Angolan Literature in the Presence of an Incipient Canon of Literatures Written in Portuguese

Introduction

I admit to never having had any experience teaching Angolan literature or any other literature written in Portuguese in a foreign scholastic context. Nevertheless, I am familiar in general with the readings that others have done of Angolan literature as well as other African literatures. This knowledge results from what I have read in the works of literary critics and researchers whose intended readers are not Africans. My familiarity also has to do with both those who are Africans and those who are not and who teach at universities in Africa. But all of those teachers recognize, however, the inefficacy of the instruments with which the researchers operate in realizing their readings, principally when one does not work from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Two Portuguese scholars who research and teach lusophone African literature appear to be relatively aware of this inefficacy. Writing in Ensaios de Literatura Comparada Afro-Brasileira (Essays on Afro-Brazilian Comparative Literature), Salvato Trigo maintains that Angolan and other lusophone African literatures create a problem: "o problema da alteridade ético-estética que permite a essas literaturas a construção de universos simbólicos e referenciais cuja leitura exige de nós um aprofundado conhecimento antropológico-cultural do mundo africano, realidade cultural e civilizacionalmente mestiço, como vimos" 'the problem of cultural-aesthetic otherness that permits in these literatures the construction of symbolic and referential universes, our reading of which demands a profound anthropological-cultural knowledge of the African world, which, as we have noted, is hybrid in its cultural reality and with respect to civilization' (73).

In a similar manner, Pires Laranjeira makes the following observation: "Como se compreende, uma disciplina de liteatura africana tem, por isso, problemas específicos que não se encontram nas de literatura portuguesa ou mesmo francesa, italiana ou brasilileira por estarem relacionadas com países cuja realidade é, no mínimo que se possa dizer, um pouco mais familiar aos alunos" 'As we understand, an African literature discipline thus has specific problems that are not found in Portuguese literature or even in French or Brazilian because they are identified with countries whose reality is, at the very least, a little more familiar to the students' (8).

After recognizing the existence of other important problems, Laranjeira then offers the following opinion:

Compreende-se, assim, que o interesse de uma cadeira de literaturas africanas não se esgote na literatura, sendo necessário convocar outras disciplinas, nem sempre presentes no ensino de outras literatuas, para melhor descodificar textos e seus contextos de criação e recepção, como sejam a antropologia, a história de Africa, as metafísicas tradicionais bantas [leia-se bantu], a sociologia, a história comparada das religiões, a história das instituições políticas, a história das mentalidades, a mitocrítica, etc.

As one can readily understand, the interest of a professor of African literature is not limited to the subject matter, and that he or she must also convoke other disciplines, which are not always called upon by those who teach European and other literatures, in order to decode texts and their contexts of creation and receptions. Thus, many literary critics and teachers of literature may, in carrying out their research, bring to bear such disciplines as anthropology, African history, traditional Bantu metaphysics, the sociology and comparative history of religions, the history of political institutions, history of mentalities, mythology, etc.

(9)

In O Conhecimento da Literatura (The Knowledge of Literature), in a footnote that appears in a chapter devoted to the subject of literature as an institution, Carlos Reis denounces the existence, in the Portuguese academic community, of the following:

[. . .] uma mal disfarçada resistência contra o reconhecimento do significado próprio das chamadas Literaturas de Expressão Portuguesa; fruto, em parte, de reminiscências ideológicas de raiz colonialista, essa resistência ideológica de raiz colonialista, essa resistência funda-se também na leitura de tais literaturas à luz do cânone literário português e europeu, leitura que, desse ponto de vista, é naturalmente...