An Introduction to Spanish Post-colonial Exile: The Narrative of Donato Ndongo

Abstract

An Introduction to Spanish Post-colonial Exile: The Narrative of Donato Ndongo Michael Ugarte is Professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Missouri-Columbia . Ugarte is the author of books and articles dealing with modern Spanish literature and culture, among which is Shifting Ground: Spanish Civil War Exile. He is currently working on a book on Spain's cultural relations with Africa in the twentieth century. The writing of Donato Ndongo, Equatorial Guinea's foremost intellectual and novelist (now living in exile in Murcia) has much to do with the post-colonial condition both in terms of politics and in terms of the complexities (philosophical as well as aesthetic) of representation . He has written many historical essays concerning his country, as well as novels. The fictional narratives have the feel of epics; they dramatize history in the form of eyewitness testimony, accounts that question the causes of the events as well as questions about the very rendering of these events. These narratives make for the discussion of perspective, identity , nostalgia (typical of exile writing), and they do so in a way that is unusual in Western culture. Ndongo has said that one of his primary goals is to recast his oral tradition, to replicate the stories he heard as a child and continues to hear and read as an adult and to tell them as if he were the griot, Africa's archetypical story-teller, chosen by his community or the spirits of the clan to tell that community who its members are and how they got to be the way they are. Donato Ndongo is "Western" in two specific senses: he is from the region of central west Africa, an area that includes the nations of Senegal, Cameroon, Gabon, and Nigeria. But he is also "European." Indeed, in being from a former Spanish colony Ndongo has a lot of Europe in him, despite Spain's much-discussed reputation of being at the margins of Europe. Ndongo might be considered European in the postmodern or postcolonial sense in much the same way as are African writers steeped in the so-called "Western tradition." The very title of Ndongo's first novel, Los tinieblas Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 8, 2004 178 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies de tu memoria negra, comes from a line of verse of one of the foremost proponents of "négritude," Leopold Senghor, in a poem from Chants d'ombre, "Gardé jalousement par les ténèbres fidèles de leur mémoir noire" (28), also one of the novel's epigraphs: "guardado celosamente por las tinieblas fieles de su memoria negra" (J)? This novel takes the form ofan Afro-Spanish bildungsroman narrated by a first/second person in search of racial, cultural, linguistic, existential identity, all very much within a socio/ historic colonial structure. The frame consists of an opening chapter "zero" evoking the remembrances of this I/you (a person without a name in the novel) when he was an adolescent in his native Equatorial Guinea. This first memory is the rendition of his decision not to become a priest, a difficult move not as much for him as for his then mentor, Father Ortiz—especially when he as a lad declares to the priest, "Reverencia, Õ frica no necesita únicamente sacerdotes" (17). Ndongo moves from this opening scene to the story of the I/you from his childhood through adolescence and ending with his depatture from his community. The final images of this first chapter are reminiscent of the evocations of remembrance in Nabokov's well-known autobiography, Speak Memory: Es otoño. Llueve. Hace frÃ-o, pero no lo notas. Es un tiempo desgraciado que re hace sentirte molesto, que te lleva recuerdos de una niñez que condicionarÃ-a para siempre tu existencia. A través de la persiana medio levantada para aprovechar los últimos rayos de luz percibes el eco del deambular ajetreado de los habitantes de la gran ciudad. La monoton Ã-a exasperante y sublime de las gotas contra el cristal trae a ru memoria un paisaje atrozmente distinto (naturaleza exultante contra cemento y cristal), el que divisabas desde tu ventana del seminario de Banapá. Definitivamente...