations and nationalism are to a great extent cultural and not just ideological phenomena, the literature which heralded the Angolan nation undoubtedly played a key role in spreading the idea of independence. 1 Literature laid the ground for and developed alongside the political and military action of the various nationalist organisations, in particular those which came together in the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola). It is not necessary to subscribe entirely to the theory that

This paper examines the narrative poem Juca, a matumbola, published in 1865. The author of the text was Ernesto Marecos (1836-1879), a Portuguese writer of the Romantic period, who lived and worked in Angola at least between 1856 and 1857. The poem deals with the phenomenon of matumbolas, similar to that of zombies, widely diffused in Haitian folklore. The source for Marecos'poem was an account published in 1859 in the Boletim official do Governo Geral da Provincia d'Angola, written by someone who, like him, was an official of the Portuguese colonial government. Besides studying the poem and comparing it with its probable source, I will also refer to other occurrences of the theme in modern An-golan literature.

O primeiro número do dossiê temático “Literaturas póscoloniais em línguas românicas”, que aqui apresentamos, é um dos resultados do colóquio internacional homónimo, que teve lugar na Universidade de Oeste de Timișoara, na Roménia, em 15 de maio de 2018.
O primeiro número do dossiê temático “Literaturas póscoloniais em línguas românicas”, que aqui apresentamos, é um dos resultados do colóquio internacional homónimo, que teve lugar na Universidade de Oeste de Timișoara, na Roménia, em 15 de maio de 2018.

"Utopia of a Nation: The Construction of the Angolan Social Imaginary in the Literary Production of the Post-Independence" by Fábia Barbosa Ribeiro, review of the book Angola: Nation and Literature (1975-1985), published by Editora Prismas, Curitiba, 2016.

João Maria Vilanova alias João de Freitas (1933-2005), was an outstanding author in Twentieth-Century Angola, who choose to live totally incognito. Despite being considered just poet, he wrote several tales and different texts still unpublished. This paper aims to show an experimentalist aspect of his work, as he turned post into art form, by inserting in it an innovative prose.

Guerrilheiro, sociólogo, professor, político e activista cultural são outras tantas facetas que alimentam o escritor que sempre quis ser e é Artur Maurício Pestana dos Santos (Benguela, 1941). Este angolano branco, descendente de portugueses, é internacionalmente conhecido como
Pepetela, tendo publicado mais de uma dúzia de romances entre As aventuras de Ngunga (1973) e Predadores (2005).
Dez anos depois de lhe terem concedido o Prémio Camões, a AELG outorgou-lhe a distinção de "Escritor Galego Universal", que o trouxe por vez primeira à Galiza em maio de 2007.
Essa foi uma oportunidade para conhecê-lo ao vivo e ouvi-lo em Santiago de Compostela.

War is recognized as an important element in the process of consolidation of national identities, as well as in the shaping of collective memory. Also, certain literary narratives of war are considered fundamental in the symbolic process leading to the formation and consolidation of national identities. A founding status has been attributed to Pepetela, a well-known Angolan writer, winner of several major international awards. His novel Mayombe , written in 1971 and published after independence, in 1980, is a literary account of the confrontations between Portuguese soldiers and the guerrillas of the anti-colonial People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA – Movimento Popular de Libertacao de Angola) in northern Angola. The present paper will focus on the myth of the nation’s origins proposed in this novel. It is suggested that Mayombe portrays just one of the possible perspectives on anti-colonial war and on the origins of the Angolan nation, namely a perspective moulded after a socialist imagery, and shaped by a teleological view of history. I will argue that this vision influences the handling of such important issues as individual freedom, the co-existence of diverse forms of collective identity, and the use of violence, leading to a bias in collective memory. War is recognized as an important element in the process of consolidation of national identities, as well as in the shaping of collective memory. Also, certain literary narratives of war are considered fundamental in the symbolic process leading to the formation and consolidation of national identities. A founding status has been attributed to Pepetela, a well-known Angolan writer, winner of several major international awards. His novel Mayombe , written in 1971 and published after independence, in 1980, is a literary account of the confrontations between Portuguese soldiers and the guerrillas of the anti-colonial People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA – Movimento Popular de Libertacao de Angola) in northern Angola. The present paper will focus on the myth of the nation’s origins proposed in this novel. It is suggested that Mayombe portrays just one of the possible perspectives on anti-colonial war and on the origins of the Angolan nation, namely a perspective moulded after a socialist imagery, and shaped by a teleological view of history. I will argue that this vision influences the handling of such important issues as individual freedom, the co-existence of diverse forms of collective identity, and the use of violence, leading to a bias in collective memory.