Images of a Colonial Kalunga

Abstract

s is well known, the intellectual field of the European left's mode of thought, during that historical period, became revitalized by Jean-Paul Sartre's manifest empathy for black causes. Sartre expresses this empathy in Orph&e noir (Black Orpheus), the preface to his Anthologie de la nouvelle podsie negre et malgache de languefranqaise (Anthology of the New Black and Malagasy Poetry in French). The musical ambience of that title was an echoing of Sartre's narrative La nausee, first published in 1938, in which the first-person narrator Antoine de Roquentin becomes aware of his existential condition upon hearing a song intoned by an African American woman. All elements of the notion of the protagonist's awareness manifest themselves in the musicality and reflections that the tune unleashes. There are two opposing worlds-that of the daily routine, with the individual adhering to established habits, and that which is disdained by consciousness. It was the tension between not being consciousness of the automatic actions of the observed world (for example, characters playing cards in a bar) and the symbolic process of identification that one finds in musical notes. During the brief duration of a musical piece, Roquentin finds a critical order of what we That feeling of identification reveals itself in the individual and not in connecting with the (for Sartre, the other is oppressive), thus forming a social collective, differing from that which one can verify in Agostinho Neto's work. The musical movement of the composition that motivated jazz presupposes integration, expansion, doubt, life, and death. What follows is a succession of notes that leads to the idea of continuous adventure. The manifestation of the new, when materialized by means of the musical note, already becomes old. It is in that order in process, continuously new, that Roquentin will cure himself of existential nausea. There is a difference between the world as a dealing of cards and the form of consciousness experienced by the character. In that instant of consciousness the character finds happiness and the sensation of plenitude. It is a matter of an experience that expands consciousness, a praxis that permits one to observe the world with the hope that things can be better than they are.