Master Tamoda and His Adventures in Language

Abstract

Master Tamoda and His Adventures in Language Maria Nazareth Soares Fonseca Translated by Thomas Stovicek The literature of Angola always has had, among its writers, those who have striven most to highlight certain aspects of culture, trying to strengthen, in the space of prose or poetry, the connections between literature and the socio-political context and to rework, with the resources of literary language, the traditions passed on by the spoken word. The presence of cultural references in the literatures of recently politically independent lusophone African countries does not diminish the ability of the texts to assume the features of artistic elaboration. Not infrequently, these texts are interlaced with motivations that must be understood at the level of representations elaborated and delimited culturally. The literary texts can thus be taken as cultural representations. This means that they can be seen as sources of knowledge, although the literary motivation may be the generating impulse for new arrangements in which the word, as pointed out by Amadou Hampaté Bâ, engenders forces that act in different strengths and configure the African's relationship with the surrounding world (see Hampaté Bâ). To reflect upon the power of the word in Africa and upon the ways that oral expression seeks to transport its vibrations to the written text has been a concern of many African scholars. It is upon these questions that the present article reflects, taking as a reference "Mestre Tamoda" (Master Tamoda), an already classic long short story or novella by Uanhenga Xitu, a highly regarded Angolan writer. Uanhenga Xitu (pronounced WhanYENgah SHEEtoo) the Kimbundu nom de plume and nom de guerre, but not pseudonym, of Agostinho André Mendes de Carvalho, is well known for his portrayal of representative slices of rural life, of the sanzalas (villages) and of their inhabitants, whose speech patterns reside in the stories that the author reproduces in an attempt to bring himself closer to the common folk. The self-taught Xitu, having lived many years in a rural environment, brought to his literature the experience he acquired through contact with various parts of Angola, alongside the people and amidst the political militancy, all of which convinced him that it is practice that teaches one how to do things. As a consequence, Xitu's books have a strong flavor of authenticity given that they are largely inspired by life lived, from his contact with people in rural and suburban settings, where the traditions taught by the elders have been expressed in native tongues, especially Kimbundu or M'bundo, and where ancestral social and cultural practices have survived. As the author himself observes, it was the [End Page 75] memories of his experience in the rural setting (where he heard stories, legends and songs, attended wedding ceremonies and participated in communal routines) that made up the very seed of the literature he began to write later, when the mandatory leisure time as a political prisoner reminded him of the contact with inhabitants of different places he had come to know. What he experienced, living in the bush and in the quimbos (small villages) listening to the old men who told him the stories and precepts that legislated the life of ethnic groups, are thus the fundamental elements of his literature. This literary expression began as the writing down of simple notes based on memories, which Xitu cultivated to break up the thought patterns that potentially might have driven him mad, as he admitted to Michel Laban during an interview in 1991. A reading of the notes that Xitu made while a political prisoner in the infamous Tarrafal concentration camp on the Cape Verde island of Santiago reveals a writer who walks with confidence through two worlds, the rural and the urban, registering via literature his observations and conclusions with respect to the social, political, and cultural issues he once confronted. Uanhenga Xitu is, according to Solange de Oliveira Bicalho, one of the living history archives of his people, and his work revives customs that he observed in the very medium in which he was born and raised, and that as a professional in the field of health care, he could best observe. Therein lie many of the issues that...