Under the Sign of a Projective Nostalgia: Agostinho Neto and Angolan Postcolonial Poetry

Abstract

Under the Sign of a Projective Nostalgia: Agostinho Neto and Angolan Inocência Mata Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon, Portugal trans. by Vicky Hartnack It is in fact well known that during the colonial-fascist period, which saw the emergence of a nationalist aesthetic, literary production entered into dialogue with liberation ideology. For this reason, the literary aesthetic of the time called for a rhetoric seeking to share imagined social and historical memories and to collectivize anguishes and aspirations, redirecting them along thematic and stylistic landscapes which, upon seeing the erasures, looming conflicts and divergent tugs-of-war going on within the "imagined community," strove to build a unified, cohesive body within the guidelines of nationalism—which, according to Ernest Gellner, may be defined as "a political principle defending the reciprocity between national unity and political unity" (11). In reinforcing the widespread diffusion of writing during the period in which the literary system was being defined, another way out was grounded in cultural imagination that lay in phenomena to do with nature and socioculture (people, the signs of everyday life, the physical and social environment), which were transformed into symbols. Using such symbols and drawing upon the power which the word had, what writers wanted was to forge the social, psychological and affective-sentimental link among individuals, thus satisfying an extratextual function of an ideological intent. Through these cultural places, or culturalized places, of signs taken out of geography and nature, of values and attributes that were (re)invented socioculturally and (re)elaborated intellectually, they sang of the motherland—a community of very centralized and united laws and institutions with a political aim (see Smith ch.1): a motherland that, although lacking in human justice, was prodigious in nature. In the words of António Candido, this prodigiousness of nature and the harmony between man and nature worked "as an ideological construction transformed into a compensating illusion" (149).1 This is the idea behind Agostinho Neto's poems such as "Havemos de voltar" ("We shall return"), "O içar da bandeira" ("The hoisting of the flag"), "Adeus à hora da largada" ("Farewell at the hour of departing"), "Não me peças sorrisos" ("Don't ask me for smiles"), "O caminho das estrelas" ("The pathway to the stars"), "Campos verdes" ("Green fields"), "Sangrantes e germinantes" ("Bleeding and germinating"), or "Caminho do mato" ("The bush path"). In these poems, as in many other [End Page 54] poems in Sagrada Esperaça (Sacred Hope), bushpaths, enforced labor, suffering and pain, human exploitation and the plundering of the earth's wealth by using the local labour force—this is what colonialism is about—became "the pathway of flowers / flowers of love" ("Caminho do mato"). Following the period of end-seeking ideological agencies of a nationalist hue, however, there are other things moving writers nowadays, thus making the Angolan literary panorama a diversified, eclectic space. Although it would be foolhardy to characterize the present era by merely taking into consideration one aesthetic tendency, it may be ventured that the ideological nature of new writing emerging from the body of the nation and from identity issues, still tends to be nostalgic, since it harps back to the past as if it were a characteristic of the utopian imagination that still exists. Be that as it may, it feeds on itself in a cannibalistic process in the sense that it devours, like a metaphor that critically assimilates the elements of a founding aesthetic, on the condition that these elements are re-worked according to the historical context, urgently needed to handle the various tensions splintering present-day Angolan society. In the new view of Angola, the contingencies of historical-cultural and socio-economic undertakings are on the basis of the symbolic links needed to rebuild the country, only this time by resorting to "subjective consciousness." It is by means of this individual consciousness that historical memory still persist as do the...