12-11-2005

Páginas sobre Angola neste site    

Literatura Angolana

The TLS n.º 5347    SEPTEMBER 23, 2005

The quest for Angolanidade

The heritage of current fiction in Angola

STEPHEN HENIGHAN

Pepetela

JAIME BUNDA E A MORTE DO AMERICANO

277pp. Lisbon: Dom Quixote. l5euros.

972 20 2527 9

Manuel Rui

UM ANEL NA AREIA

95pp. Lisbon: Cotovia. l0.95euros,

972 795 039 6

José Eduardo Agualusa

O VENDEDOR DE PASSADOS

213 pp. Lisbon: Dom Quixote. 14.50euros.

972 20 2667 4

Ondjaki

QUANTAS MADRUGADAS TEM A NOITE

203pp. Lisbon: Editorial Caminho. 9euros.

972 21 1626 63

The Portuguese language is spoken more widely, and in a more standard form, in Angola than in any other former Portuguese colony in Africa. In Mozambique, where English is also important, Portuguese has   spread more slowly. Creolized dialects rule street life in Guinea Bissau and the two-island republic of São Tomé and Príncipe. In the Cape Verde Islands, Creole is gaining ground in public contexts, including literature. Angola owes its distinctness to two calamities: slavery and civil war. As the source of Portugal’s slave     trade to Brazil between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, Angola developed a class of    African middlemen - known, confusingly, as “Creoles” - who managed the trade for their colonial masters. The Creoles adopted a Portuguese-speaking, Roman Catholic culture and often intermarried with European traders. In the early twentieth century, when large-scale European settlement of Angola began, the   Portuguese Government’ s attempts to marginalize the Creoles in order to strengthen the settlers failed to stem mixing across racial lines. The syncretized culture of the capital, Luanda, gave birth to the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola), the Marxist guerrilla force that went to war against Portuguese colonialism in 1961, took power in 1975, and, under a more opaque ideological banner, remains in power today. For most of the country’s history, the MPLA has been at war with rival guerrilla factions, South Africa, or Zaire. In the 1990s, when Mozambique was settling its civil war, Angola returned to the battlefield. The worst fighting in the country’s history   drove millions of people out of rural areas into the crowded musseques of zinc-roofed cinder block houses on the outskirts of Luanda. Here, African languages are in retreat; most urban young people speak only Portuguese. Reliable figures are scarce, yet with 4 million inhabitants, Luanda is probably - after São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro - the world’s third-largest Portuguese-speaking city.

Angola’s first President, Agostinho Neto, was both a poet and a Creole married to a white woman: the father of the nation was also the father of three mixed-race children. Today, when the MPLA has abandoned Marxism (even though the streets of downtown Luanda continue to bear the names of Marx, Engels and Lenin), the. governing party’s multicultural legacy lives on. Current Angolan fiction, like the revolutionary leadership in the 1970s, is monopolized by men of mixed mace, the dominant writer of the l960s and 70s, José Luandino Vieira, a working-class white man who wrote his books during a twelve-year incarceration in the colonial government’s concentration camps, twisted the Portuguese language in search of an instrument to express Angolan reality. Vieira lapsed into creative silence after Independence (he now lives as a recluse in Portugal), but the quest for Angolanidade (“Angolanness”) persists.

Angola’s best-known writer, Pepetela, is closely identified with this quest. “Pepetela” became the guerrilla code-name, and later the pen-name, of Artur Pestana, a sixth-generation Angolan of predominantly European ancestry born in Benguela, in the country’s southern coastal region, in 1941. Trained as a sociologist and MPLA operative in Algeria during the 1 960s, Pepetela fought as a guerrilla for seven years, rising to the position of a regional commander during the defence of Angola against the first South African invasion, in 1975. From 1976 to 1982 he was Deputy Minister of Education. Pepetela’s fifteen books have earned him large audiences in Portugal, Brazil and some European countries. He owes his international reputation to Mayombe (1980), a tightly observed novel about the ethnic and ideological splits and sexual tensions afflicting a group of MPLA guerrillas. Mayombe was so controversial that President Neto himself had to approve its publication in Angola.

In Pepetela’ s later fiction the transition from insurgency to nation-building turns Mayombe’s portrait of ethnic strife on its head in the search for cultural fusions capable of reconciling Angola’s diversity. In Yaka (1984), which, like Mayombe, is available in English, a Bakongo statue initiates a white settler family into engagement with the Angolan nation. Lueji, o  Nascimento de um Império (1989; Lueji, the Birth of an Empire) shuttles between a retelling of the rise of the Lunda people of north-eastern Angola to imperial grandeur in the sixteenth century and a modern story about a mixed-race Luanda dancer, who shares the queen’s name and struggles to put on a ballet celebrating the historical Lueji’s accomplishments.

The MPLA’s abandonment of socialism in 1990, combined with the return to war in 1992, undermined the construction of Angolanidade. A Geração da Utopia (1992; the Utopian Generation), Pepetela’s most popular novel after Mayombe, follows the lives of four Angolan revolutionaries from their student days in Lisbon through the struggles of the 1970s to total disillusionment by the early 1990s. Párabola do Cágado Velho (1996; the  Old Turtle’s Parable) abandons the Creolized makers of modern Angola to tell the story of the war in the countryside from the perspective of the African poor. A Gloriosa Família (1997; The Glorious Famili) returns to the seventeenth century to trace the first glimmerings of Angolanidade, as it emerged in opposition to the Dutch occupation of Luanda between 1641 and 1648. the Van Dum family (whose name echoes that of the Van Dúnems, the most powerful of Luanda’ s Creole dynasties) define the culture they defend in terms of Catholicism, the Portuguese language and their mixed racial identity. These values, presented as positive, are undermined by the family’s brutal reliance on the slave trade. Narrated by a Van Dum slave, the novel insists on the corruption that has always been part of the Creole class.

A Gloriosa Família marks the end of a cycle in Pepetela’s work in which the Creoles serve as a model for the nation. His two recent novels about the  Luanda detective Jaime Bunda (“James Bum”), an overweight descendant of the great Creole families, turn to satire. Pepetela is an ambitious writer, but he is rarely subtle. He has a compelling narrative gift and a deep emotional investment in his characters. He writes in efficient standard Portuguese, seasoned with a very mild sprinkling of African words. His weakness is narrators who spell out for the reader insights amply demonstrated by the action. The sardonic tone of the  Jaime Bunda novels parlays this editorializing tendency into a conduit for acerbic commentary on contemporary corruption. The first novel, Jaime Bunda, Agente Secreto (2001), opens with the murder of a young girl on Angolan Independence Day; it ends with a criminal mastermind, who is a high government official, seen congratulating detectives on national television for arresting someone else for crimes he himself has committed.

In Jaime Bunda e a morte do americano (2003; Jaime Bunda and the  Death of the American), Pepetela pokes fun at the Luanda-centrism of younger urban Angolans by forcing Jaime to leave the capital to solve the murder of an American engineer in Benguela. The  government fears that unless the murderer is arrested the United States will declare Angola a terrori₅t nation. The narrator warns that many Angolans continue to resent the US for its support of apartheid-era South Africa, although few will say so, “preferindo hoje blandiciosas globalizações mais pós-modernistas~. (“Preferring today appeasing globalizations more in the spirit of Postmodernism”). The novel itself partakes of the postmodern spirit in being modelled on the case of a Portuguese engineer who was murdered in Benguela in 1950. The imperial mantle having passed from Portugal to the  United States, Washington sends au PBI agent to Benguela to shadow Jaime’s investigation. Besotted with American Popular culture, Jaime looks forward to meeting a real FBI agent, only to have his expectations upstaged when the  agent turns out to be a light-skinned African American woman who bears a Suspicious resemblance to Condoleezza Rice. Jaime’s blundering attempts to seduce the  agent are rebuffed when she opts for an affair with the  winner of the  Miss Benguela contest. Behind this comic plot, which shreds the Creole elite’s last pretensions to patriarchal authority a tragedy unfolds. Júlio Fininho a young man demobilized from the  army and facing unemployment, falls in love with Maria Antónia a mixed race woman forced to support herself through prostitution. Trapped by the manipulations surrounding the  murder investigation they see their future - and by implication that of Angola –destroyed. The only glimmer of hope ironically lies in the postmodern device of multiple narrators who suggest alternative solutions, the  second less grim than the  first, to the mystery of the American’ s death.

Manuel Rui, also born in 1941, has followed a course similar to that of Pepetela. A native of Huambo, in Angola’s cool central highlands, Rui is of mixed Portuguese and Ovimbundu parentage. He practised law in Portugal while beginning his literary career. Returning to Angola in 1974, he served as the  MPLA’s Director of Information and Propaganda, wrote the country’s national anthem and composed au Angolan version of “The Internationale”. A collection of short fiction from this phase of his career was published in English under the  title Yes, Comrade! (1993), but it is his later, more comic and disenchanted work that has secured his reputation. Rui is best known for a short novel, Quem Me Dera Ser Onda (1982; If Only I Were A Wave on the Sea). Told with rippling light-heartedness, this satire on socialist housing policies recounts the  story of a man who is accused of “capitalist speculation” when he begins to raise a pig in the  bathroom of his flat. In comic scenes, the  man’ s young sons, motivated purely by the  desire to save the  pig’ s life, play havoc with the state bureaucracy.

Rui’s latest short novel, Um Anel na Areia (2002; A Ring in the Sand), was published just as Angola’ s forty-one years of civil war ended, Maritime imagery emphasizes the  characters’ rudderlessness, as, one by one, African religion, Catholicism, Marxism and consumerism are discarded as moral guides in a society where war has destroyed all systems of belief. Marina, a young secretary, receives a gold ring from her boyfriend Lau the first time they make love on the beach. Her response is to toss into the ocean, as an offering to the goddess Kianda, the inferior rings she inherited from her late mother. Marina’s colloquial interior monologues dramatize her regret at having jettisoned her inheritance. In spite of her successful career - fluent in English and adept with computers, she and Lau are Angola’ s potential new middle class - Marina fears that the war may not end before Lau is conscripted. Her anxiety is inseparable from the crisis of values that crystallizes when she loses his ring in the sand. Neither her status-conscious aunt nor her depressed best friend can offer reliable counsel as to how she should live her life. the  tale ends with a rhetorical question asking who is in charge and a tentative suggestion that the family is the only institution worth saving.

José Eduardo Agualusa, also from Huambo, belongs to a different generation. Born in 1960 to a Brazilian father and a white Angolan mother, Agualusa was imprisoned by the MPLA in adolescence for his membership of a far-Left splinter party. Profoundly marked by the  events of 1977, when a violent internal coup attempt sparked savage repression that left thousands dead, Agualusa roamed the world for years as a kind of “loyal dissident”, often speaking on Angola abroad but refusing to live in the  country (he has recently moved back to Luanda). Agualusa’s pared-down fiction extols the cultural incongruities characteristic of Creolized societies; he has cited Bruce Chatwin as an influence. His first novel, A conjura (1989; the  Conspiracy) reconstructs a 1911 uprising against Portuguese colonial policies that were designed to curb intercultural mingling; his epistolary historical novel Nação Crioula (1997) was translated into English as Creole (2003). Estação das Chuvas (1996; Rainy Season), his most powerful work, breaks down the emotional distance that sometimes accompanies Agualusa’s stylistic elegance, by making explicit the  narrator’s engagement in historical events.

Agualusa’s most recent novel, O Vendedor de Passados (2004; the  Man Who Sold Pasts), is narrated by a gecko clinging to the wall of the  home of Félix Ventura, a Luanda antiquarian book dealer. As an albino, Ventura is often mistaken for a white man. taking advantage of his access to old books and photographs, he constructs fictionalized genealogies, complete with memorabilia, for nouveau-riche members of the Luanda elite, “proving” their Creole ancestry. The client known as José Buehmann poses a particular challenge because he is white. Ventura provides Buchmann with a genealogy attesting to his origins in a white settler community in southern Angola. Accustomed to indulging the snobbish fantasies of the new black business class, Ventura is alarmed when figures from Buchmann’s fabricated past come to life. The  gecko, meanwhile, relates his memories of a previous life in which he was a man: not just any man, but Jorge Luis Borges. The  parallels between Buchmann and Borges the  “book man”, fuelling Agualusa’s insights into the  ways in which history is created by books but cannot be contained by them, are ingenious. Told in short, ironic scenes, O Vendedor de Passados is consistently taut and witty. Unfortunately, the novel’ s violent conclusion, which re-enacts the  gruesome fate of the  couple who staged the  1977 coup attempt, does not emerge organically from events in Ventura’ s bookshop; the story’s final twists feel imposed.

Both history and earlier Portuguese-language African literature influence the  work of Ondjaki, the  first significant writer to emerge from the  generation that grew up with the  revolution. Born Ndalu de Almeida in a mixed-race family in Luanda in 1977, Ondjaki is the author of nine books. Some of his early work is slight, but his autobiographical novel Bom dia camaradas (2001; Good Morning Comrades), a bittersweet memoir of the  relationship between Angolan pupils of the  1980s and their Cuban schoolteachers, is honest and affecting. Ondjaki’s second novel, Quantas Madrugadas Tem a Noite (2004; How Many Dawns Has the  Night), marks a large step forward. Narrated in a rough-edged Luanda slang twisted knotty wordplay and many literary allusions, the  novel recounts the  attempts to bury the deceased Adolfo Dido (the name is an obscene pun) in the  face of obstacles posed by bureaucratic obtuseness and a tropical downpour. Adolfo claimed to have fought in the civil war (in a province bypassed by the  war); two women, each maintaining that she is his spouse, aspire to the  pension due to his “state widow”.  Yet, as one character remarks, in order to have widows, the  state must be dead. Denied a decent burial, Adolfo has no choice but to come back to life and reveal himself as the tale’s narrator. At one level, this novel is about Angola’ s inability to bury the corpse of the Marxist state. But it is also a celebration of the Portuguese language in Africa; the Lisbon edition contains a glossary of three closely printed pages. Ondjaki’s voice recalls the stories of Luandino Vieira; there are allusions to the Mozambican writer Mia Couto, to Pepetela, to Brazilian novels. In its boundless energy, Quantas Madrugadas Tem a Noite illustrates that contemporary Angolan fiction is responding not only to history, but to an evolving literary tradition.

11 de Março de 2008

perfil 

• Nasceu em Benguela, a 29 de Outubro de 1941

• Licenciado em Sociologia, foi professor na Faculdade de Arquitectura de Luanda

• Em 1997 venceu o Prémio Camões pelo conjunto da obra.

Artur Carlos Maurício Pestana dos Santos é tratado pelos amigos por Pepe, diminutivo do nome que escolheu para assinar os seus livros. São 16 obras de ficção desde que publicou As Aventuras de Ngunga, em 1973, até este O Quase Fim do Mundo (Dom Quixote), agora nas livrarias. Até aqui a sua obra foi uma espécie de narrativa do país onde nasceu. Com excepção deste último romance, uma ruptura, como o próprio reconhece, nesse contar do país que assumiu quase como uma missão desde que em 1963 tomou uma posição política e se alistou no MPLA. Nessa altura foi para Argel e lá formou-se em Sociologia, depois de estar em Lisboa onde integrou a Casa dos Estudantes de Angola enquanto aluno do Técnico. Não por muito tempo. A engenharia não o seduziu. Já escrevia, mas só muito mais tarde pensou em publicar. A luta pela independência era mais forte, dentro e fora do país, e Pepetela era um independentista empenhado. Foi guerrilheiro em Cabinda até que veio, em 1975, a tal da independência e era hora de arrumar esse mesmo país. A escrita e a política coabitaram sempre na atenção de Pepetela, que continuou a escrever, mesmo aceitando integrar uma equipa governativa logo após a independência.  Quadro do MPLA, e membro das forças armadas até uma hepatite o debilitar, torna-se vice-ministro da Educação, em Outubro de 1976, cargo que exerce até 1982. Ainda acumulou a docência universitária com a escrita. Hoje, Pepetela é escritor profissional.