Identidade e Mobilidade Angolanas na Ficção de Pepetela

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the Angolan national identity in Pepetela’s literary works, with emphasis on the novel O Planalto e a estepe [The Plateau and the steppe], published in 2009. The hypothesis that guides this dissertation is that Pepetela, in his works, argues that any model that takes the Angolan national identity as something fixed and finished is doomed to failure because, as well as its history, the identity of Angola is dynamic and mobile, i.e., it is in a constant process of reconfiguration. In order to verify this assumption, we choose as research corpus four Pepetela’s works in which the discussion of Angolan identity is clearly evident: the short story “Estranhos pássaros de asas abertas” ["Strange birds with open wings"] (from the book Contos de morte [Tales of Death], 2008) and the novels Yaka (1980), Mayombe (1985) and O Planalto e a estepe (2009). To the development of this work, we turn to some important ideas linked to identity discussion and to Pepetela’s fiction, being more important the following concepts: a) the ellipse of the hero, a thesis by which Robson Dutra shows that Pepetela, in order to criticize the authoritarian and hegemonic discourses, intentionally avoids to build characters inspired in classic heroes; b) the concept of unsubmissive literature developed by professor Roberto Pontes and that is linked with some works written by African Portuguese speakers who, even before the independence of their countries, rebelled against colonial literature forms prevailed in the former Portugal colonies in Africa; c) memory identity, an expression created by Janine Ponty and that is used by Jöel Candau (2012) in a study on the close relationship between memory and identity; and d) the understanding of nation as narration, argument developed by Homi Bhabha, and that has its origin in the fact that the nation, like literature, is also a narrative, given that it is developed from an arrangement of symbols, events, formulations and mythical characters that give meaning to the trajectory of the members of a given country. Through these and other theoretical constructs, we demonstrate that the different Angolas arisen from the Pepetela’s works shelter a diversity of individual identities that preclude any construction project of an Angolan national identity based on fixity and homogeneity.