Donato Ndongo Research Articles

O lugar do silêncio nas literaturas africanas. O não-dizível como o esquecimento pós-traumático nos textos de Angola e da Guinée Equatorial

The article analyses the space of literary silence as a specific, metaphorical and intelectual space, an idea derived from Pierre Nora’s concept of “space of memory” (1984). In the context of sociocriticism and geopoetics reflexions, we analyse the silence in the literature of Angola and Equatorial Guinea searching the difference between the unspoken due to political and ideological reasons, prohibitions or taboos and the unspoken related to the impossibility to speak about the traumatic experiences suffered by African colective and cultural subject (Edmond Cros). We focus on the unspoken as post-traumatic amnesia in the works of José Eduardo Agualusa and Pepetela from Angola and in the novels and tales of Leoncio Evita Enoy and Donato Ndongo Bidyogo from Equatorial Guinea. The conclusion is that the space of silence in these texts is the result of a post-traumatic disorder caused by trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Remnants of carcerality and fascism in contemporary literature from Equatorial Guinea

From 1939 to 1968, the Spanish territory in the Gulf of Guinea suffered from a double, imperial and fascist oppression under the Franco regime. While colonialism officially ended in 1968, the promise of independence perished as newly elected Francisco Macías Nguema —inspired by Francoism—became increasingly violent and repressive of political dissent. Colonial Black Beach prison became the site for incarceration, torture, and executions as Macías ruthlessly retaliated against political dissent. I analyze two contemporary novels, Poderes de la tempested (2004) by Donato Ndongo Bidyogo and Autorretrato con un infiel (2007) by José Fernando Siale Djangany, to show the prison—the edifice and its carceral reverberations in society—as the nexus of the double, fascist and imperial violence that persists and is renegotiated in the aftermath colonialism. From the metaphor of the prison, I explore the legacy of Francoist violence in post-colonial Equatorial Guinea that has been variedly characterized as colonialism's residual legacy or the perpetuation of afro-fascism or a self-inflicted colonialism. I wish to complicate the historical cause-and-effect. I reread these texts from a historical and literary perspective focusing on representations of prisons and carceral societies, while engaging with the co-implications of fascism and imperialism in Spanish and Equatorial Guinean history.

ZRANIONA PAMIĘĆ I HISTORYCZNA TRAUMA W LITERATURZE GWINEI RÓWNIKOWEJ. TWÓRCZOŚĆ DONATA NDONGO BIDYOGI

Wounded Memory and Historical Trauma in the Literature of Equatorial Guinea. Donato Ndongo Bidyogo’s Works The article, based on the example of Donato Ndongo Bidyogo’s works, presents two aspects of Equatorial Guinean literature, namely memory and trauma. They are crucial for the understanding of this still young literature, written in Spanish. The consideration of selected issues developed by contemporary Equatoguinean writers gives the country’s literature a specifi c character. A refl ection on the dramatic past and the diffi cult present is its recurring motif. The article is divided into four parts. The fi rst part presents a theoretical refl ection on the concept of Paul Ricouer’s “wounded memory” used in the text. The second analyses the so-called traumatic discourse in literature, and attempts to fi nd the distinction between a traumatic event and a traumatising experience. The third part of the article presents the issues of Equatoguinean historical traumas and sketches the literary landscape of the country. The article focuses on literary strategies of collective projection, wounded memory of Equatorial Guineans and the issue of the (im)possibility of mapping trauma in literature. The last part of the text presents literary examples of the phenomena discussed in the literature of Donato Ndongo Bidyogo.

The African Dreams of Migration: Donato Ndongo's “El sueño,” Langston Hughes, and the Poetics of the Black Diaspora

ABSTRACTPerhaps the first text about immigration in Spain, “El Sueño” (1973) by Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo Makina (Niefang, Equatorial Guinea, 1950), narrates a Senegalese man's difficult journey via patera (rickety boats used to cross the Mediterranean) from Africa to Europe. Throughout the short story, suggestive allusions to the poems “Harlem” (“Dream Deferred”) and “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes (1902–67) articulate displacement and movement and thus connect Ndongo's story to concepts integral to the African Diaspora. The essay examines the term “diaspora” through analyses of Ndongo's short story in relation to Hughes's poetry. Here, the term “diaspora” does not only refer to human migrations, but also to a literary geography that moves beyond the Middle Passage and slavery to construct new continuities between Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Effectively, the narrator of “El sueño” invokes Hughes's depictions of the unarticulated dream, spectral rivers, and fraught mobility to render a vision of frustration and torment with dire consequences for Africans. Indeed, Ndongo's hazy, nightmarish “sueño” sheds light upon the ongoing significance of diaspora. Specifically, he reveals the harsh realities Africans seeking refuge endure as they attempt to access “Fortress Europe.”

The Dictatorship of Equatorial Guinea and the Postcolonial Writing of Donato Ndongo Bidyogo

The Dictatorship of Equatorial Guinea and the Postcolonial Writing of Donato Ndongo Bidyogo

Faithful Witnessing as Practice: Decolonial Readings ofShadows of Your Black MemoryandThe Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

This article considers María Lugones's concept of faithful witnessing as a point of departure to think about the ethics and possibilities of faithful witnessing in literary contexts. For Lugones, faithful witnessing is an act of aligning oneself with oppressed peoples against the grain of power and recognizing their humanity, oppression, and resistance despite the lack of institutional endorsement. I engage the work of Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Denise Oliver, and other scholars who offer methodologies and discourses on recognition, witnessing, and resistance. I argue that the feminist philosophical concept of faithful witnessing is a critical element of reading decolonial imaginaries. The article undertakes close readings of two novels in the Afro‐Latinx and Afro‐Hispanic tradition: Donato Ndongo'sShadows of Your Black Memoryand Junot Díaz'sThe Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. In these readings, the concept of faithful witnessing enriches the analysis of religious colonization and the gender violence inherent to coloniality.

EL BARCO COMO CRONOTOPO EN <i>EL METRO</i> DE DONATO NDONGO-BIDYOGO

Evidence suggests that the question of migrations nowadays has become a major challenge of political, social and imaginary life of many societies in the World. In addition to South-South migrations, the migrations from Africa to Europe are which mass media pay more attention. If the migration is widespread in the World, the symbol of the present boat people awakes painful memories (arabo-occidental slavery) in the particular case of the Black African postcolonial migrant. In El Metro (2007), Donato Ndongo uses that image to show the danger, the insecurity of clandestine migrants to sea.

An Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison) reincarnates in Manchild in the Promised Land (Claude Brown) and becomes Shadows of Your Black Memory (Donato Ndongo)

Ralph Ellison’s allegorical journey in Invisible Man (1994) launched a new era in African-American culture and Black literacy for the entire world in 1952. In 1965, Ellison’s tragic, Diasporic hero appears to have experienced a reincarnation in the epic of Manchild in the Promised Land (1999) by Claude Brown. Currently, lingering in the caverns of Shadows of Your Black Memory (2007), past and present, Donato Ndongo’s tragic, Diasporic hero (of Equatorial Guinean heritage) prompts us to relive the course of colonialism and neocolonialism ‘of the mind’ in this…. the new millennium. This paper addresses the trilogy of resistance writing in Ellison’s Invisible Man, Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land, and Ndongo’s Shadows of Your Black Memory. The experiences of the writers, political issues illustrated, and the impact upon the Black literary landscape (universal) will be explored.

Representing Gender on the Move from Africa to Spain: Donato Ndongo's El metro

This paper argues that literary representations of migration from Africa to Spain hold the potential to create alternative visions of gender, identity, and the nation. I analyze the work of the Equatorial Guinean author, Donato Ndongo, whose novel El metro (2007) demonstrates how gender and migration intersect to shatter any fixed notion of the African migrant experience. The migratory journey from Africa to Spain becomes a space where normative notions of gender and sexuality are contested. Informed by postcolonial and gender theory, this article seeks to shed light on a number of questions related to gender and migration: How are the traditional gender norms strengthened or interrogated in these literary narratives? How do these representations challenge masculine hegemony by presenting alternative images of masculinity and femininity? Finally, what larger implications do these visions of masculinity and femininity have on the nation? In order to answer these research questions, I focus on the following themes: the role African gender relations play in the decision making process, the existence of gendered social networks; how the migratory journey reconfigures or reaffirms gender roles, and how the return of the migrant is a gendered performance of masculinity. My analysis reveals how Ndongo creates subversive gendered identities, which emerge from the migratory experience, that contradict the normative discourse in Spain surrounding the phenomenon.

Adrift on the black Mediterranean diaspora: African migrant writing in Spain

Focusing on the strategies employed to recreate agency in the black diaspora in postcolonial Europe and taking at its basis recent narratives produced by African migrant writers in Spain – Cameroonians Inongo-vi-Makomé and Susan Akono, and Guinean Donato Ndongo – this paper explores the ways in which identity is reconstructed in diasporic situations, to answer questions such as what images of the self and the other are created and disseminated at a national level and in the wider context of globalization. Spain, the historically homogeneous out-migration country is transforming into a site of multicultural interaction as it becomes a destination for members of several diasporas, many with their own legacies of colonialism and racism. Due to its European Union status and growing presence in the world economy, the nation is participating in a global phenomenon in which immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees are looking towards the new Europe as an impenetrable fortress. This paper attempts to discuss these issues within the tangled web of forms of power and subjection exercised upon immigrants through Western imperialism.

De victorias o derrotas: El metro, de Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo

El metro (2007), the most recent novel by the Equatoguinean author Donato Ndongo, ends with the failure of the immigrant experience for its African protagonist. I argue that the blurring of gender difference and a relationship with the world based on male competition leads to this ending of the novel in a fundamental manner. This text reflects an identity conflict in an African male individual, Lambert Obama Ondo, who relates to white men in terms of victory or defeat. Both black and white women have a subsidiary role. In this scenario, there is no possibility of conquest for Lambert, since he comes from a poor country and cannot count on a corrupt government to confront neocolonial exploitation. Finally, as an illegal Black African immigrant in Spain who has to endure racism and social vulnerability, he will not have a chance for a sound victory over white men. He will end being a victim, but at least a heroic one.

Learning from the Beginning

In this review of the new English translation of Donato Ndongo's seminal work Shadows of Your Black Memory, Brad Epps explores the classic postcolonial contradiction of using the master's tongue to dismantle the master's discourse—a project particularly fraught by Equatorial Guinea's position as the only Spanish-speaking country in Africa.

Entre estética y compromiso: La obra de Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo, by Joseph-Désiré Otabela and Sosthène Onomo-Abena

Reviewed by: Entre estética y compromiso: La obra de Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo Moses E. Panford Jr. Entre estética y compromiso: La obra de Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo Joseph-Désiré Otabela AND Sosthène Onomo-Abena Madrid: UNED, 2008. 281 pp. ISBN 978-84-362-5554-6. Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo is undoubtedly one of the giants of the literature of Equatorial Guinea. His stature, already evidenced by his own substantial publications, the numerous conference presentations and dissertations on his works, is more than reconfirmed in Joseph-Désiré Otabela's and Ssothène Onomo-Abena's Entre estética y compromiso: La obra de Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo. The work is divided into three main sections, prefaced by the authors' own introduction and a prologue by José Domínguez Caparrós. The introduction—broken down into the pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods—is an overview of Donato Ndongo's involvement in and influence on the evolution of Equato-Guinean letters. His remarkable production and the timely collaboration of researchers such as M'bare N'Gom and Marvin Lewis, among others, have brought Equato-Guinean literature into the mainstream: a remarkable feat in view of the numerous dissertations and works produced in neighboring Cameroun and the US, despite the stifling political conditions and minimal publication outlets for writers in the only African-Hispanic country. Chapter 1, "A Life, an Itinerary," is a condensed biography of Donato Ndongo. The very informative details garnered through extensive interviews with the writer himself (31) make it an invaluable resource for any critic who attempts to base any exegesis of Ndongo's thematic material on his personal life experiences. Of particular interest are his cultural endeavors in Spain and "subversive" political activities that have eventually rendered him a persona non grata in his own native country. The caption "Writing as Expression of Political Resistance" very accurately sums up the content of the second chapter, in which the authors trace Ndongo's literary journey from his initial days in the Colegio de los Padres Escolapios San José de Colasanz (Valencia, Spain)—where he read his first book by a black author, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart—through his current position as Visiting Professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia. They conclude that his literary corpus can be delineated as a re-reading of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: "a re-reading that supposes a journey to the origins of the trafficking of Blacks, of slavery, of colonialism and neocolonialism, where coffee, timber, ivory, etc., have made way for petroleum and "coltan" (columbite-tantalite), at the same time that ONGs substitute missionaries, leaving intact the paradigms of a skewed and almost criminal relation which makes Africa deplorably defenseless and unbalanced" (81). Subsequent to the conclusion are very useful appendices: reproductions of Ndongo's six articles on Frantz Fanon (originally published in Indice) and five of the former's interviews that had appeared in different journals. Equally significant is the bibliography that includes studies currently not catalogued in fundamental databases such as the MLA International Bibliography and Dissertation Abstracts. As [End Page 195] Domínguez Caparrós poignantly notes in the prologue, the book will undoubtedly serve as an authoritative reference for future studies on Equato-Guinean literature (10). Moses E. Panford Jr. Virginia Tech mpanford@vt.edu Copyright © 2009 Indiana University Press

Spain's Heart of Darkness: Equatorial Guinea in the Narrative of Donato Ndongo

“An idea … an unselfish belief in an idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to … ” (251). Indeed, Africa is about the idea, or so seems to think Charlie Marlow th...

An Introduction to Spanish Post-colonial Exile: The Narrative of Donato Ndongo

An Introduction to Spanish Post-colonial Exile: The Narrative of Donato Ndongo Michael Ugarte is Professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Missouri-Columbia . Ugarte is the author of books and articles dealing with modern Spanish literature and culture, among which is Shifting Ground: Spanish Civil War Exile. He is currently working on a book on Spain's cultural relations with Africa in the twentieth century. The writing of Donato Ndongo, Equatorial Guinea's foremost intellectual and novelist (now living in exile in Murcia) has much to do with the post-colonial condition both in terms of politics and in terms of the complexities (philosophical as well as aesthetic) of representation . He has written many historical essays concerning his country, as well as novels. The fictional narratives have the feel of epics; they dramatize history in the form of eyewitness testimony, accounts that question the causes of the events as well as questions about the very rendering of these events. These narratives make for the discussion of perspective, identity , nostalgia (typical of exile writing), and they do so in a way that is unusual in Western culture. Ndongo has said that one of his primary goals is to recast his oral tradition, to replicate the stories he heard as a child and continues to hear and read as an adult and to tell them as if he were the griot, Africa's archetypical story-teller, chosen by his community or the spirits of the clan to tell that community who its members are and how they got to be the way they are. Donato Ndongo is "Western" in two specific senses: he is from the region of central west Africa, an area that includes the nations of Senegal, Cameroon, Gabon, and Nigeria. But he is also "European." Indeed, in being from a former Spanish colony Ndongo has a lot of Europe in him, despite Spain's much-discussed reputation of being at the margins of Europe. Ndongo might be considered European in the postmodern or postcolonial sense in much the same way as are African writers steeped in the so-called "Western tradition." The very title of Ndongo's first novel, Los tinieblas Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 8, 2004 178 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies de tu memoria negra, comes from a line of verse of one of the foremost proponents of "négritude," Leopold Senghor, in a poem from Chants d'ombre, "Gardé jalousement par les ténèbres fidèles de leur mémoir noire" (28), also one of the novel's epigraphs: "guardado celosamente por las tinieblas fieles de su memoria negra" (J)? This novel takes the form ofan Afro-Spanish bildungsroman narrated by a first/second person in search of racial, cultural, linguistic, existential identity, all very much within a socio/ historic colonial structure. The frame consists of an opening chapter "zero" evoking the remembrances of this I/you (a person without a name in the novel) when he was an adolescent in his native Equatorial Guinea. This first memory is the rendition of his decision not to become a priest, a difficult move not as much for him as for his then mentor, Father Ortiz—especially when he as a lad declares to the priest, "Reverencia, Õ frica no necesita únicamente sacerdotes" (17). Ndongo moves from this opening scene to the story of the I/you from his childhood through adolescence and ending with his depatture from his community. The final images of this first chapter are reminiscent of the evocations of remembrance in Nabokov's well-known autobiography, Speak Memory: Es otoño. Llueve. Hace frÃ-o, pero no lo notas. Es un tiempo desgraciado que re hace sentirte molesto, que te lleva recuerdos de una niñez que condicionarÃ-a para siempre tu existencia. A través de la persiana medio levantada para aprovechar los últimos rayos de luz percibes el eco del deambular ajetreado de los habitantes de la gran ciudad. La monoton Ã-a exasperante y sublime de las gotas contra el cristal trae a ru memoria un paisaje atrozmente distinto (naturaleza exultante contra cemento y cristal), el que divisabas desde tu ventana del seminario de Banapá. Definitivamente...

A Guinean Antigone

plutense in Madrid where he is specializing in theatre, a topic he has never aban doned as scholar, actor, or translator. Most commentators on the literature of Equatorial Guinea mention the oral quality of its prose nar rations and refer to texts recited or sung by the griots} In the rather picaresque tales by Maximiliano Nkogo found in Adja-Adjd y otros relates, for example, the author enriches the orality of the language with bits of officialese that are repeated so that everyone knows them by heart and recites them ironically. This tendency from the ancient story telling custom leads naturally into works of the theater, where the musicality of the word is joined, in some cases, by a kind of chanting and/or specified musical instruments played with a gay or somber tone, dictated by the scene. The three plays included in the anthology by M'bare N'gom and Donato Ndongo share a common theme with the Nkogo stories as well as with many other literary works?that of corruption, the struggle of the individual to survive within a system rife with bribery, favoritism, and a hellish bureaucracy to boot.2 In Pancracio Esono Mitogo Obono's play, El hombre y la costumbre, Juan, the womanizing protagonist, is sent to town to solve various problems, but his position as an offi cial gives him privilege and he is much more interested in using his status to attain objects and attract women than in solving anything. In fact, as he becomes more and more of a problem, his assistant Jesusa covers for him, creating an in teresting contrast between the independent working woman and Michaela, who becomes Juans lover and who contains her fits of jealousy because she is completely dependent on Juan. Esono uses a good deal of local vocabulary in this play, rendering it difficult to put on successfully in other Spanish