Under the sign of a projective nostalgia: Agostinho Neto and Angolan post-colonial poetry

Inocncia Mata
Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon, Portugal

In a certain opaqueness, every generation discovers its mission; it takes it on or becomes a traitor.
Frantz Fanon

It does not seem an exaggeration to say that, today, that in reacting to the intriguing and by no means pacific dynamic of the countrys post-colonial situation (at least until 2002), Angolan literature is going through a period of remarkable aesthetic eclecticism and reflective productivity. This is due to a transtextual, inter-generational dialogic and the need to re-think the country, a task in which literature has taken on the role of vanguard. It continues to be the chosen means for reflection and has almost replaced the social scientists (historians, sociologists, politologists) in recording and analysing events and phenomena, which have yet to be raised to the object of study. Nonetheless, despite Angolan literature continuing to give shape to identity on the path traced out by history and its images and memories, today, the ideas and designators are others. Or rather, this otherness is not only aimed at subjects from without but takes into account the very ones who are part and parcel of the state of things. In other words, the new generation of writers have taken it upon themselves to internalize their gaze on Angola from within, and they have not turned their backs on the new power relationships. In fact, it is well known that during the colonial-fascist period, which saw the emergence of a nationalist aesthetic, literary production entered into dialogue with liberation ideology. For this reason, the literary aesthetic of the time called for a rhetoric seeking to share imagined social and historical memories and to collectivize anguishes and aspirations, redirecting them along thematic and stylistic landscapes which, upon seeing the erasures, looming conflicts and divergent tugs-of-war going on within the imagined community, strove to build a unified, cohesive body within the guidelines of nationalism - which, according to Ernest Gellner, may be
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defined as "a political principle defending the reciprocity between national unity and political unity (1993:11). In reinforcing the widespread diffusion of writing during the period in which the literary system was being defined, another way out was grounded in cultural imagination that lay in phenomena to do with nature and socioculture (people, the signs of everyday life, the physical and social environment), which were transformed into symbols. Using such symbols and drawing upon the power which the word had, what writers wanted was to forge the social, psychological and affective-sentimental link among individuals, thus satisfying an extra-textual function of an ideological intent. Through these cultural places, or culturalized places, of signs taken out of geography and nature, of values and attributes that were (re)invented socioculturally and (re)elaborated intellectually, they sang of the motherland a community of very centralized and united laws and institutions with a political aim (Smith, 1997:23): a motherland, which although lacking in human justice, was prodigious in nature. In the words of Antnio Candido, this prodigiousness of nature and the harmony between man and nature worked as an ideological construction transformed into a compensating illusion (1989:149). This is the idea behind Agostinho Netos poems such as, Havemos de Voltar (We need to return), O Iar da Bandeira (Hoisting the flag), Adeus hora da largada (Farewell at departure hour), No me peas sorrisos (Dont ask me to smile), O caminho das estrelas (The pathway of stars), Campos verdes (Green fields), Sangrantes e germinantes (Bleeding and germinating) or Caminho do mato (Bushpath). In these poems, as in many other poems in Sagrada Esperaa (Sacred Hope), bushpaths, enforced labour, suffering and pain, human exploitation and the plundering of the earths wealth by using the local labour force this is what colonialism is about became the pathway of flowers / flowers of love (Caminho do mato). However, following the period of end-seeking ideological agencies of a nationalist hue, there are other things moving writers nowadays, thus making the Angolan literary panorama a diversified, eclectic space. Although it would be foolhardy to characterize the present era by merely taking into consideration one aesthetic tendency, it may be ventured that the ideological nature of new writing emerging from the body of the nation and from identity issues, still tends to be nostalgic, since it harps back to the past as if it were a characteristic of the utopian imagination that still exists. Be that as it may, it feeds on itself in a cannibalistic process in the sense that it devours, like a metaphor that critically assimilates the elements of a founding aesthetic, on the condition that these elements are re-worked according to the historical context, urgently needed
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to handle the various tensions splintering present-day Angolan society. In the new view of Angola, the contingencies of historical-cultural and socio-economic undertakings are on the basis of the symbolic links needed to rebuild the country, only this time by resorting to subjective consciousness. It is by means of this individual consciousness that historical memory still persist as do the features and particularities of the representations of History. They have the intuitive goal to deconstruct (possible) strategies to bring about the political nation and transform it into the civic-territorial nation, which is the foundation on which individuals may demand their lawful rights in the community (Smith, 1997:147-148). In new Angolan poetry, this is one of functions which seems to be stripping itself of the early model foreseeing the building of this imagined community. That was a hygienically- thought out model but the new poetry comes at a time when Angolans see their children living in utmost precariousness, mainly since the state of war has been naturalized in Angola. What has become of our former loves, the poems that taught us how to love the motherland and were the lyrics of the rousing songs of the revolution during the 1970s? What dialogue has Angolan poetry of today established with the generation that created the national literary movement forefronted by Agostinho Neto, so as to (continue to) think about the country? It is within the context of this new function that the tense, dense dialogue between the poetry of the preceding age, and in particular Agostinho Netos poetry (but also the poetry of Antnio Jacinto, Viriato da Cruz or Aires de Almeida Santos) seems to me to be significant, as it is between the narrative mainly of Luandino Vieira and present Angolan literature, namely the poetry of Paula Tavares, Maria Alexandra Dskalos, Joo Maimona, Jos Lus Mendona and Adriano Botelho de Vasconcelos. The latter are all post-independence poets and have lived through the anguish of the influence of the classical Angolans 1. In the end, how does presentday poetry enter into dialogue with our classical poets, the very authors who founded the Angolan literary system? This post-colonial generation, mostly past fifty years of age or approaching it, is still characterized, historically speaking, by their willingness to speak about the nation and
1

Here, the term classical is used in the sense Vtor Manuel Aguiar e Silva defined it: the classical writer is one

that, no matter what his era, is our contemporary because s/he still has something to say to us" (Vtor Manuel Aguiar e Silva, H um tempo para formar o leitor. Entrevista a Joo Pedro Aido. Palavras (Lisboa), Associao de Professores de Portugus, No. 21/Spring, 2002. p. 19). RAL Research in African. Lusophone African and Afro-Brazilian Literatures. Vol 38. Number 1. Spring 2007 (p. 54-67)

identity. The poetry of Adriano Botelho de Vasconcelos and Jos Lus Mendona for example, whose work first started to emerge in the 1970s, still bear distinct marks of the utopian celebration. Anyone reading Botelho de Vasconcelos Voz da Terra (1974) (Voice of the Land), Abismos de Silncia (1996) (Abysses of Silence) and Tbua (2004) (Board), may receive the impression that they were written by different poets. The same thing happens with Jos Lus Mendonas Quero Acordar a Alva (1997)(I want to awaken the Dawn) and Ngoma do Negro Metal (2000) (Black Metal Ngoma). Different poetics granted because the first anthologies, Voz da Terra and Chuva Novembrina (November Rain), celebrate the revolution in a collage of what may be called combat writing written in isotopic verse, or in other words, in a semantic network which, in Botelho de Vasconcelos case, calls for the reiteration of the voice of the land in whose interweaving symbolic and allegorical signs, we find the Angolanness constructed by the creators of the system. In Jos Lus Mendona, this celebration emerges by dwelling on the semantics of fertilizing the soil in an era of freedom (here the reference is to Angolas independence won on 11 November 1975). On the other hand, in the latest anthologies by both these poets, particularly Abismos de Silncio and Ngoma do Negro Metal, there is already a note of nostalgia for a future that has been announced but not fulfilled: silence and the black metal reveal evident melancholy and regressive, distopian nostalgia. The semantic-pragmatic form favoured by the two poets is the elegiac mode so as to better express their perplexities about the world, the country and themselves. The idea of a rich motherland sung by Agostinho Neto in the poem Havemos de Voltar (We need to return), or by Antnio Jacinto in Monangamba 2 and O rio da Nossa Terra (The River of our Country), or in Quando os meus irmo voltarem (When my brothers return) by Aires de Almeida Santos, has now been disqualified by the view that the national wealth is being misappropriated by a non-localized agent I almost said a globalized agent - owing to the fact that it has a biopolitical reach and its power, which has no face, no race, no national agenda, is a transnational system that decentralizes and de-territorializes (Negri & Hardt, 2001:12). In fact, what we have here is a machine made up of different parts (economic, cultural, family, food, and even affective), which holds to ransom the socio-cultural body itself the social bios. It is this matter that Pepetela weaves into the borders of his work. For example, in A Gerao de Utopia (Generation of Utopia), the same domestic imperial agent may be
2

Kimbundu word meaning slave or rural forced labour worker.

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deciphered and it is because of this that I have spoken about an internal otherness. It comes in the shape of Malongo who has replaced the traditional imperialist in the final instance, the imperium no longer means colonizing, controlling lands that are not ours, that are far away, that are owned and inhabited by others (Said, 1995, p. 37). The poets prophesy about returning to the motherland has come true and Malongo has returned to his beautiful Angola, to liberated Angola/independent Angola (Neto, Havemos de Voltar) and has installed himself in his native land:

[Malongo] had been ready for peace for a long time. He had started shouldering his way in with small business deals. He acted as a middleman for mediumsized Belgian, French and Dutch companies wanting to sell their goods or technology. As he was an old friend of the people in power () he wangled his first deals (). He had to share out his commissions. Even so, he earned a lot of money. He earned ten times more in one year than what he had earned throughout his previous activity. He was indeed ready for such-longed for peace. (GU: 259-261) However, forty years later, Agostinho Netos interlocutor in the song to the motherlands wealth that abounds in its natural resources, landscape and cultural potentialities (the marimbas, kissange, carnival), seems to be the same in Jos Lus Mendona, particularly in Respirar as Mos na Pedra (1989) (Hands breathing on stone), as well as in Quero Acordar a Alva and in Ngoma do Negro Metal. Quero Acordar a Alva specially, which works as a macropoem and is developed in three movements (the three parts are books called: Sobre o nocturno corao de frica (On the Black Heart of Africa), Uma rvore Fala (A Tree Speaks) and Quero Acordar a Alva), responds to the euphoric sacred hope of returning to the motherland with a tense black heart of Africa. Here, we may read the distopian marking of time in the Reconstruo Nacional (National Rebuilding): 1974 Construction workers of all the slums raise their green awakening the city with armoured shells of palm oil in the fleshy echo of the buttocks. 1994 Our children gnash their teeth in this ethylic sky of perfumed bullets 2004
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Our Lady Saint Ana of Muxima still petrifies the river Bengo country but the gods no longer spit out the honey of anguish in our paper mouths

Another opposing dialogue may be seen in Agostinho Netos poems Sangrantes e germinantes (Sagrada Esperana) and the poem by Jos Lus Mendona Sangrantes pedaos de metal(Bloody pieces of metal) (in Ngoma do Negro Metal): while Netos poem ends clearly in a better, prophetically utopian mood, For the future behold our eyes For Peace behold our voices For Peace behold our hands Of Africa united in love

Jos Lus Mendona instead ends his poem on a note of despair: Dreams of my recycled world Through chimeras of turpentine doves

In Jos Lus Mendonas poetry, he insistently re-writes about the contamination that has been at work ever since the nationalist struggle between the motherland (the institutional entity) and the land that sustains nature. The move towards identity is akin to what happened in the 1930s in Latin America whose literature attracted Antnio Candidos eye when he was addressing the balance of singing the land/thinking the motherland , and transforming the land into a reason justifying the motherland: The idea of the motherland is closely bound up with the idea of nature and in part, she uses nature for justifying herself.() One of the ostensive or latent presuppositions of Latin-American literature was this usually euphoric contamination between land and motherland, where it was believed that the greatness of the latter would be a sort of natural doubling up of the power attributed to the former. (Candido, 1989: 141-142) Subverting the bond that on the one hand had united the nation and wealth, and on the other hand, had linked this to the collective happiness which needed building, today, the poet Jos Lus Mendona believes that:
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The African is slipping like a sack of salt we are the children of oil and ash of an eternal sun doing business in our belly when we lie to rest night and day ears cut off by the guerrilla. In black and white we were plucked out teeth in wisdom and in the maximbombo of the dead the infancy of the besieged pollen takes a seat. And cranes of empty mouths are hoisted the hold of our dreams slipping like a sack of salt. (JLM, Como um saco de sal, Quero Acordar a Alva) What emerges in this always opposing dialogue is the idea of the African in its metonymically Angolan version, which strengthens the transnationality of the imperial entity who still has Mother Africa as his super-motherland, is now connected to orphanhood (material, cultural, spiritual) and the dispossession of land as well as man even when a child: in the maximbombo (bus) of the dead the infancy / of the besieged pollen takes a seat. Orphanhood is the ultimate heritage, summing up the feeling of the unrealness of utopia that pervades contemporary Angolan poetry. Therefore, more than the individual being orphaned in relation to the motherland, it is the orphaning of the motherland of which the poets speak; the orphaning of an institution that no longer hopes for something - almost messianic to push for change and dialectical transformation, contrary to what is in Adeus hora da largada and O iar da bandeira, both in Agostinho Netos Sagrada Esperana (Sacred Hope): Tomorrow we will sing hymns of freedom when we commemorate the date slavery was abolished We are going in search of light your children Mother) (all black mothers whose children departed Going in search of life. (Adeus hora da largada)
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******

I arrived at the precise moment of the morning cataclysm in which the embryo breaks through the earth dampened by the rain bringing forth a plant resplendent in colour and youth I arrived to see the resurrection of the seed the dynamic symphony of the surging joy in men (...) When I returned the day was chosen And the hour had come (O iar da bandeira) On the other hand, oil, diamonds and the metal from the gold and copper mines do not generate life, thai is, what would we have to back to as it says in Ngoma do negro metal: From the black metal of Cassinga 3 today the ngoma raises up the echo of canonized voices for the last rites of the rifle. And the ship of reimbursed mouths bites musically on the oceans rewritten role. On insect-wings of night dogs mate with the anthropometric scene: between roots the belly of death splits open vertically. Paula Tavares in Dizes-me Coisas Amargas como os Frutos, 2001 (You Tell me Bitter Things like the Fruit), as well as Maria Alexandre Dskalos, in Lgrimas e Laranjas (2001)(Tears and Oranges), deconstruct the semantics of hopeful waiting and transform it into a disenchanted wait, infusing it with a nostalgia that pervades their whole misfortunate existence, regardless of the indifference of the ones they are waiting for: sadness the eyes
3

An important mining zone in the municipality of Jamba in Hula province (the border area between Hula and Kunene provinces), belonging to the Companhia Mineira do Lobito (Lobito Mining Co.). The iron is channelled out through Namibe (the former port of Moamedes) specially built for the purpose where a project has been drawn up for a mineral cable conveyor.

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from where you eye me from behind a time passed the time of old promises. Your eyes, beloved, are the eyes of someone who has already died and yet knows it not. (PT, Sombras Shadows) The children of Eve have no memory of Eden. It was with silence that the snake received payment. They pass by it indifferently and walk on without returning. Neither Eve's solitude nor Adams grieving make them retrace their footsteps. (MAD)

There is none of the poets rapture over the prodigious body that is egalitarian, harmonious and without cracks. Contrary to the illusion of beautiful motherland/our land, contemporary Angolan poetry has embarked upon a strained dialogue with the founding poets by means of a series of natural freaks that make a part of History, as for example, in Ex-Votos (2003) by Paula Tavares: At the top of the hill of salal 4 No orchid is born In the dry lakes of the moon No fish swim Down the legs of girls No blood runs The slow ash of the night Devours the fire.

Termites.

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This is what also happens with the person spoken about in the poem written by Maria Alexandre Dskalos, who made a name for herself in 1991 and whose poetry, in Jardim das Delcias (Garden of Delights), already sums up the quest to find a less bipolarized eye, one that is more prescriptive and centrifugal: The colours are in nature. The world is not black and white. From this poem, one may also read the tense mute dialogue going on in two directions: with Antnio Jacinto in Poema de alienao (Poem of Alienation) (My poem / I am white / black mounted on me / galloping for life), and with Ernesto Lara Filho who confesses in his poem Sinceridade (Sincerity), that he would like to be black . to which Paula Tavares replies in Identidade (Identity) (Ex-Votos): He who is buried Wearing only his own skin Does not rest He wanders along roads. It is this dialogue as happened earlier on between Agostinho Neto and Joo Maimona that I believe to be subversive, cannibal-like, or rather, anthropophagical (in the sense that the writers of today critically devour the categories of the founding system, embodying in it the contingencies of the countrys history). And I consider this dialogue even productively post-modern, in the way of constantly questioning the doxa, or tradition, by counterposing this tradition bespeaking the children of a gloriously promising motherland with its present mendicant, subhuman condition. Again we have Jos Lus Mendona: Sub-Saharan are we subtended subjects subspecies of the subworld subnourished are we surges of subepidemics summarily subdead of subdollars are we
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subdeveloped subjects of a subservient south. (JLM, Subpoesia Subpoetry, Quero Acordar a Alva) Compare this poem with the earlier Poems of alienation by Antnio Jacinto and Poema as well as Adeus hora largada by Agostinho Neto. Or even Velho negro (Old black man):

Sold and transported in galleys lashed by men lynched in great cities dispossessed to his last coin humiliated to the dust always defeated forced to obey God and men he lost himself He lost his country and the concept of being Reduced to rags they mocked his gestures and his different soul Old black rag lost in time and divided in space! When he passes in his loincloth with his spirit well concealed in the silence of empty phrases they murmur: Poor black man! And the poets say they are his brothers. The nation the imagined community of us is a category where the land has expanded to become a unified, cohesive body and where the motherland is an institution. If they
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were once the dialoguing conforming entities in founding literature, they are no longer so in the literature of today. Going beyond the gregarious nation, todays literature wants to work its civil dimension in harmonizing different categories such as nostalgia about the past and desiderative intentions for the future, in a discursive strategy that would like to see these two desires become a part of the new post-colonial community. And thus we arrive at the present scene of Angolan literature at the place of citizenship, hitherto inexistent in shaping the location of culture and nation, but which is making itself felt in order to secure a niche in the discourse about identity and a place in the nations writing. Citizenship, a legislative quality concomitant with any nation (Smith, 1997:147), carries with it renewed implications mainly about the place of the motherland. The scenario showing the ruins of the human condition, not only about socioeconomic precariousness, also focuses on the disorganization of memory, spaces and feelings. There was once a promised motherland that the voice in the poem O iar da bandeira (Agostinho Neto), prophetizes when it calls on aspirations, places and historical, cultural, affective and spiritual entities that had once been heroic, and when it urges a new start with everyones help as in the lines Everyone was striving to raise on high / the flag of independence; now according to the meaning of todays poetry this promised motherland has now given place to a macabre syndicate (Lima Barreto, 1961: 226) 5. However, with Jos Lus Mendona as well as with Adriano Botelho de Vasconcelos, Joo Maimona, Paula Tavares and Maria Alexandre Dskalos , their poetry has rescued the real country from latency and hushed whispering, whether it writes about nostalgic recollections or makes serious and critical accusations, as we have seen in the poem Ngoma do negro metal, where the word now associated with natural wealth is fuzil (rifle), thus constructing an isotope of destruction, pain and death. We see this particularly in the voices of the women. Even the titles of their latest anthologies have caused surprise: Dizes-me Coisas Amargas como os Frutos and Lgrimas e

In 1961, Lima Barretos view of the motherland sums up what I would like to think as indicative of contemporary

Angolan poetry. I therefore quote: (...) the Motherland, this monster that devours everything, continued to be victorious in mens ideas, leading them to death, declarations of war and hardship so that upon the misfortune of millions, a thousand could live regally, tightly bound in a macabre syndicate. Afonso Henriques Lima Barreto, Numa e a Ninfa (1915) Complete Works, Volume III, So Paulo, Editora Brasileira, 2 edition, 1961. p. 226. Afonso Henriques de Lima Barreto was born in 1881and died in1922. RAL Research in African. Lusophone African and Afro-Brazilian Literatures. Vol 38. Number 1. Spring 2007 (p. 54-67)

Laranja. Right at the very beginning with the titles - there is the transfiguration of signs in ruin so that, opposite to the dialogical and ideological, these self-same signs still tell us of the chance to have a beloved motherland, despite the cruel human condition. Nonetheless, it is not always a projective nostalgia seeking reconstruction. For example, look at the dialogue between the two poets, Joo Maimona with Atrs da sombra (Behind the shadow), and Paula Tavares with Origens (Origins) respectively, about the catastrophic view of the country and the urgent need to capture the postponed dream. It is an elegiac-type discourse resulting from a dwindling nostalgia:

in my day I had parties of shadows everything was shadowy. the rise and the fall: I call these colours postponed words: I never tire of contemplating their ruin. (JM, Idade das Palavras, Age of Words) I have a memory of the time in which we were vatwa, wild fruit. I have a memory of a time without time before the war, of the harvests and the ceremonies. (PT, Dizes-me Coisas Amargas como os Frutos) Notwithstanding the fact that this nostalgia is sometime regressive (because it is crepuscular), what contemporary poetry is really looking for is not the negation of celebrating the land and its peoples, or its historical features and poetics. If today, the poets are preoccupied about looking at the internal relations of power so as to share wealth more fairly, so as to begin to dignify the individual, so as to respect the private, segmented history of groups of people, so as to respect civil rights and make social relations more equitable, they do nothing more than critically re-elaborate upon the current of solidarity and complicity that Agostinho Neto builds up using prosopopeia in Leaving for contract work 6, where nature weeps with Maria as
6

During the Portuguese colonial system contract work was an euphemism of forced labour to which African

indigeneous people (considered incivilized people) were submitted. RAL Research in African. Lusophone African and Afro-Brazilian Literatures. Vol 38. Number 1. Spring 2007 (p. 54-67)

Manuel leaves on contract-work, or when everyone takes part in the rousing symphony in O iar da bandeira; or again when nature joins the two lovers in Carta dum contratado (Letter from a contract-worker) by Antnio Jacinto. Despite celebrating the communion between man and nature as parts of the same whole, where nature empathizes with the speaker's pain at separation and in his plight as an illiterate man, this poem of Antnio Jacintos stands in opposition to Adriano Botelho de Vasconcelos poem in which the land is shrouded in silence and shadows and the mothers glance lays to rest the anguish / that make sterile the signs of / brotherhood (Abismos de Silncio: 24). Likewise, in the twofold symbolism of the WomanMother who, in nationalist poetry, is a symbol of resistance, persistence, protection, union and strength, in several of Paula Tavares poems, Woman is humanized and made fragile when confronted with the destructive power of events around her (war, hunger, the destruction of emotional relationships and its consequences), as we see in Me Mother (Dizes-me Coisas Amargas como os Frutos): Mother arrived she was not alone the basket she was carrying was not well-finished mother arrived her plaits were not straight mother arrived and the cloth she was wearing was not well adjusted mother arrived with her mature eyes her mothers eyes they did not look in the same direction mother arrived and it still was not the time for sour-milk bread and the children. Mother arrived and the talk she brought was not well primed mother arrived alone with her talk of the disgrace of poverty of sour milk and of noise. In the poem O iar da bandeira by Agostinho Neto there was the euphoria and the emancipating germination which flowed in the roles played by the (then) figures of history (Amigo Liceu, Benge, Joaquim, Gaspar, Ildio, Manuel among other friends and brothers), of
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culture (the Ngola Ritmos, the Intelectuais, the Liga and the Farolim) and of the past (Ngola Kiluanji and Queen Ginga); instead that euphoria, that is, where there was an attempt to press forwards by referring to what was found when the poet went back (O iar da bandeira), today, according to Botelho de Vasconcelos again, The sanzalas 7 were deserted and the old folks did not bury their dead, no joy was heard except through wine. They dreamed with their heads addicted to the signs until they had lost their trust in them. (ABV, Abismos de Silncio) What in effect is happening is that the discourse about the nation is undergoing critical re-dimensioning. However, it is as yet based on the coordinating ideas of the national project freedom, tradition, cohesion in unity and social well-being so that the nation continues to conceive itself above and beyond the imagined community and the land as a territorial motherland, the place where we are born and spend our childhood, where our hearts and homes are () where our ancestors, our heroes and our ancient cultures are (Smith,1997: 146). However, because the real country no longer allows for joy in the celebration chant, the voice of the past seems to question. This time it is Joo Maimona's turn to react: impalpable mournful country when sought it covers itself with night, fugitive it grows in the river where the farther-most ocean that is seen weeps at encountering the fruit the ashes that little by little become other windows. (JM, Procura Pursuit, Retrato das Mos. Festa da Monarquia 8)

7 8

Rural African villages. I am only considering Retrato das Mos (Portrait of Hands), which is one of the two parts of Joo Maimonas

book, Festa da Monarquia (The Monarchys Feast), 2001, the other being precisely Festa da Monarquia. It is true that the two parts do not constitute a whole and each part works on its own. The author himself takes this view and has written two different prefaces, one for each part. It seems to me that for the sake of economy, they have been published together. When I wrote the preface for Retrato das Mos, I did not know that the book would be a part of a publication called Festa da Monarquia, rather than be published on its own. RAL Research in African. Lusophone African and Afro-Brazilian Literatures. Vol 38. Number 1. Spring 2007 (p. 54-67)

The semantic cluster characterizing the country forms a declining isotope where there are words such as mournful country, fugitive in which ashes bear fruit against other windows Therefore, after many decades the germination and the revolutionary transformations that were proclaimed have still failed to come true: Eves children have no memory of Eden (Maria Alexandre Dskalos) because Eden never existed in the first place! Instead of Eden, there is the suggestion in Botelho de Vasconcelos poem quoted above, that the historical dynamic has been interrupted because the ancestral cycle conjures up the picture of unburied dead. Such psycho-socio-cultural deconstruction leads to a persons alienation, manifested in drunkenness, lack of dream and despair. And also in repression, which dealt a blow against the imagined community of the time (May 1977), counteracting the idea of freedom preached in nationalist discourse the same that Sem Medo (Fearless) was mistrustful of, even during the liberation struggle, so that he was to state: a [political] party is a chapel (Mayombe, 1985:131). Sem Medo summed up the way in which the dogmatic logic of the post-utopian movement worked through religious thought and Christian allegory, the design of which Adriano Botelho de Vasconcelos takes up: In cathedrals the seagulls made the tides last until the motherlands were submersed under a single reason. Their treasure lost a utopia on the current of a pamphlet the old folks try to evade confession until their words have left jobless in their clubs and on the quaysides the poets. (ABV, Tbua, 2004: 92) Until the motherlands were submersed under a single / reason: the dictatorship of a monolithic ideology that caused the jailing, disappearance, deaths, common graves, pain, traumatized families, all becoming the "material of publications such as Boaventura Cardosos Maio, Ms de Maria (1997) (May, Marias Month), E. Bonavenas Os Limites da Luz (2003) (The Limits of Light), and Adriano Botelho de Vasconcelos' Tbua (2004). The latter was awarded the Sonangol Literature Prize in ex-aequo under his pseudonym, Aires, which was the name of his older brother, killed during the DISA the Angolan Intelligence and Security Forces retaliations against the alleged perpetrators of an attempted coup detat engineered by
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MPLA dissidents rallying around Nito Alves e Jos Van-Dnem, the so-called fraccionistas. After all, recalling the past is also a way of breathing life into the rebuilding process I would now like to call attention to the dates of publication of the poetry which I have set in dialogue with the consecrated poetry of Agostinho Neto: Maria Alexandre Dskalos, Jardim de Delcias (1991) and Lgrimas e Laranjas (2001); Adriano Botelho de Vasconcelos, Abismos do Silncio (1996) and Tbua (2004); Jos Lus Mendona, Quero Acordar a Alva (1997) and Ngoma do Negro Metal (2000); Joo Maimona, A Idade das Palavras (1997) and Retrato das Mos (included in Festa da Monarquia, 2001); and Paula Tavares, Dizes-me Coisas Amargas como os Frutos (2001) and Ex-Votos (2003). Thirty years after independence, this generation of Angolan writers has taken up its quest of pursuing the utopian project. Relying on Fanons words in the epigraph, I would say that after all, this Generation of Uncertainties has discovered its own mission and in its own way, in its own opaqueness, it shoulders its responsibility without making concessions. Its poetry still aims at (re)building the nation although by resorting to other topics and other stylistic and rhetorical facets which have another kind of underlying philosophy: as much as dissecting responsibilities (so that the advent does not become the event) as in exercising citizenship and supporting heteroglossia, or in other words, the pluralization of views about the country and about the nation which is, at long last, in the process of being made painfully.

REFERENCES Quoted literature: DSKALOS, Maria Alexandre (1991): Jardim de Delcias, Luanda, Ler & Escrever. DSKALOS, Maria Alexandre (2001): Lgrimas e Laranjas, Lisbon, Editorial Caminho. FILHO, Ernesto Lara (1988): O Canto de Martrindinde, Luanda, Unio dos Escritores Angolanos. JACINTO, Antnio (1982): Poemas, Luanda, Unio dos Escritores Angolanos. MAIMONA, Joo (1997): A Idade das Palavras, Luanda, INIC. MAIMONA, Joo (2001): Festa da Monarquia, Luanda, Kilombelombe.
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MENDONA, Jos Lus (1989): Respirar as Mos na Pedra, Luanda, Unio dos Escritores Angolanos. MENDONA, Jos Lus (1997): Quero Acordar a Alva, Luanda, INIC. MENDONA, Jos Lus (2000): Ngoma do Negro Metal, Luanda, Ch de Caxinde. NETO, Agostinho (1976): Sagrada Esperana, Luanda, Unio os Escritores Angolanos. PEPETELA, Mayombe, (1985), Luanda, Unio dos Escritores Angolanos, 3 edio. PEPETELA, A Gerao da Utupia (1992): Lisbon, Edies Dom Quixote. SANTOS, Aires de Almeida (1987): Meu Amor da Rua Onze, Luanda, Unio dos Escritores Angolanos. TAVARES, Paula (2001): Dizes-me Coisas Amargas como os Frutos, Lisbon, Editorial Caminho. TAVARES, Paula (2003): Ex-Votos, Lisbon, Editorial Caminho. VASCONCELOS, Adriano Botelho (de) (1996): Abismos de Silncio, Luanda, UEA/ABV Editora. VASCONCELOS, Adriano Botelho (de) (2004): Tbua, Luanda, UEA. Reference works: BARRETO, Afonso Henriques de LIMA (1961): Numa e a Ninfa. Obras Completas, volume III, So Paulo, Editora Brasileira, 2 edio. CANDIDO, Antonio (1989): A Educao pela Noite & Outros Ensaios, So Paulo, Editora tica. COMPAGNON, Antoine (1999): O Demnio da Teoria (Literatura e Senso Comum), Belo Horizonte, Editora da UFMG. GELLNER, Ernst (1993): Naes e Nacionalismo, Lisbon, Gradiva. HARDT, Michael & NEGRI, Antonio (2001): Imprio, Rio de Janeiro-So Paulo, Editora Record[translation Berilo Vargas]. MATA, Inocncia (2001): Literatura Angolana: Silncios e Falas de uma Voz Inquieta, Lisboa, Mar Alm /Luanda, Kilombelombe. SAID, Edward W. (1995): Cultura e Imperialismo, So Paulo, Companhia das Letras. SMITH, Anthony D. (1997): A Identidade Nacional, Lisbon, Gradiva.

Translator: Vicky Hartnack

RAL Research in African. Lusophone African and Afro-Brazilian Literatures. Vol 38. Number 1. Spring 2007 (p. 54-67)