Angolan Literature in the Presence of an Incipient Canon of Literature Written in Portuguese

Abstract

Tadmit to never having had any experience teaching Angolan literature or any other literature written in Portuguese in a foreign scholastic context. Nevertheless, I am familiar in general with the readings that others have done of Angolan literature as well as other African literatures. This knowledge results from what I have read in the works of literary critics and researchers whose intended readers are not Africans. My familiarity also has to do with both those who are Africans and those who are not and who teach at universities in Africa. But all of those teachers recognize, however, the inefficacy of the instruments with which the researchers operate in realizing their readings, principally when one does not work from an interdisciplinary perspective. Two Portuguese scholars who research and teach lusophone African literature appear to be relatively aware of this inefficacy. Writing in Ensaios de Literatura Comparada Afro-Brasileira (Essays on Afro-Brazilian Comparative Literature), Salvato Trigo maintains that Angolan and other lusophone African literatures create a problem: o problema da alteridade etico-estetica que permite a essas literaturas a construqgo de universos simb61icos e referenciais cuja leitura exige de n6s um aprofundado conhecimento antropol6gico-cultural do mundo africano, realidade cultural e civilizacionalmente mestigo, como vimos 'the problem of culturalaesthetic otherness that permits in these literatures the construction of symbolic and referential universes, our reading of which demands a profound anthropological-cultural knowledge of the African world, which, as we have noted, is hybrid in its cultural reality and with respect to civilization' (73). In a similar manner, Pires Laranjeira makes the following observation: Como se compreende, uma disciplina de liteatura africana tem, por isso, problemas especificos que nao se encontram nas de literatura portuguesa ou mesmo francesa, italiana ou brasilileira por estarem relacionadas com pafses cuja realidade e, no minimo que se possa dizer, um pouco mais familiar aos alunos 'As we understand, an African literature discipline thus has specific problems that are not found in Portuguese literature or even in French or Brazilian because they are