Dialogo com as Ilhas: sobre cultura e literatura de Sao Tome e Principe (review)

Diálogo com as Ilhas: sobre cultura e literatura de São Tomé e Principe, by Inocência Mata. Lisboa: Edições Colibri, 1998.

Lusophone Africa, a fragmented geographical space and neglected academic area of inquiry, is currently enjoying what we have called "Seasons of Harvest." ¹ Yet, in spite of this optimistic season, the recent flooding disaster in Mozambique, which has caused anger around the world at the sight of five helicopters hovering helplessly to save thousands of people holding on to dear life on tree tops, ² raises a topical question: Can anything less than disaster come out lusophone Africa? And this is the crux of the paradoxical context in which I situate Inocência Mata's Diálogo com as Ilhas. The title cannot be more appropriate, for Mata has always been in dialogue with Portuguese colonial discourse as used to denigrate African nationalist discourse. From Pelos trilhos das literaturas africanas em l'ngua portuguesa (1992), Emergência e Existência de uma literatura: o caso santomense (1993), through a co-edited manual with Pires Laranjeira, Literaturas africanas de expressão portuguesa (1995), Mata has distinguished herself as a comparatist, an internationally renowned critic whose voice continues to provoke the establishment where she meets misconceptions and stereotypes of Africa head-on (ironically, on the Portuguese territory) and with her theoretical-practical grounding and versatility.

In an era of cultural studies, interdisciplinarity, and insularity/migration studies, Diálogo com as Ilhas is a welcome addition to the limited critical literature on São Tomé and Pr'ncipe. Encompassing and ambitious in its scope and content, the book provides a comprehensive historicism of Santomean oral and literary cultures, paying close attention to the values of fables, tales, and legends, privileging established writers such as Marcelo da Viega, Francisco José Tenreiro, Tomás Medeiros, while not discounting the unheard voices of Frederico Gustavo dos Anjos, A'to Bomfim, Sum Marky, and Albertino Bragança, among others. As the author points out in her preface, the absence of critical output on lusophone African writing is due more to the dispersal of articles in various journals and less of its inexistence, hence her justification in collecting her different studies "numa só publicação" (9). She goes on to day, "Em todo o caso, a selecção pretendeu dar uma visão mais ampla da cultura e da literatura são-tomenses, embora a literatura, minha área de trabalho, tivesse ficado privilegiada" (9). Mata's modesty notwithstanding, Diálogo com as Ilhas presents a cohesive body of works on the Santomean experience that would otherwise be lost if not rescued in such a seminal book.

Structured as a historical-literary trajectory, the three parts can be summed up as a triad: cultural foundations, literary adventures, and dialogic interventions. In this intricate relationship between culture, literature, and criticism, Mata displays her cultural and critical grounding without which the reading of Santomean experience can be reductionist. In the first part, "Retratos Culturais," Mata resuscitates Santomean oral traditions through fables and legends while calling attention to the threat to two minority Santomean creole languages, "Lunguyê" of the Island of Pr'ncipe and "Angolar" of the Island of São Tomé. For Mata, the lack of a cultural policy to recuperate, revitalize, and dignify these languages, among others, is not only lamentable but genocidal. Mata calls for an integrated educational and cultural policy that will rescue traditional languages from the fangs of folklorization and oblivion:

Um projecto integrado de Educação e Cultura poderia ser uma das vias. E isso um primeiro objetivo: a dignificação desta l'nguas, enquanto l'nguas de cultura e não apenas de folclore, e criação da necessidade de se aprender a l'ngua dos pais e avós [. . .] porque há falta de uma educação pela l'ngua. (34)

Aside from Mata's lamentation...