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General Overview
Poetry was the first genre to thrive in Lusophone literature. As early as the 1930s, its blossoming marked the rise of political consciousness among intellectuals, who used poetry to celebrate a unique identity and experience. Notable among the poets of cultural authentication are the
Cape Verdean Jorge Barbosa, whose volume Arquipélago (Archipelago) was published in 1935, and Mozambican Noémia de Sousa, the first female Lusophone poet in Africa, best known for the poem “Sangue Negro” (Black Blood, 1976). The wars of liberation, which began in the 1960s in the Portuguese colonies, gave rise to a poetry that called for action. “Anti-evasão” (Anti-Evasion, 1962) by Cape Verdean Ovídio Martins exemplifies the poetry of this movement, which renounced the escapism of earlier poets in its insistence on addressing social, economic, and political issues. The end of colonialism in 1975 brought about a new type of poetry characterized by delight in language. Mozambican Luís Patraquim, whose best work appears in A inadiável viagem (The Urgent Voyage, 1985), represents this change.
Beginning in the 1940s, Lusophone prose writers sought to provide a more authentic image of Africa than that popularized by colonial writers, which tended toward racism. Their works typically borrow extensively from oral traditions. Cape Verdean Baltasar Lopes da Silva’s novel Chiquinho (1947) tells of a man who leaves Cape Verde to follow his father to America. One of the few Lusophone works available in English is Nós matamos o cão tinhoso (1964; We Killed Mangy Dog and Other Stories, 1969) by Mozambican Luís Bernardo Honwana. José Luandino Vieira, author of Luuanda (1964; Luuanda: Short Stories of Angola, 1980), and other Angolan writers experimented with language by superimposing features of their native Kimbundu language on the Portuguese and by using Kimbundu words liberally.
Drama was the least developed of the literary genres in the colonial era because of strict Portuguese censorship of all mass media. The beginning of drama in the Portuguese territories is generally dated to a bilingual musical about bride price—a payment by a groom or his family to the bride’s family—which was performed in Luanda, Angola’s capital, in 1971. During the liberation struggle, however, freedom fighters encouraged performances of politically charged works in the areas they controlled. Theatrical performances began to flourish after the Angolans dislodged the Portuguese from urban centers, and independence brought about the establishment of urban theater groups. Noteworthy among Angolan plays is Henrique Guerra’s O círculo de giz de bombó (The Manioc Chalk Circle, 1979), a children’s play inspired by a play by German dramatist Bertolt Brecht. In Mozambique, Belo Marques inaugurated a series of radio dramas, structured after traditional storytelling sessions, in 1978.
The new trend in Lusophone African literature manifests itself mainly in poetry and combines an interest in issues of identity, ethnicity, alienation, and language with what one critic has described as tropical sensuousness. Examples appear in the works of two Angolan writers:
Ritos de Passagem (Rites of Passage, 1985) by Paula Travares and Sabores, odores & sonho (Flavors, Scents & Reveries, 1985) by Ana de Santana. Other writers whose work exemplifies this trend include the Mozambicans Hélder Muteia, author of Verdades dos mitos (Truths of Myths, 1988), and Eduardo White, in Opaís de mim (The Country That Comes from Me, 1989).
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 1
Explain the major characteristics of Lusophone African literature.
Colonial Lusophone Prose: Luis Bernardo Honwana We Killed Mangy Dog & Other Stories
These are colonial stories set in the colonial era. The world of the stories of Luis Bernardo Honwana is no longer a world of belief: the structures of traditional society are absent in the post-contact phase. Accordingly, a strong structural organisation is also no longer present in the narratives which concern themselves with this time. However, although there is no central spatial framework, aspects of space provide a key to interpreting this world in which the relationships between the personae are as tenuous as the narrative situations often are.
In the case of the story called "Dina", there is the fact of expectation created by the story and then denied or frustrated. With regard to the action, firstly, a confrontation is developed between the Overseer and the men, the outcome of which is not fully shown. When the Overseer realizes that he has committed a shameful act, his reaction, and the reaction of the men, lead the reader to believe that the situation of the Overseer may well be precarious. Then follows the unexpected acceptance of the wine, and the outspoken youth of the kraal gang is killed. Whether or not there are any consequences of this second violent act is again not given. What is the effect of these open-ended structures? As the reader's attention has been directed wholly at and through the figure of Madala, a lacuna is created in the reading experience. The result is that the reader seeks meaningful connexions elsewhere than in the action. As in many of Honwana's stories, spatial features such as (in this story) the cornfield, the wine, and the weeds seem to be the keys to revealing the latent meanings.
Owing to the juxtaposition of the forced labour of Madala with its pleasant physical setting, the 'sea' of the cornfield, his work is made to seem even more painful by being placed in this contrastive setting. The way Madala organises his work is also significant: out of the pain and difficulty of his labour he creates a little order, by lining up the weeds he pulls up. However, this order seems meaningless, because it is not related to anything - except perhaps to the obsessiveness that Madala has developed as a defence against the destructive nature of his life. The line of weeds is evidence of what he personally has done of his own volition, thus giving him back belief in his own freewill, which in fact has been taken away from him. On the other hand he has become so profoundly conditioned to the habit of hard work that he goes on working during the dinner break, but pulling up only imaginary weeds.
As for the wine, even if it were not a conventional symbol for the experience of communality, this meaning is established in any case by Madala's reflections. He is in the habit of sharing his wine with friends at the cantina; the Overseer on the other hand never shares, although he does not finish the bottle. It is only when he is driven by the shame which the reader must imagine he feels as a result of his degraded act that he gives the dregs of his wine to the offended father, an offering which is utterly inadequate to heal such a wound. Such is Madala's degradation, however, that he accepts the offer. Perhaps then it is the denatured state of Madala and his friends that we can see in them the "strange fish" of the ending of the story. The use of this natural image implies how very unnatural the situation of the ‘peonised’ worker is. The attempt to harmoniseman with this landscape deliberately fails. The tone of the ending ironically merely appears to pacify the anger which is latent in the action - anger, it is implied, which cannot and should not be allayed while the situation remains.
Whereas the anger is at least partially demonstrated in the case of "Dina", with the story which follows it in the collection, it is well concealed. The reader has to work hard to find the strangeness in the story, precisely because it is presented so familiarly. But again, if one looks closely at the juxtaposition of spatial features, one sees the incongruity of the richness of the intellectual life of the narrator's family as contrasted with the poverty of their material circumstances. The former is implied by the presence of the narrator's drawing materials and the magazines, which are not only very numerous but also placed in a hierarchy of value; the latter is obvious in most of the other details. An examination of this kind enables the reader to fill the undetermined gaps in the implied action, which are mostly related to Papa. No reason is given for his imprisonment, nor is his hospitalization with what we infer a back injury. It is possible for the reader to close these gaps by inferring a connexion between the factors mentioned: poverty, intellectual activity, imprisonment and injury, but only by inferring an ideology in the work.
In "The Old Woman" also, an ideational structure is buried in the work, in the connexion between the mother figure and the "good years" as opposed to the present with its "nauseous, nauseating stares" and feelings of "a slow, soft erosion". This is carried through the narrator's ambivalent feelings towards his mother - the superficially derogatory title for example - and actual fact implies also the ending which merely seems to resolve the situation while in the impossibility of such a resolution. The attempt to hold onto the past only reveals the fact that it is past.
The ending of "The Hands of the Blacks" is also ambivalent, in a more superficial way, in that we do not know why exactly the mother is crying. What is clear is the ideology of the story. Different versions of myths explaining the origin of the pale hands of the black peoples reveal different degrees of intolerance or concern. The mother's story is the only one which is manifestly moral; it therefore causes all the others to be seen,retrospectively, in amoral light.
Turning to the title story, one is immediately struck by certain aspects of the print level, such as the subtitles. Titles and subtitles are usually seen as being in the authorial register, that is, under the direct control of the author, as opposed to being part of the mediation process. But in the present case, this is not necessarily so; and examination reveals that a particularly elusive kind of textual indeterminacy is operating, which recalls for example the Aeolus section of Ulysses. In that part of the novel which deals with the newspaper offices, Joyce makes use of a quasi-headline for each small section of the chapter. However, the contents of the section are not necessarily related to the preceding 'headline'. A dialectic is thus set up by the expectation created by the text which the reader has to try to resolve. In this way, the reader becomes more involved in the reading process, as he is forced to create his own meaning for the relationships between different aspects of the text.
In " We killed Mangy-Dog" the first subtitle could well be authorial, as it sums up both the subject of the first section and also directs attention to the ambivalence of the image of Mangy-Dog's pathetic blue eyes, simultaneously sick, yet appealing. However, the second subtitle (p.82) is clearly mediated by the figure of the narrator, involving one more degree of complexity. The statement is not of the conventional form of a sub-heading, and does not seem adequate to head the whole section, as it is only relevant to the first two pages. It seems to be merely an anticipatory interruption.
Honwana's text draws attention to itself as such, although initially not by self-reflexive elements in the narration, but by devices in the authorial register, and at the print level. It remains unclear, however, why the sub- headings are indecisive and sometimes misleading. It seems that the indeterminacy and the ambivalence of the subtitles (in their partial misdirection of expectation) is congruent with the indeterminate nature of the presentation of the narrator's consciousness, which leaves much to be inferred.
The same thing applies to the variations in typeface which occur in the climactic passages. There is some uncertainty as to what the use of a particular typeface precisely denotes. Their main effect is to indicate confusion in the narrator's mind about how strongly he should be feeling the force of what he is saying or thinking. There is a quality of hysterical overstatement and repetition which suggests that he is not sure that his feelings and thoughts are appropriate to the circumstances. This confusion may be seen in his actions also: why does Ginho run to fetch his gun if he is sympathetic to Mangy-Dog; why does he allow himself to be persuaded by the gang to fire a shot when later he holds onto a mere girl while she blocks his ears? All these confusions at different levels accord with confusions which are essential to the text's ideology, in which manliness is construed as a pose of cynical callousness and affection is perverted and shameful.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 2
Using any story from Bernardo Honwana’s We Killed Mangy Dog & Other Stories examine the immediate expectations of hope in most Lusophone countries.
Post-Colonial Lusophone Prose: Baltasar Lopes da Silva Chiquinho
Chiquinho is a Cape Verdean novel written by Baltasar Lopes da Silva in 1947. The probability of the literary work is the most common in Cape Verde, it marked the beginning of the typical literature in Cape Verde along with local themes in Creole culture. Along with Claridade, Baltazar Lopes participated with Manuel Lopes and Jorge Barbosa as founding members of the literary league /review and the name was the movement in the main activists of the same replica of Lisbon’s famous Torre de Belém, found in the Cape Verdean city of Mindelo, which stands today as a physical reminder of the continued role played by colonial subjects in Portugal’s 20th literary Century empire. As a facsimile of one of the metropolitan capital’s most famous edifices, the Cape Verdean tower was clearly designed to evoke the mother country’s glorious Age of Discovery and, thereby, to generate local pride in the role that Cape Verde played in Portugal’s heroic past. As such, it stands as a concrete reminder that not only political control of their archipelago originated in the metropolis—the bases of a Cape Verdean historical imaginary were also to be dictated by metropolitan models.
In Chiquinho, the title character and his fellow teenage friends join the revelry at one of Mindelo's raucous nightclubs during Carnaval. Suddenly, a badiu (someone from Santiago Island) initiates a batuque, and the narrative voice in the novel proclaims:
The room is in pure Africa, sun on the plain and a view of the savannah, with monkeys cavorting. The badi[u] takes everyone with him on a trip back through the centuries.(23)
The novel is a tribute to the island of Chiquinho. The Isle of Chiquinho which was a shrine to knowledge and an understanding of that found in streams of the island as in the mountains, valleys and the beauty of Cape Verde. Indeed, Baltasar Lopes boasts and celebrates the island that saw his birth.
Chiquinho is considered quintessentially Cape Verdean: after growing up in a rural community on Sao Nicolau, a young man discovers a more cosmopolitan life when he moves to Mindelo for his secondary education, and ultimately, when drought strikes Cape Verde, he decides to follow in his father's footsteps and embark on the next boat for America. This novel problematically posits Portugal as the origin of a one-way cultural flow, with Portuguese travelers disseminating the seeds of Lusophone culture on three continents, it also suggests a way for Cape Verdeans to live both in the "homeland" and the "host country" when they venture to Portugal. Since Cape Verde is an integral part of Lusofonia, Cape Verdeans do not in theory have to shed their national identity when integrating into a larger "Lusophone" identity in Portugal. This poses a challenge to the formulation of diaspora communities, wherein alienation and segregation in the host country is tempered by mythical memories of a homeland. Lusofone literatures imagine that a perfect Lusophone community is always possible, whether or not the various speakers of Portuguese involved were born in Portugal. The metaphor of "utopia" (which literally means "no place") is particularly apt, since Lusofonia suggests that the Lusophone identity exists betwixt and between the territorial boundaries of the seven Portuguese-speaking countries.
Baltasar Lopes’ semi-autobiographical novel Chiquinho like-wise inscribes the colonial relation and explores questions arising from Cape Verde’s political, cultural and economic dependence on the metropolitan centre. However, the story told in Lopes’ novel originates in the colonial periphery and the dynamics linking the copy to its original are reversed, as the narrator engages in a version of mimicry that closely parallels Homi Bhabha’s theories regarding the ambivalence of colonial discourse. Baltasar Lopes conceived his novel as promoting of a theory of Cape Verdean Creole culture and language that was similar to and dependent upon metropolitan models, but unwittingly, perhaps, he concurrently ensured the strategic failure of this project. This novel, therefore, constitutes an effect of flawed colonial mimesis that at once entails both resemblance and menace.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 2
Chiquinho is a Cape Verdean novel written to expose the quest for identity. Explain.
CONCLUSION
Certainly, the Lusophone literary culture is not as consistent and popular as other literary cultures in Africa. The Anglophone and Francophone writers in Africa are more prolific than the Lusophone. Besides they enjoy wider readership since the writers in Lusophone countries write mostly in Portuguese, a less wide language than the other two languages. Only a few of Lusophone literature writers have been translated into English. African Literary writing has historically been tied to resistance to Portuguese colonialism and for this reason was largely censored before independence. Writers such as Luis Bernardo Honwana were imprisoned for their work. Many of the writers have the quest for identity as a major concern. Chiquinho by Baltasar Lopes da Silva explores the inevitable traumas of colonialism on the people and how the necessity of general reaction inspired creative impulses. This work has been described as a typical literature of Cape Verde and Lusophone world because of the inherent ideological quest for peace, justice and proper identity.
SUMMARY
From the study of the two texts here selected to cover the two most important Lusophone periods in history, it is clear that the Lusophone bloc in Africa have the same historical experience with the other blocs. Baltasar Lopes da Silva is one of the popular writers in Lusophone bloc. His works contributed so much to the development of literature in Portuguese Africa. Chiquinho is one of his collections of stories about the Portuguese experiences in the colonial times and the battle for survival and identity. Honwana, another writer here treated, is best known for the book We Killed Mangy Dog, which combines personal and cultural autobiography. Virtually all the poets and writers use the colonial Portuguese language as their medium. Many of the writers use Portuguese, particularly with the infusion of local African words, as an important part of their nation's cultural heritage. Many other Lusophone writers apply this medium of creative art in their literatures. They regard it as means of retaining their culture and calling for the application of African languages as their national languages. Because of a lack of education and other disadvantages, women have been underrepresented in the literary realm. One exception is Noemia De Sousa, who is known as the mother of Mozambican writers. When she began writing in the 1950s and 1960s, she was the only mestiça writing in Portuguese in Africa. She takes on the subject of African women and their work and has become a voice for the women of her country.
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