Por uma modernidade própria: o transcultural nas obras Hibisco roxo, de Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, e O Sétimo Juramento, de Paulina Chiziane

Abstract

In recent times, the African literature starts to shift from its previous nationalist function as to conceive modernity. The search for what Édouard Glissant (2005) discusses concerning a “specific modernity” is observed. This literature, when understanding how consuming is the attempt to conquer an identity proper to African nations, reflects the impossibility of return to a pre-colonial past and that the hibridity of its cultures is not only the result of the European colonization, but also an existing reality before the colonization. The current attempt is to search for a modernity that is not the homogenizing, imposed by the globalization, in which the identities form easily commerciable patterns and the minorities are subordinated. The “specific modernity" that is searched for, starting with the communication of the African literature and its societies, is a modernity with rhizomatic that tries to give voice to subjects previously hidden. In this search, the feminine authorship shows a particularized movement introduced in contemporary African literature. Women, before and after the colonization were seen as subjects stigmatized and violated by patriarchy, establishing with the literary expression a relationship that reveals and has the need to talk about their conditions as a minority and the condition of of other minorities. This work proposes to study two contemporary African female writers in whose works one can read the search and problematization of the modernity of their nations. The study analyzes the works The seventh oath (2000), written by the Mozambican writer Paulina Chiziane and Purple hibiscus (2011), by the Nigerian, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Using the comparative method, the works are analysed by examining the way the authors communicate literally, producing in their narratives, updates of the African values, previously held forth by writers of other generations. Both narratives establish debates that distance themselves from the anterior perspective of African literatures when creating a face for the nation, in an attempt to invent a specific identity for them, because the narratives in The seventh oath and Purple hibiscus show an African identity that tries not to be fixed, imobile ou unique, however it is different due to its diversity of identities that relate to each other in the contemporainity.