THE FEMININE IN THE WORK OF UANHENGA XITU: MEMORY AND IDENTITY IN ANGOLAN LITERATURE

Abstract

In this article, we are interested in the representations of social life in the narratives of the Angolan writer Uanhenga Xitu, mainly in his concern with the feminine character and the feminine role in the traditional Angolan societies. In these narratives, which take place in Angola, the social representations of the woman reveal a “modus vivendi” that is different from those women who migrate to the capital, Luanda, a place where the notion of a life in community, so meaningful in the traditional societies, has lost its meaning. There, the work is done to favor the colonist and not the whole community. On the other hand, in the spaces of the countryside, which are far from the colonizer’s stern hand, the representations of the Angolan social life are more expressive and this difference reveals that the migration from the country-side to the capital, in the case of a country driven by colonization, represents, as in a metaphor, the abandonment of a kind of social living in the terms of the another. Because Portugal’s colonization process was assimilationist, this migration will mean an adherence to the “modus vivendi” of the other, in many ways an effort to do not suffer so much the impacts of the domination. It is no wonder that Xitu’s feminine characters were chosen in this discussion; in his texts, these women are given voice to express the Angolan “proprium”, as if the writer wanted to recognize and acknowledge their contribution in the construction and preservation of the memory, which is able to create identity links, among as many generations, both from the past and the future, as it will be shown here (The reflections presented in this paper are the result of my doctorate studies, called “Entre dois contares: o espaço da tradição na escrita de Uanhenga Xitu”, presented at FFLCH-USP in 1996 and under the supervision of Dra. Maria Aparecida Santilli, who died in March 2008).