Nação e narração: identidade, história e memória em Pepetela

Abstract

The Angolan literature carries within itself, the marks of an ethnical, cultural and linguistic diversity, owing, mostly, to its disturbed and complex historical background. The long duration of the colonial period and the cruelty of a civil war let the country full of separations, uncertainties and cultural diversities. Identifying within a place determined by mixtures has become a huge challenger for the subjects who exist in this nation. Such subjects has met in the word the most powerful weapon to fight for building their identities, the element which is able to take society the common objective: the recognition of a national identity. In accordance with these points, the corpus of this research is the novel “A gloriosa Família: o tempo dos Flamengos” by the Angolan writer Pepetela which narrates specific fact of the Angolan history: the Dutch occupation, represented by the company of the West Indies in Luanda for seven years, from 1643 to 1647. The conflicts took place about the family Van Dum, which was made up of Baltazar Van Dum (Dutch), D. Inocência (Angolan) and his eleven children (three of them were slaves‟ children). The narrator is characterized as Mister Van Dum‟s slave and, as it all of this was not enough, he was a mute, illiterate and nameless slave and, even being a character in the novel, he does not take part effectively in the plot. When unveiling the historical facts from the point of view of the colonist, the slave then starts to play a dual role during the novel, because while he is a character, he is but a thing being, however, in his role as a narrator, he takes up the position of a thinking person, aware of his miserable condition in the plot and in the story. The current research analyzes the narrative construction, observing the established relations among fiction, history, memory and identity. In order to do so, this work was divided three chapters: the first one is about the stylistic and historical information of the work, focusing on the novel as genre, its elements and specificities in African Literature grounded on Rita Chaves and Bakhtin. The second chapter analyzes the narrator‟s background based on theoretical discussion about history and memory, proposed by Jacques Le Goff, Antoine Compagnon, Walter Benjamin, Antonio Candido. The third chapter guides the analyses towards the study of cultural identity in the development of all the narrative, in other words, in its completion. It is grounded on Stuart Hall, Castells and Glissant. At the end of this work, we hope to relate to theoretical used in the research with the narrative at issue so that the theory may help understand the literary phenomenon.