‘Memórias emprestadas’: From the Post-national State to the End of Socialist Internationalism in Ondjaki’s AvóDeznove e o segredo do Soviético and Sonhos azuis pelas esquinas

Abstract

The Angolan author Ondjaki, born in 1977, after Angola’s independence, borrows the memories of his parents’ generation of anti-colonialist revolutionaries to consecrate the image of a post-national, autonomous Angolan nation in fiction written in the twenty-first century. AvoDezanove e o Segredo do Sovietico (2008) transmits an idealized vision of a revolutionary childhood in order to bolster the post-national image of the Angolan state in the twenty-first century, when neither the author nor his readership lives in Angola, and the government is no longer idealistic but corrupt and oppressive. The short story collection Sonhos azuis pelas esquinas (2014), exploring the author’s globalized identity, employs the vantage point of the globalized present to unravel the memories borrowed from the narrator’s parents in order to come to terms with stark realities of the 1980s obscured by the earlier work’s ideology.