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Research in African Literatures 38.1 (2007) 68-74

Images of a Colonial Kalunga
Benjamin Abdala Júnior
Universidade de São Paulo
trans. by Russell G. Hamilton

Musical Movement

As is well known, the intellectual field of the European left's mode of thought, during that historical period, became revitalized by Jean-Paul Sartre's manifest empathy for black causes. Sartre expresses this empathy in "Orphée noir" ("Black Orpheus"), the preface to his Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (Anthology of the New Black and Malagasy Poetry in French). The musical ambience of that title was an echoing of Sartre's narrative La nausée, first published in 1938, in which the first-person narrator Antoine de Roquentin becomes aware of his existential condition upon hearing a jazz song intoned by an African American woman. All elements of the notion of the protagonist's awareness manifest themselves in the musicality and reflections that the tune unleashes. There are two opposing worlds—that of the daily routine, with the individual adhering to established habits, and that which is disdained by consciousness. It was the tension between not being consciousness of the automatic actions of the observed world (for example, characters playing cards in a bar) and the symbolic process of identification that one finds in musical notes. During the brief duration of a musical piece, Roquentin finds a critical order of what "we are." That feeling of identification reveals itself in the individual and not in connecting with the other (for Sartre, the "other" is oppressive), thus forming a social collective, differing from that which one can verify in Agostinho Neto's work.

The musical movement of the composition that motivated "jazz" presupposes integration, expansion, doubt, life, and death. What follows is a succession of notes that leads to the idea of continuous adventure. The manifestation of the new, when materialized by means of the musical note, already becomes old. It is in that order in process, continuously new, that Roquentin will "cure" himself of existential nausea. There is a difference between the world as a dealing of cards and the form of consciousness experienced by the character. In that instant of consciousness the character finds happiness and the sensation of plenitude. It is a matter of an experience that expands consciousness, a praxis that permits one to observe the world with the hope that things can be better than they are.

The Waters of Kalunga

The character in Sartre's narrative discovers at that instant a feeling for the facts of his existence. That feeling differs from that experienced by Elder João, the [End Page 68] protagonist in Agostinho Neto's Náusea. There is, nevertheless, an implicit dialogue with the Sartrean matrix, an updating that is already something else, as Roquentin himself pondered. It is a note that would be a differentiated updating of conjunctions of multiple symbolic notes. Moreover, it is another ambiance; it leaves Paris for Luanda and goes from a closed environment to the openness of a beach that possesses a history. There intersect the ocean's waters, joining with the colonial ebbs and flows, and the sands of time of the Angolan land marked by that domination.

Elder João, a fisherman's son, had just been expelled from the beach as a result of the presence of the colonial civilization. It was the waters of Kalunga, a deity identified with the sea who has a negative symbolization for members of the Kimbundu ethnic group. Kalunga is associated with death, with slavery. With respect to the latter, in one movement the colonial waters imprison and carry off, for the Americas and for Europe, the human capital and the riches of the land. And, in a reverse movement, the way of being of Kalunga was implanted for the land's native peoples. It was the action and also Kalunga's attraction that made Elder João, while he was still young, end up moving away...

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