As vozes gravadas no dorso da História: narrativas múltiplas e a denuncia social em Mayombe e A Sul. O Sombreiro de Pepetela

Abstract

This research analyzes the novels A sul. o sombreiro (2011) and Mayombe (1980) by angolan author Pepetela. Our aim is to discover how formal and thematic aspects, especially the construction of narrators and the characters’s representation, contribute to the demystification and rewriting of Angola’s historical past. In order to achieve this objective, we will carry out a reading of the novels keeping in perspective the relation between literature and history in Pepetela’s above mentioned novels. We are going to base our analyse on the theories of Roger Chartier, Walter Benjamin, Hayden White and Michael Lowy. To analyze formal aspects, such as the narrator, we will use terminologies from this field of literature studies, especially Mikhail Bakhtin and Alfredo Lemos C. de Carvalho’s theories. As for the thematic aspects, we will discuss the concepts of postmodernism bases on Linda Hutcheon’s postulates. Matters of identity will be discussed considering Stuart Hall’s texts on the subject; race and racism considering Frantz Fanon, Tzvetan Todorov and Hanna Arendt’s discussions; colonialism and post colonial discourses are being approached according to Boaventura Souza Santos, Aimé Césaire, Kabenguele Munanga and George Balandier’s theories. Among others, Rita Chaves, Inocência Mata, Jane Tutikian and Tania Macêdo papers will be supporting information on Pepetela’s life and work. A sul. o sombreiro (2011) and Mayombe (1980) will be analyzed respectively as historiographic metafiction and historiographical novel, due to their mixture between reality and fiction in their narratives, constituing a glimpse at the past in the perspective of the present. This one of Pepetela’s writing main characteristics. We consider the technique of approaching multiple narrators and different points of view a strategy used by the author to relativize the narrative discourses placed and to counterphysical truths fossilized in time in order to question the totalizing, excluding and limiting historical narratives.