1

PRISONERS OF ANAMNESIS:

EXORCISING HISTORY THROUGH STORYTELLING IN THE WORK OF

LÍDIA JORGE AND PAULINA CHIZIANE

A dissertation submitted to The University of Manchester for the degree of

Master of Arts in the Faculty of Humanities

2005

Ana Margarida Dias Martins

School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures

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CONTENTS

Abstract 3

Declaration, Copyright Statement 4

Acknowledgements 5

Dedication 6

Introduction 7

1. Mapping the field 12

1.1. The postcolonial under the sign of the global economic market

12 1.2. The postcolonial under the sign of gender

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2. Telling the Feminine(s): Becoming Women 23

2.1. Introduction

23 2.2. The Genders within: (En)gendering the Mozambican civil war

23 2.3. An army of Penelopes: Weaving exoticism at the Stella Maris

29 2.4. Conclusion 34

3. Telling the Exotic: Becoming Strategic 36

3.1. Introduction

36 3.2. Guilt and the Anthropological Exotic

36 3.3. Guilt and the Epistemological Exotic

39 3.4. Conclusion 44

4. Telling Stories: Becoming Transgressive 46

4.1. Introduction

46 4.2. Style and Stucture in Ventos do Apocalipse

46 4.3. Style and Structure in A Costa dos Murmúrios

51 4.4. Conclusion

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Conclusion: Of exorcisms and the (un)spoken amulet of Gender 56

Bibliography 58

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This study is based on Lídia Jorge’s A Costa dos Murmúrios and Paulina

Chiziane’s Ventos do Apocalipse. It poses the question of how these authors make

use of storytelling, gender and exoticism in their re-writing of national armed

conflict (Portuguese colonial war waged against the Mozambicans and the

Mozambican civil war, respectively). The main argument of this work reads the

narratives as strategically feminine and strategically exotic texts, tactically

placing gender issues at the heart of violence to suggest new definitions of

national identity according to a redefinition of gender. The study combines

feminism of difference (language, gender, sexual difference) with postcolonial

theory. It attempts a critical re-reading of Graham Huggan’s definition of the

postcolonial exotic in terms of a critical articulation of Butler’s gender theory,

Cixous’s notion of feminine discourse and Deleuze’s theory of Becoming-

Woman. These theories contribute to a feminist reading of the texts due to their

emphasis on a state of Becoming rather than Being. Boaventura de Sousa Santos’

concept of the Portuguese colonial specificity is conjugated with Homi Bhabha’s

notion of colonial mimicry and utilised to deal with the construction of

Mozambique as a former colony on the economic periphery of Portugal (as

semiperiphery in the world system), and of Portugal’s own inner periphery (in

terms of Jorge’s creation of a ‘national exotic’). I examine the construction and

the role of female characters within the fictional landscape of the narratives, as

well as the authors’ thematic, stylistic and structural subversions of possible

exoticised readings of the texts. I investigate how the authors deconstruct the

national imaginary of the past by means of a particular telling of stories that

unfolds, on the one hand, Portugal’s colonial problem of self-representation and,

on the other, Mozambique’s problematic process of becoming-nation.

THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION submitted by Ana Margarida Dias Martins for the Degree of Master of Arts and entitled ‘Prisoners of Anamnesis: Exorcising History through Storytelling in the work of Lídia Jorge and Paulina Chiziane’.

September 2005

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DECLARATION

No portion of the work referred to in this dissertation has been submitted in

support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other

university or other institute of learning.

COPYWRIGHT STATEMENT

(1) Copyright in text of this dissertation rests with the author. Copies (by

any process) either in full, or of extracts, may be made only in

accordance with instructions given by the Author and lodged in the

John Rylands University library of Manchester. Details may be

obtained from the Librarian. This page must form part of any such

copies made. Further copies (by any process) of copies made in

accordance with such instructions may not be made without the

permission (in writing) of the Author.

(2) The ownership of any intellectual property rights which may be

described in this dissertation is vested in the University of Manchester,

subject to any prior agreement to the contrary, and may not be made

available for use by third parties without the written permission of the

University, which will prescribe the terms and conditions of any such

agreement. (3) Further information on the conditions under which disclosures and

exploitation may take place is available from the Head of the School of

Languages, Linguistics and Cultures.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank my supervisor and friend Hilary Owen for all her stimulating

criticism, guidance and support throughout the year, and for her constant words

of advice and encouragement. I warmly thank my family for their unspeakable

support, for the parcels of miminhos and for being on the other side of the phone

every night. Finally, I thank my friends, present and absent, for their interest

and encouragement, and for the food, the music, the smiles, the compulsive

cinema, the emails, the books, the conversations, the love. Obrigada.

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Ao meu querido Contador de histórias,

Avô Ce(le)stin(h)o

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Introduction

The Past is such a curious Creature

To look her in the Face

A Transport may receipt us

Or a Disgrace –1

To those believing the future of the past is their responsibility, Dickinson’s

‘curious Creature’ might sound more than curious. She might sound

threatening. Lurking behind these lines is a subtle evocation of the mythical

Medusa, with hair of a thousand snakes, turning into stone those who cannot

refrain from looking her in the eye. Sooner or later, we all fix our eyes upon her.

There is always a quiet joy in the recognition of the past, as if remembering

provided a special garment clothing the self in the present. But, like colonies of

ants underneath solid stones, so too behind every historical gathering numerable

constellations of meanings move in all directions, in a perpetual storing of what

is perhaps only storable in the form of stories. That is the past.

The goal of this study goes beyond addressing the ways in which two women

writers ‘look her in the Face’, to borrow Dickinson’s phrase. The four chapters

of this study deal with an increasingly expanding field of debate, that of

postcolonial Lusophone literature. Topics such as memory, storytelling, gender

and exoticism guide the analysis of two sets of textual objects, representing both

Portugal as a former colonial empire - Lídia Jorge’s A Costa dos Murmúrios –

and Mozambique as a former Portuguese colonial territory – Paulina Chiziane’s

Ventos do Apocalipse.2

The main argument of this work reads the narratives as strategically feminine

and strategically exotic texts. I argue that both authors tactically weave together

gender and exoticism with past national armed conflicts by placing gender issues

at the heart of violence to suggest new definitions of national identity according

to a redefinition of gender. These considerations raise a number of questions.

1 Emily Dickinson, ‘The Past is such a curious Creature’, in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. by T. Johnson (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1970), p. 531. 2 L. Jorge, A Costa dos Murmúrios (Lisboa: D. Quixote, 2004). Further references to this book are given after quotations in the text; P. Chiziane, Ventos do Apocalipse (Lisboa: Editorial Caminho, 1999). Further references to this book are given after quotation marks in the text.

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What is meant by strategically exotic/strategically feminine narratives, gender

and exoticism? What kind of alternative feminine voices do these narratives

encompass? What, in the symbolic construction and material production of these

postcolonial texts, contributes to a reading in the line of a feminist project?

To address these questions, I propose a textual comparative approach focusing

on the interconnections between the authors in terms of how language is used to

address cultural otherness in their storytelling and how meanings are

legitimised, authenticated and negotiated. Theoretically, the work combines

feminism of difference (language, gender, sexual difference) with postcolonial

theory, in an attempt to demarcate both the range and limitation of these

theories when applied to the texts. I attempt a critical rethinking of Graham

Huggan’s definition of the postcolonial exotic in terms of a critical articulation of

the postcolonial exotic with Judith Butler’s gender(s) theory, Heléne Cixous’s

concept of feminine discourse, and Gilles Deleuze’s theory of Becoming-Woman.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ concept of the Portuguese colonial specificity will

be conjugated with Homi Bhabha’s notion of colonial mimicry and utilised to

deal with the construction of Mozambique as a former colony on the economic

periphery of Portugal (as semiperiphery in the world system), and of Portugal’s

own inner periphery (in terms of Jorge’s creation of a ‘national exotic’).

Chapter 1 begins by providing a critical overview of Huggan’s definition of the

postcolonial exotic. Departing from a conventional approach to exoticism,

understood as a process through which the cultural other is rendered strange

even when translated into familiar terms, Huggan redefines the exotic within the

postcolonial field, where a re-politicisation of the term is deployed in the name of

a critique of power relations. The chapter goes on to develop the postcolonial

exotic to take account of gender, an area not explored in any depth by Huggan as

his insights into the postcolonial exotic focus mainly on the global economic

market (production, consumption and exchange of postcolonial literary

production/critical theory). I argue that at the intersection of gender,

storytelling, and memory is woman’s relation to language in a postcolonial

context. A revision of the concept of gender will be set in motion with reference

to Butler, Cixous and Deleuze as three theorists who, divergences apart, are

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connected by their emphasis on Becoming rather than Being. This chapter

analyses how these theories contribute to a feminist reading of the texts in terms

of a deconstructive performance of gender through a verbal performance of the

past: performance is seen as bringing out the ‘unsaid’ behind the word and the

‘unsettled’ behind history through the ‘unspoken’ in gender. The chapter ends

by stating why the two women writers under discussion are particularly

appropriate subjects for such an analysis: they write at a time and about a time

when patriarchal ideologies, historically and culturally different in Portugal and

Mozambique, weighed especially heavy on women.

Chapter 2 focuses on the relationship between gender inequality and armed

conflict by arguing that both Chiziane and Jorge place gender at the heart of the

wars (Mozambican civil war and Portugal’s colonial war in Mozambique,

respectively). While Ventos addresses gender inequality in terms of the role of

women in armed conflict, A Costa deals with the same issue from within the

system of exoticism, in terms of the role of women outside armed conflict. This

chapter develops the argument according to which national identity is

historically and culturally defined by these writers through a reading of the past

that re-interprets gender and places the feminine at the core of the countries’

conflicts.

Chapter 3 discusses the value of the aesthetic practices that tell the past,

specifically the colonial past, through the feminine. If, in Ventos, Chiziane’s

particular use of the story is strategically connected with a local cultural crisis,

translated into a ‘storytelling crisis’, in A Costa, Jorge’s strategic use of exoticism

develops a notion of the self through the point of view of the other, offering the

familiar Portuguese in the guise of a national gendered exotic. Jorge’s

production of an internal exotic is achieved not only through her manufacturing

of exotic otherness, but also through her particular use of storytelling, which

triggers a certain way of reading her text based on a western romantic ideal of

cognitive salvage fuelling what I call an epistemological exotic (doubling a

western romantic ideal of ethnographic salvage that fuels Huggan’s

anthropological exotic found in Chiziane’s text). This chapter develops the

argument whereby guilt (the common engine behind the action of both

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narratives), articulated with exoticism, is responsible for the production of

narratives that tactically defy exoticised readings of the books.

Finally, Chapter 4 dwells on the style and structure of the narratives. Their

linguistic, structural and stylistic deviancy is used to overrun patriarchal binary

logics in a postcolonial context. The chapter focuses on the creative (dis)orders

produced by Chiziane’s and Jorge’s processes of remembering and telling the

past. It contends that structural/stylistic problematisations match a

problematisation of the body in both novels, and propel the narratives’

transformative and therapeutic drives, through a de-territorialisation of memory

and identity.

To place this study in relation to other work in the field is to emphasise one of

the perils this project faces: the extensive bibliography on Jorge’s work seems to

declare the anaphoric nature of any other study on this author. Within

Portuguese postcolonial criticism, there is an extensive bibliography on Jorge

and specifically on A Costa dos Murmúrios. Substantially less has been written on

Chiziane.3 The creative insights of these studies not only ground this

investigation, but also help to allocate the path that leads to the formulation of

3 The following list is not exhaustive but merely exemplifies the focus on Jorge’s and Chiziane’s work: P. Jordão, Echoes of Transidentity: The transmission and construction of identity in two novels by Lídia Jorge (Universiteit Utrecht: Faculteit de Letteren, 2001); P. Jordão, ‘A Costa dos Murmúrios: Uma Ambiguidade Inesperada’, pp. 49-59, in Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, II, Spring 1999; S. Campos, ‘Corporeal Identity: Representations of Female Sexuality and the Body in the Novels of Paulina Chiziane’, pp. 137-54, in Sexual/Textual Empires: Gender and Marginality in Lusophone African Literature, ed. by H. Owen and P. Rothwell, Lusophone Studies 2 (Bristol: University of Bristol Press, 2004); H. Sapega, ‘No Longer Alone and Proud: Notes on the Rediscovery of the Nation in Contemporary Portuguese Fiction’ pp. 168-186, in After the Revolution: Twenty years of Portuguese Literature 1974-1994, ed. by H. Kaufman and A. Klobucka (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1997), p. 181; N. Nogueira, ‘A Dualidade essencial em A Costa dos Murmúrios de Lídia Jorge’ pp. 71-76, in A Mulher Escritora em África e na América Latina, ed. by A. Mão-de-Ferro (Évora Codex: NUM, 1999); N. Mackenzie, ‘Portuguese Silence After Decolonisation: A Female Perspective’ (unpublished Master dissertation, University of Manchester, 2005); A. Ferreira, ‘Lídia Jorge’s A Costa dos Murmúrios: History and the Postmodern She-Wolf’, pp. 268-78, in Revista Hispânica Moderna, Vol. XLV, 2, December 1992; H. Kaufman, ‘Reclaiming the Margins of History in Lídia Jorge’s A Costa dos Murmúrios’, pp. 41-9, in Luso-Brazilian Review, Vol. XIX, 1, Summer 1992; M. Santos, ‘Bondoso Caos de Lídia Jorge: A Costa dos Murmúrios’, pp. 64-7, in Colóquio/Letras, 107 (1989). A. Leite, ‘Paulina Chiziane: Romance de Costumes, Histórias Morais’, pp. 75-88, in Literaturas Africanas e Formulacões Pós-coloniais (Lisboa: Colibri, 2003); M. Laban, ‘Encontro com Paulina Chiziane’, pp. 969-94, in Moçambique: Encontro com Escritores, Vol. III (Porto: Fundação Engenheiro António de Almeida, 1998); P. Chabal, The Postcolonial Literature of Lusophone Africa (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1996); H. Owen, ‘The Serpent’s Tongue: Gendering Autoethnography in Paulina Chiziane’s Balada de Amor ao Vento’, pp. 169-84, in Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, 10, Spring 2003; I. Mata, ‘Paulina Chiziane: Uma Colectora de Memórias Imaginadas’, pp. 135-42, in Metamorfoses 1, 2000.

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new perspectives on the subject. This study provides a new comparative

approach to the academic field of postcolonial literature in the Portuguese-

speaking world, as no work compares Jorge to Portuguese-speaking African

women writers. The novelty of this investigation therefore resides in its

analogical approach to two writers embodying two halves of the same colonial

coin.

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1. Mapping the Field

1.1. The postcolonial exotic under the sign of the global economic market. In The Postcolonial Exotic, Huggan’s examination of some of the processes

whereby value is attributed to postcolonial works within their cultural field is

preceded by an analysis of the term ‘postcolonial’.4 He argues that the discussion

of postcolonialism as opposed to postcoloniality is determined by the urgent need

for vigilance regarding neocolonial structures of power in the age of global

commodity. In his attempt to clarify the meanings of these two regimes of value,

Huggan evokes the distinction between postmodernism and postmodernity.

Postcolonialism is seen as sharing some postmodernist preoccupations with

textual indeterminacy, the crisis of meaning, and the effort to marginalise,

delimit and decentre Eurocentric frames of reference. Postcoloniality, on the

contrary, is said to be largely a function of postmodernity, as ‘its own regime of

value pertains to a system of symbolic, as well as material exchange in which

even the language of resistance may be manipulated and consumed’ (2001: 6).

Postcolonialism and postcoloniality are not entirely antipodal points on the

surface of the postcolonial field of production. The two regimes of value are

mutually entangled. As Huggan points out, ‘postcolonialism is bound up with

postcoloniality; but to admit as much is not to “sell out” to pernicious capitalist

causes, it is rather to interrogate and strategise one’s own position within the

institutional parameters of the postcolonial field’ (2001: 9). Central to Huggan’s

argument is therefore the irresolvable struggle between these two regimes of

value, in the name of cultural difference. Under the sign of the postcolonial,

4 G. Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001). Further references to this book are given after quotations in the text.

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cultural difference becomes politicised, revealing the unequal relations of power

through its representations. Within the globalised commodity culture, cultural

difference acquires an aesthetic value that is, in Huggan’s words, often measured

explicitly or implicitly in terms of the exotic.

Exoticism is bound up with cultural translation. By cultural translation Huggan

means the superimposition of a dominant way of thinking, speaking and seeing

onto marginalised people. Exoticism effectively hides the power relations behind

essential labels of marginalised racial/ethnic groups, ‘allowing the dominant

culture to attribute value to the margins while continuing to define them in its

own self-privileging terms’ (2001: 24). The exotic describes a particular mode of

perception that is political and aesthetic, converting cultural difference into

spectacle. If nineteenth-century exoticisms were the product of the expansion of

the nations and about the concealment of imperial authority through the exotic

spectacle, late twentieth-century exoticisms seem to be the product of a

worldwide market, ‘shifting from a more or less privileged mode of aesthetic

perception to an increasingly global mode of mass-market consumption’ (2001:

15). This is due to a massification of exotic merchandise.

The globalised circulation of exotic products, therefore, seems to have

reinvigorated the exotic instead of destroying it. It also seems to have called for a

reconsideration of the conventional exoticist distinction between (imperial)

centre and periphery. The crumbling of imperial centres allows for exotic

products to be characterised ‘not by remoteness but by proximity – by their

availability in a shop or street market or shopping-mall somewhere near you’

(2001: 15). However, as Huggan notes, one must not forget about the significant

continuities between older forms of imperial exoticist representation and some of

their allegedly postcolonial counterparts.

Today, postcolonial writers and critics are not only subject to but are also active

manipulators of exoticist codes of cultural representation. Huggan delineates two

ways by which continuities between old and new forms of imperialism are

perpetuated, both working in the production and consumption of postcolonial

literary/cultural texts. One of these is commodity fetishism. According to the

Marxian formulation, commodity fetishism describes the veiling of the material

conditions under which commodities are produced and consumed. Huggan

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argues that ‘[i] n conveying both the allure of the commodity (through

mystification) and the illusion of the severance of the finished work from its

process of production, commodity fetishism links up with earlier forms of

exoticist representation, arguably becoming the postmodern version of exoticist

mystique’ (2001:18). Through mystification of historical experiences, imagined

access to the cultural other through consumption and reification of people and

places into exchangeable aesthetic objects, commodity fetishism contributes to

the mystification of foreign cultures in ways that empower mainstream cultures.

Another means of continuity between past and present forms of imperialism is

the aesthetics of decontextualisation, which, according to Appadurai, is

connected with ‘the diversion of commodities from their original cultural

nexus’.5 Placing objects and things in unlikely contexts potentially intensifies the

commoditisation of the artefacts of the ‘other’ because it enhances their value

through their decontextualisation.

Decontextualising what is rendered as ‘other’ precedes its domestication, a

process through which commodities are taken from the margins and absorbed

into mainstream culture. Marginality is often seen positively in contemporary

cultural theory, due to its power to disrupt and destabilise the authority of the

centre. However, the commodification of marginality, understood as the attempt

to ensure the availability of the margins for the mainstream, keeps it exotic:

exoticism is perpetuated as ‘the regulating mechanism that attempts to

manoeuvre difference back again to the same’ (2001: 22). What is at work here is

a commodified process referred to at the beginning of this chapter: that of

cultural translation whereby marginality is defined through its conformity to

mainstream culture. Such a process not only sterilises marginal thinking in

terms of its subversive potential, but also ascribes to it a predominantly aesthetic

value, reducing marginality to fetishised cultural difference.

In his quest for ways of contesting such neo-imperialist tendencies, Huggan

emphasises the incorporation of the exotic ‘into works that challenge – often

looking to subvert – metropolitan mainstream cultural codes’ (2001: 27). This

backs up his definition of a ‘postcolonial exotic’, as marking ‘the intersection

5 A. Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspetive (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 28.

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between contending regimes of value: postcolonialism and postcoloniality’ (2001:

28). In an attempt to understand how value is generated in the postcolonial field

of production, Huggan resorts to the politics of value that govern commodity

exchange, outlined by Appadurai, only to conclude that these categories have

equivalents in the postcolonial field:

‘the politics of diversion and of display’ (the spectacle of cultural difference); ‘the politics of authenticity and of authentication’ (the construction of native authenticity, the marginal voice, the representative writer); ‘the politics of knowledge and ignorance’ (alteritism, the fetishisation of the other); ‘the politics of expertise … and connoisseurship’ (aestheticisation, mechanisms of professional legitimisation).

(2001: 31)

Because these categories also belong to the discourse of the exotic, Huggan

argues that the postcolonial exotic is very much central to the postcolonial field.

His definition of the term incorporates the dilemma surrounding the

construction of an object that resists its own commodification:

The postcolonial exotic … is many different things at once: a mechanism of cultural translation for the English speaking mainstream and a vehicle for the estrangement of metropolitan mainstream views; a semiotic circuit in which the signs of oppositionality are continually recoded, circulating alternately as commodities within a late capitalist, neo imperialist symbolic economy and as markers of anti imperialist resistance …

(2001: 32)

As an answer to the question of what can be done with this dilemmatic definition,

Huggan focuses on how authors make use of a ‘strategic exoticism’: ‘the means

by which postcolonial writers/thinkers, working from within exoticist codes of

representation, either manage to subvert those codes … or succeed in

redeploying them for the purposes of uncovering differential relations of power’

(2001: 32).

Huggan’s groundbreaking insights into the postcolonial exotic and specifically

his concept of strategic exoticism influence and guide this study only to the extent

that they provide a background onto which new perspectives are projected. It

seems problematic that such thought-provoking work is often evasive and

crucially silent on matters concerning gender subordination and performance,

women’s writing and power relations within the language. In fact, Huggan’s

extremely appealing text would be worth studying simply for the very reason

that it hardly ever mentions these topics. He concludes The Postcolonial Exotic by

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stating that ‘the language of resistance is entangled, like it or not, with the

language of commerce; the anti-colonial in the neo-colonial, postcolonialism in

postcoloniality’. But how is one to ‘lay bare the workings of commodification’

behind the workings of the globalised alterity industry’ (2001: 264) if, as Nfah-

Abbenyi rightly argues, the language of resistance deliberately excludes the

‘subjectivity in women’s bid for agency and self-determination’?6 How can the

value of marginality be discussed while the (post)colonial women writers’ voice is

ignored, both as a doubly disabling discourse, and, perhaps due to that, as a

doubly subversive weapon of resistance? Any serious attempt to formulate these

questions will lead to the conclusion that the trouble with postcolonialism as an

institutionalised academic field is of a double nature. The neo imperialist

implications of a postcolonial literary/critical industry centred on the west are no

doubt magnified through a tacit, ‘behind-the-curtain’ handling of gender, while

on stage a flashy dissection of the postcolonial literary/critical industry takes

place. Thus, what follows is a consideration of the extent to which feminist theory

is able to account for the issues involved in this work, namely gender, language

and exoticism.

1.2. The postcolonial exotic under the sign of gender

The discussion of the postcolonial exotic under the sign of gender calls, firstly,

for an analysis of what is meant by gender, and secondly, for an inevitable

confrontation of gender and sexual difference theories within the feminism of

difference. For the rest of this chapter, I intend to contextualise and discuss the

work of three theorists - Cixous, Butler and Deleuze. This choice is grounded on

their common emphasis on Becoming rather than Being and on their divergences

in terms of sexual difference and gender.7

6 J. Nfah-Abbenyi, Gender in African Women’s Writing: Identity, Sexuality and Difference (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 17. 7 In this study I resort to the following works (among others) by the theorists mentioned: H. Cixous, ‘The laugh of the Medusa’ (1983), in

Feminisms: A Reader, ed. by M. Humm (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992); J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); G. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: The Athlone Press, 1987).

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The feminism of difference places sexuality, along with race and class, as a

category to identify differences between groups. Academic transatlantic divides

tend to place American theories of gender in direct opposition to continental

theories of sexual difference. Sexual difference theory expresses the feminist

political passion for social and individual in-depth change according to a re-

evaluation of the body. It calls for a critical and deconstructive investigation of

sexuality as a privileged site of constitution of the subject. The concern to fight

back the systematic social stereotypes of sexual difference divides into three

schools of thought. The so-called French feminists such as Cixous and Irigaray

focus on sexual differences in language; others like C. Gilligan and J. Butler

describe sexual difference in terms of gender identity; finally, theorists such as A.

Rich and M. Daly define differences in terms of sexual preferences and not

simply on the basis of gender identity.8

I depart from Cixous’s line of thought that considers art and literature as

privileged sites offering evidence of the ways in which differences of thought are

structured. Following on from S. Beauvoir’s description of ‘woman as Other to

man’, Cixous examines the dichotomies man/woman, mind/nature. Cixous very

explicitly values femininity and writing, the first as an alternative economy that

exceeds binary logic and can overturn the existing patriarchal order, and the

second as an act of liberation from social censorship and personal inhibitions.9

Drawing women closer to writing is Cixous’s constant plea:

Woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies.10

Cixous’ concept of écriture féminine is a concept that refuses any established

definitions: ‘it is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is

an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorised,

enclosed, coded’.11 She emphasises the relationship with the body, more than the

physical features of the (male/female) body itself, in her formulation of feminine

writing. Such writing will serve as a rupture, or a site of transformation or

8 M. Humm (ed) Feminisms: a Reader (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), p. 193. 9 S. Cornell, ‘Hélene Cixous and les Études Féminines’, pp. 31-48, in H. Wilcox et al (eds.) The Body and the Text: Hélene Cixous, Reading and Teaching (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), p. 35. 10 H. Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1983), p 196. 11 H. Cixous (1983), p. 200.

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change; she uses ‘rupture’ in a Derridean sense: a place where the totality of the

system breaks down and one can see a system as a structure, rather than simply

‘the truth’. Cixous deliberately plays with gender norms, proliferating gender

configurations beyond the substantive stable identity of ‘femininity’, as a

‘woman’s only’ territory, traditionally designating the woman as men might

wish her to be, defined by masculine fantasies.12 As an attempt to subvert the

discourse of patriarchy, Cixous’s highly subversive vision of writing is not

limited to women:

In my seminar … I speak of a decipherable libidinal femininity which can be read in a writing produced by a male or a female.13

Feminine writing has been the victim of constant criticism since the term was

first coined in 1975. Shiach addresses the criticisms endured by Cixous, charged

for being essentialist, reducing women to an essence … and thus negating the

possibility of the very change she seeks to promote’.14 J. Still relates Cixous’s

feminine writing to an idea of feminine economy, problematising whether it

emphasises physical difference of the relationship with one’s body, and also the

extent to which privileging qualities attributed to the feminine contributes to the

establishment of sexual hierarchies. Another critique of Cixous springs from her

negotiation of dualisms. Her apparent reliance on foundational dualist

structures, while serving to emphasise the movements in which oppositional

structures are breached, still conforms, to a certain extent, to the ‘twofold’ law.

Clearly, Cixous believes that undoing the symbolic order requires that very

order. In fact, as R. Braidotti wittily puts it, ‘women who yearn for change

cannot shed their old skins like snakes’.15 Braidotti regrets the reception of

continental theories of sexual difference in the U.S.A. and defines the points on

which this reception rests: ‘essentialism (sexual difference is allegedly a-historic

and deterministic and thus leaves no room for social change); universalism (it

makes over-general claims and disregards cultural diversity) and heterosexism

12 S. Cornell (1990), p. 37. 13 H. Cixous, To Live the Orange (Paris: Des Femmes, 1979), p. 48. 14 M. Shiach, Hélene Cixous: A Politics of Writing (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 17. On criticism of Cixous see, for example, Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985). 15 R. Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialistic Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), p. 26.

19

(it plays down the creative subversive force of power of lesbian and homosexual

desire)’.16 Since the 80s, debate has opposed the strategic essentialism of Cixous

to the neo-materialism of M. Wittig. Butler retained from Wittig two crucial

notions that she used to oppose the feminism of sexual difference: the

performativity of gender and a hermeneutics of suspicion towards the category

of ‘woman’ taken as the foundation of feminist politics. The first emphasises the

normativity of ‘woman’ within the regulatory discourse of sexuality, and the

second stresses the limitations of the category ‘woman’: it fails to be exhaustive

because gender intersects with ‘racial, class, ethnic, sexual and regional

modalities of discursively constituted identities’.17

Butler’s work perceives gender not as a core aspect of one’s identity but rather

as a performance, how one behaves at different times. What she longs for is a

strategy by which she can leave behind the regulatory fictions of sexuality.

Gender is devised as an identity constituted in time through a ‘stylised repetition

of acts’, a norm that can never be fully internalised because it is impossible to

embody.18 In the context of this study, what is interesting about Butler’s theory is

her concept of ‘ambivalence’, closely related to Derrida’s concept of différance

(différance understood as ‘the possibility of the play of presence and absence of

entities, or metaphysics, and of the world as such’).19 Ambivalence, perceived as

a site of subversion, allows for gender discontinuities in which ‘gender does not

necessarily follow from sex, and desire … does not seem to follow from gender’.20

Butler writes that the ambivalence between the ideal and the norm makes

compulsory heterosexuality forever unstable, forever needing to reinforce itself,

to repeat imitations of its ideals. Identity is therefore seen as an illusion

retroactively created by our performances. The performative is roughly

understood as a doing that constitutes a being, an activity that creates what it

describes.21 A shift in the context of performances may lead to the parody of

16 R. Braidotti (2002), p. 29. 17 J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 3. 18 R. Braidotti (2002), pp. 37, 140. 19 I. Harvey, Derrida and the Economy of Différance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 206. 20 J. Butler (1990), p. 135-6. 21 J. Austin, How to do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).

20

dominant conventions that render actions and behaviours intelligible and

acceptable, troubling dominant notions of what it means to be female and male.

Butler exemplifies her vision of gender and of subversion:

To claim that all gender is like drag, or is drag, is to suggest that imitation is at the heart of the heterosexual project and its gender binarisms, that drag is not a secondary imitation that presupposes a prior and original gender, but that hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a constant and repeated effort to imitate its own idealizations… drag is subversive to the extent that it reflects on the imitative structure by which hegemonic gender is itself produced and disputes heterosexuality’s claim on naturalness and originality.22

Butler does not agree with the centrality of the bodily matter in Cixous’s and

Irigaray’s theories because she does not believe that an emphasis on the feminine

can ever subvert the representational economy of phallogocentrism’. Contrarily

to this line of thought, Cixous recognises the subversive powers of working

through the images and representations that the masculine knowing subject has

created of Woman as Other. Braidotti refers to this as a strategy of mimesis: the

debate on the feminine happens in terms of a mimetic relationship with the

subject. 23

Lurking behind these polemic divides is the threat of a phallocentric revival

through gender pluralism/strategic essentialism. Therefore, it is crucial to fight

back these divides by discussing sexual difference and sexuality to enact ‘real’ in-

depth transformations. As Braidotti argues, ‘the point is not to know who we

are, but rather what, at last, we want to Become, how to represent mutations,

changes and transformations, rather than Being in its classical modes’.24

In this study I consider the concept of becoming that perceives feminism as a

continuous revisionist undertaking. This emphasis on ‘everlasting becomings’ is

reinforced by the French poststructuralist Deleuze. Cixous’s notion of feminine

writing is contemporaneous to Deleuze’s notion of becoming. Both theorists

emerge in the post-68 context, a period of intense cultural revolution. As C.

Colebrook notes, the link between woman and becoming formed part of a

22 J. Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 125. 23 R. Braidotti (2002), p. 25. 24 (2002), p. 2.

21

general movement in the Parisian terrain of the time.25 Contrarily to Cixous,

Deleuze is not interested in ‘woman’ as an individual identity. In his opinion, a

clear cut distinction between the sexes is reductive. Therefore, his concept of

‘becoming-woman’ is not directed at women as group of people with a shared sex

and identity, but at everyone in terms of a deep transformation and

transgression of identity. He recognises the constitution of the subject through

language but proposes a new subject, one that was never centred, instead of a

decentred subject. In this sense, Deleuze resembles Huggan: in both, gender

remains to a great extent latent.

Deleuze conceives anti-hierarchical ways of thinking the subject. If the centred

or decentred subject is perceived as sedentary, socially ‘nailed down’ to a

subjectivity, the a-centred subject is nomadic, because ‘the life of the nomad is in

the intermezzo’.26 His continual evocation of phenomena that evade

domestication by western culture is underlined through the concept of de-

territorialisation: becoming-woman aims at a kind of erasure, an

imperceptibility not as a function of invisibility but as a function of

recomposition, a radical change in consistency, where the connecting thread is

not one of subjective identity:

But what does becoming-imperceptible signify, coming at the end of all molecular becomings that begin with becoming-woman?... A first response would be: to be like everyone else.27

Writing away from a unified subject, Deleuze searches for other structures that

are unknown and cannot be easily identified with language. These structures are

meant to transform Life into a work in progress and Being into Becomings ‘that

are more than simple transformations of an existing real’.28 The outcome of a

Deleuzian becoming-woman is never emphasised, for becoming is the process

itself, dwelling in an eternal state of ‘betweenness’. From here it is easily spotted

a similarity in Deleuze’s notion of becoming and Cixous’s notion of the NBW

25 I. Buchanan and C. Colebrook (eds) Deleuze and Feminist Theory (Edinburgh: University Press, 2000), p. 12. 26 G. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: The Athlone Press, 1987), pp. 159, 379. 27 G. Deleuze and Guattari (1987), p. 279. 28 V. Conley, ‘Becoming Woman Now’, in C. Colebrook (2000), p. 21.

22

(Newly Born Woman).29 The newly born woman continuously engenders the self

by opening it to metamorphoses and becomings. V. Conley points out the

intersections between the writer and the philosopher:

Cixous in Prénons de Personne and in the Newly Born Woman, writes of unlimited becomings and of ongoing transformations of Western thought. She strives to undermine the unified (male) subject equated with deadly forms of narcissism, as a means of changing social and political structures altogether. … They both emphasise becomings and militate against the Oedipal theatre that benefits those in power. … Cixous and Deleuze make it clear: … Both philosophers and poets can write against power by carrying a kind of guerrilla welfare.30

If Cixous’s mode of writing is reminiscent of Deleuze’s philosophical becomings,

Butler’s perception of gender as a performative act may also synchronise with

Deleuze’s notion of becoming as recomposition and simulation (as the opposite of

identification): ‘if identification is nomination, a designation, then simulation is

the writing corresponding to it, a writing that is strangely polyvocal’.31 These

considerations are, nevertheless, cut across by Butler’s disagreement with

Deleuze’s cosmic vision of the world that turns desire into a ‘privileged locus of

human ontology, an ontology that suffers for lack of historicised context’.32

What holds these three theorists together in the context of this study is a

common search for other structures, for ways out from the confines of a

disciplinary society, in terms of an idea of becoming guided by notions of

perpetual transformative movements in progress. The key words here are

mutations, changes, transformations, metamorphoses. Connecting the theoretical

threads of gender and the postcolonial exotic is woman’s relation to language

through an adaptation of the notion of ‘becoming’, slightly twisted to

accommodate Cixous’s, Butler’s and Deleuze’s perceptions of the term. As the

following chapters will clarify, Jorge and Chiziane are particularly appropriate

subjects for such an analysis. Their different discursive structures and styles are

responsible for a deconstructive performance of gender through a performance

of the word. This is perceived as a strategically exotic device that seeks to

29 H. Cixous, The Newly Born Woman, trans. by Betsy Wing (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996) 30 (2000), pp.22-7. 31 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York: Viking Press, 1977), p. 87. 32 J. Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 206.

23

challenge ‘institutional structures and dominant systems of representation’

(Huggan, 2001: 32) through a subversive employment of gender within a specific

narrative style. What is at stake in these texts is a somewhat different ‘strategic

exoticism’ from that proposed by Huggan, because it deals with the postcolonial

exotic under the sign of gender directed towards a process of becoming, within

the capitalist logic of production/consumption. The authors’ crafty performances

of gender defy the structures by which gender is produced. This, more than

bringing marginal genders into the scene, mainly reconceptualises gender

identity, national identity and narrative in deregulatory ways. Also, Jorge and

Chiziane’s skilled performance of stories is responsible for bringing about

national and individual unsettled memories and ‘unspoken’ meanings behind

official and personal stories. This performative writing moves beyond oblivion

and activates a therapeutic process whereby stories become transformative

through their strategic stylistic and gendered performance.

2. Telling the Feminine(s): Becoming Women

2.1. Introduction

Setting out the tone of the debate in this chapter is the study of the performative

construction of non/conformist characters and their role within fictional

landscapes built to criticise past and present social configurations. So far, the

majority of studies on Ventos and A Costa have more or less centred their focus

on the analysis of protagonist couples such as Minosse/Sianga (Ventos) and

Ev/ita/Luis Alex, Helena/Forza Leal (A Costa).33 A walk through the array of

female characters so far more or less neglected by critics, will unfold their role

within the semantic constellation of these narratives and help demonstrate that,

in both narratives, gender inequality is placed at the root of the armed conflicts.

A definition of national identity is attempted through a cultural interpretation of

the past that re-configures gender and places the feminine at the heart of both

countries’ agenda. The authors of Ventos and A Costa are responsible for the

33 In this study, I follow P. Jordão’s adoption of the form ‘Ev/ita’ in Echoes of Transidentity: The Transmission and construction of Identity in two novels by Lidia Jorge (Universiteit Utrecht: Faculteit der Letteren: 2001), to refer to the two narrators of A Costa simultaneously.

24

reconfiguration of history through storytelling, as they textualise the memory of

armed conflict by means of a problematisation of the historical past seen through

the lenses of gender.

2.2. The Genders Within: (En)Gendering the Mozambican civil war.

Considering that Chiziane emerged as the first Mozambican woman novelist in

1990 (with Balada de Amor ao Vento) in a country that has heard too few feminine

voices in comparison to the numerous influential masculine voices (J.

Craveirinha, Ba Ka Khosa, L. Honwana, M. Couto, to name just a few), it is not

surprising that the author consistently chooses to highlight women by

emphasising their subaltern position within the family and the community. In

Ventos, the author looks back at a ravaging civil war that followed the end of

colonialism and devastated her country for more than almost two decades. On a

first level, Chiziane’s vision of the past describes the effects of brutal armed

conflict, famine and draught. On a deeper level, her book boldly tackles the

causes of national conflict through a number of insights into the construction of

gender within the Mozambican society.

Chiziane’s gender negotiations seek to challenge dominant systems of

representation by politicising family, too often turned apolitical for the sake of

violence and war legitimisation. If gender is manipulated strategically by the

author, and if received gender norms are interpreted and organised anew in the

context of a country’s civil war, to what extent does the narrative undertake a

move from gender identity towards national identity? To answer, I shall explore

the status of the young woman in relation to Butler’s performative notion of

gender to suggest that the engendering of female characters acknowledges

gender in terms of a corporealisation of choice and places gender inequalities at

the heart of the Mozambican civil war.

Writing the body within the particular context of Mozambique is, as Campos

argues, a process deeply rooted in the ‘material conditions created by local

patriarchal practice, sexist mythological beliefs, colonialism, slavery and civil

25

wars’.34 Because we are dealing with the narration of unsettled civil war

memories, the representation of gender identity is here a politicised

interpretation of cultural meanings in the context of an important armed conflict

being rescued from oblivion with a clear purpose: to criticise specific structures

of power that have survived and still exist in the present. Werbner notes that ‘the

critique of power in contemporary Africa calls for a theoretically informed

anthropology of memory and the making of political subjectivities’ as a way of

rethinking our understanding of the force of memory that ‘moves beyond the

personal and the social in postcolonial transformations’.35 Chiziane’s textual

enshrining of her country’s endemic civil war allows for a linguistic construction

of female personal agency whereby one becomes one’s gender through a

corporealisation of choice that challenges the victim/perpetrator dichotomy. An

analysis of three female characters from Ventos - Wusheni, Mara and Emelina -

will demonstrate that this challenge, more than relocating women inside the

conflict, also reframes the conflict itself by directing the attention to its

foundations.

Wusheni, the daughter of Sianga and Minosse, lives in Mananga with her

parents. She falls in love with Dambuza (an outcast living in Mananga) and uses

her pregnancy to escape the marriage her father had prepared for her. In the

episode where Wusheni kills her own brother (Manuna) to prevent him from

murdering her partner, Dambuza, during his sleep, Wusheni is also killed by her

brother. The murders take place in the context of an attack on the village of

Mananga perpetrated by RENAMO-recruited boys.36 By killing Wusheni,

Manuna also kills the baby she carried in her womb. This event is interpreted by

Campos as ‘symbolic of the fratricidal war that is devastating the Motherland,

whose womb is being completely destroyed, leaving no hope for a future

generation to even come into existence’.37 The interpretation, undoubtedly valid,

34 S. Campos, ‘Corporeal Identity: Representations of Female Sexuality and the Body in the Novels of Paulina Chiziane’, pp. 137-54, in Sexual/Textual Empires: Gender and Marginality in Lusophone African Literature, ed. by H. Owen & P. Rothwell, Lusophone Studies 2 (Bristol: University of Bristol Press, 2004), p. 138. 35 R. Werbner (ed) Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the critique of power (London & New York: Zed Books, 1998), p. 2. 36 RENAMO: Mozambican political party (Renovação Nacional de Moçambique). 37 S. Campos (2004), p. 144.

26

nevertheless disregards an important aspect: the author’s commitment to add

gender to the analysis of armed conflict as a way of realigning national history

through a reorganisation of gender norms and behaviours. In this case, family

relations become political not only due to the fratricidal encounter, but also due

to the construction of women not as passive, helpless, innocent victims of war,

but as active subjects within the conflict. In an article dedicated to the activities

of women in times of war, I. Palmary points out that ‘the analysis of the role of

gender relations in the construction of the identities about which wars are fought

and the implications that this might have for our understanding of women’s

positioning within armed conflict is arguably the most neglected area of

writing’.38 Palmary notes that the label of innocence wrapped around the women

and children is many times used to justify war in the name of protecting the most

vulnerable. In the context of this study, the analysis of the role of gender

relations is achieved by scanning the construction of female characters and

examining the narrative style of Ventos (a topic to be analysed in a later chapter).

By revealing Wusheni’s attitude in the face of danger, and by contrasting her

behaviour with ‘normal’ (expected) gender attitudes, the narrator rehearses the

blooming of new genders through a woman’s performance that places gender

within the political sphere and runs beyond anatomical and culturally prescribed

categories of sex. The rehearsal of new genders is achieved also through the

exploration of expected male attitudes which are somehow twisted during the

attack to the village, and opposed to female unexpectedly assertive reactions:

Os homens são os primeiros a correr na saraivada de fogo na busca desesperada de um abrigo. ... Na instintiva fúria de fêmeas tentam o impossível, lançam-se na refrega, mãos nuas contra tiros de canhão, morrem lutando, com os rostos carregados de ódio.

(VA: 117)

Dambuza, lying helpless against the wall in the face of Manuna, and later

committing suicide through hanging, is the opposite of the wide-eyed Wusheni

‘atrás da porta empunhando a catana com força de mulher’ (VA: 117, my

emphasis). Previous references to expected female behaviours only call attention

to Wusheni’s attitude in the face of danger: 38 ‘Family resistances: women, war and the family in the African Great Lakes’, pp. 54-65, in Feminisms & Activisms, Annual Review of Critical Psychology, Issue 4 – 2005, p. 57.

27

Mulheres, eternas medrosas – diz [Sianga] com desprezo. (...) As mulheres estão habituadas a gritar esperando que os homens tomem a sua defesa.

(VA: 116-7)

Chiziane’s re-reading of the past seems to place gender inequality at the centre

of the Mozambican civil war: Wusheni and Manuna kill each other as the direct

consequence of the former’s persecution for having refused to follow the path she

ought to follow as a woman. Wusheni’s rejection of her father’s profitable

marriage plans triggers an episode that can be interpreted as symbolic of a

fratricidal civil war largely based upon gender inequalities.

Also escaping marriage doctrines of femininity is Mara. This character lives in

Aldeia do Monte and falls in love with Sixpence, the man who conducted the

people of Mananga through the long and painful exodus until they reached

Aldeia do Monte, after the attack on Mananga. Mara is a young girl already

‘lobolada’ and about to get married. Despite her parents’ and her jealous

fiancée’s intimidations, she decides to live her own life in the name of the love she

suddenly feels for the foreigner:

Negligencia a enxada e o pilão. Esquece os ciúmes do noivo e as birras da mãe, que o milho espere e que o noivo desespere, que a fogueira fique por acender porque agora ela é mãe do filho que nasceu da morte. Tapa os ouvidos para as palavras que a repreendem, sente que está a viver o maior sonho do mundo.

(VA: 196)

In the process of nursing Sixpence, there is an interesting subversion of gender

hierarchies through the multiplication of strategic forms of power that liberates

Mara from social power dynamics and seems to destroy binary oppositions

between the sexes. Here, the ‘essential’ feminine is sharply deconstructed: from

being perceived as a child, a mother, and a sister, Mara finally becomes a

‘woman’. ‘Woman’ is here an ambivalent word that allows for gender

discontinuities, and implies a process of identification that is never stabilised,

precluding what Butler argues for: ‘a gender experience internally varied and

contradictory’.39

39 J. Butler, ‘Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig and Foucault, pp. 128-142, in Feminism as Critique, ed. by S. Benhabib & D. Cornell (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), p. 141.

28

It seems, however, that ‘becoming’ a woman is perceived reactively. Sixpence

interferes with Mara’s individual process of becoming her own gender. This

means that she is also constituted as a woman through Sixpence’s gaze, who sees

her as ‘mulher, meu Deus, vida que amei e perdi’ (VA: 197, my emphasis). Is

Mara’s process of ‘becoming’ a creative or a subordinated process? The Marxist

objection to Beauvoir’s theory of gender identity is precisely connected with the

social constitution of personal identity: through the gaze of the Other, a person’s

self-styled gender may be completely different from the gender others see her

through.40 In this particular case, someone else’s gaze is actively participating in

the realization of a new subjectivity which, although undoubtedly moving

beyond the repression of being constantly constituted by others (others being

Mara’s parents, her fiancée, and the people of Aldeia), is constituted in part by

an-other: Mara is assuming a being also according to Sixpence’s expectations

and needs. However, the emphasis is on a process of becoming that leads to an

irreducible multiplicity rather than on just a woman. In this sense, becoming is

perceived according to Deleuze’s notion of Becoming-Woman, ‘an ir ruption of

pure vitality from which something new had been created’:41

O morto ressurge mais viril que todos os vivos juntos. (VA: 198)

Mara and Sixpence are the agents of a collaborative process that helps release

gender from its binary restrictions.42 Through Mara, Chiziane shows how

gender becomes the corporealisation of choice: she embodies a firm

reorganisation of gender within the specific material conditions of the

Mozambican civil war. Contrarily to what happens to Wusheni and, as we will

see, to Emelina, Mara does not die and her actions do not trigger any sort of

violence or physical conflict. The character defies social ‘natural truths’ which

grants her the privilege to live. This only reinforces the extent to which the

author of Ventos views gender inequalities as inseparable from the Mozambican

civil war.

40 J. Butler,‘Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig and Foucault (1987), pp. 139-40. 41 G. Deleuze, Pourparlers (Paris: Minuit, 1990), p. 231. 42 J. Butler, ‘Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig and Foucault’ (1987), p. 140.

29

When dealing with Emelina, the author again places gender inequalities at the

basis of the conflict. This character appears at the end of the novel as a castaway

woman perceived as mad by those living in Aldeia do Monte. The community has

classified her as unworthy of trust due to her past deeds, ostracising her as a

woman who grew oblivious of her role as a mother for the sake of love for a

married man. A sinister oath, according to which Emelina and her lover would

kill their offspring so that they could be more available to love each other and

form a new family, is consummated only by her. Betrayed by her lover, who runs

away to start a new life somewhere else, she is held guilty for killing her children,

while her lover is exempted from punishment and loss. Emelina does not fit the

rigid definitions of what to be and how to act as a woman and a mother. But,

although the community rejects her, she does not perceive herself as victim. She

has dealt with her past and is ready to move on. However, the community is not

willing to accept her and this justifies the moral violence held against her. As

Palmary contends, the dichotomy which sees women as either helpless victims or

vile and manipulative is responsible for obscuring ‘how the mobilisation of local

gendered relationships provides the justification for ongoing physical and

structural violence against women who transgress the dominant construction of

family boundaries’.43 Emelina becomes a legitimising force for violence in Aldeia

do Monte. She ultimately denounces the community to the soldiers of RENAMO

as an act of personal retaliation in response to the violence inflicted upon her.

Her action indicates a process of maturation through which Emelina ‘becomes’

her own gender. At last, everyone sees her smiling in a way that was never seen

before. This individual accomplishment is signalled through her laughter, a

laughter ‘que não acaba e que fica marcado nos corações dos homens, cujo eco

ainda continua a ouvir-se nos cumes do Monte’ (VA: 274). Her action originates

the attack where she and her baby are killed and with which the novel ends:

[A] bala acertou em Emelina pelas costas, perfurando a mãe e o filho. (VA: 275)

43 (2005), p. 59.

30

Similarly to what happens to Wusheni, Emelina’s death is accompanied by her

baby’s death, suggesting the perpetuation of the past in the future. Once again,

gender inequality is perceived as the engine behind physical violence and

conflict.

2.3. An army of Penelopes: Weaving exoticism at the Stella Maris

As in Chiziane’s narrative, A Costa connects gender inequality with armed

conflict. Jorge, one of the most important contemporary Portuguese writers, also

defines her country’s identity through a re-reading of history. Her first novel

which, in the words of José Saramago, ‘rotula a qualidade da escrita de toda

uma geração’, dates from 1980 (O Dia dos Prodígios).44 Her fourth book, A Costa

dos Murmúrios (1988), was written out of the effort to reinvent the collective

imagery and historical legacy of the Portuguese colonial empire. The novel is

divided in two parts, each advancing a different plot version. In the first part (Os

Gafanhotos) an unknown narrator tells the story of the young Evita’s wedding in

Mozambique. In the second part, Eva Lopo (Evita, twenty years later) comments

on Os Gafanhotos and advances her own personal account of what happened.

Jorge’s decision to present the familiar Portuguese in the guise of a national

gendered exotic redefines cultural membership and the sense of belonging to a

culture or nation that survived (and still survives) on the lie of the Portuguese

empire overseas. Jorge manufactures the Portuguese female community in

Mozambique as a group of exotic people. Throughout A Costa, these women

resemble a cluster of schooling fish moving about in unison inside an aquatic

hotel aptly named Stella Maris. Individual depictions are swept away by an

amalgamation of a couple of features that make it impossible to discern one

woman from the other. Laceworking, gossiping, or merely being pregnant, this

army of Penelopes interminably wait for their husbands to return from the war.

They are rendered strange and unfamiliar through the author’s use of exoticism

to develop a notion of the self through the point of view of the other. The process

44 Folhetim dedicated to Lídia Jorge and published by Instituto Português do Livro e da Leitura, (Secretaria de Estado da Cultura: Publicações Dom Quixote, Julho 1990), p.2.

31

of manufacturing national exotic otherness illustrates the way in which

Portugal’s colonial specificity overseas reverberates in the Portuguese national

structures, mirroring the Portuguese semiperipheral condition within the

European colonial conjuncture.

If the women at the Stella Maris are rendered exotic, how is the fabrication of

exotic otherness achieved and what are its outcomes? Within the rather extensive

list of work on A Costa, the women of the Stella Maris have not yet been analysed

from an exotic perspective. Jordão mentions the collective community of the

hotel in terms of their vision of the war as ‘a form of entertainment that helps to

make the daily life of this harmonious community a little less boring’.45 She

refers to the women of the Stella Maris in relation to men, as figurants in the

events and as the victims of violence:

[the men of the Stella Maris] are nevertheless disenfranchised and excluded from their former life in the metropolis. Consequently, they also seize upon the home and upon their women’s life, as emblems of their culture and nationality. Analogically speaking, the women of the Stella Maris become also the victims of both a patriarchal and a colonial violence. 46

Jordão argues that the narrator’s distant tone, more than signalling her

powerful position as narrator, also objectifies the Other in a denigrating tone

that imprisons the women in an image and identity as inferior. This reveals

Ev/ita as a reproducer of both patriarchal and colonial discourses, which

emphasises ‘their [the women of the Stella Maris] double repressed existence’.47

H. Owen, on the other hand, mentions the women of the Stella Maris as

accomplices of the dominant patriarchal order:

The women of the Stella Maris do not emerge from Eva’s retelling as empowered agents of their own history or as subjects of resistance to a particular version of history as hegemonic. 48

I would like to extend the argument that interprets the women as both

accomplices and victims of the dominant (colonial) patriarchal power. Ev/ita

45 Echoes of Transidentity: The Transmission and Construction of Identity in Two Novels by Lídia Jorge (Universiteit Utrecht: Faculteit der Letteren, 2001), p. 133. 46 p. 141. 47 Ibidem. 48 H. Owen, ‘Back to Nietzsche. The Making of an Intellectual/Woman: Lídia Jorge’s A Costa dos Murmúrios’, pp. 79-98, Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies. 2, p. 85.

32

reproduces the dominant symbolic system through a perception of the women at

the hotel that resorts to a specific discourse or system to dramatise these

women’s subordinate status. That system is exoticism – understood as a

particular mode of aesthetic perception, ‘one which renders people, objects and

places strange even as it domesticates them’ (Huggan, 2001: 13). The female

collectivity at the Stella Maris is victim of a process whereby its subordinate

position is emphasised through a multiple staging of marginalities (Huggan,

2001: 87). The women at the Stella Maris are marginal not only as Europeans in

Africa, but also as Portuguese exotic women in Mozambique, and as

conventional wives at the Stella Maris. Partly sourcing and partly reflecting their

matrushka-like marginalities, Ev/ita is also marginal in Portugal (as

unconventional daughter and student), in Africa (as European), in Mozambique

(as a woman) and at the Stella Maris (as an unconventional wife).

The wives at the Stella Maris are depicted as marginal, albeit living in the place

to where everything seems to converge – the hotel Stella Maris – due to the

narrator’s persistent imposition of a way of looking that translates them as the

cultural Other. Staged marginality is a term coined by Huggan and refers to the

‘process by which marginalised individuals or social groups are moved to

dramatise their ‘subordinate’ status for the benefit of a majority of mainstream

audience’ (2001: 87) Ev/ita’s fetishisation of cultural otherness within her own

culture relies on a staging of ‘partial resemblances’. The women at the Stella

Maris are displayed in part, described in terms of one excessive feature: all

references are made in terms of their husbands’ names, their hair, their children,

or even their sphincters:

Como a mulher do Ramos – aí tem um nome verdadeiro – fora punida! A mulher de um outro capitão que havia assaltado um das principais bases pediu licença para intervir. Estou a ouvi-la intervir. Ora passava o cabelo a ferro e o deixava estendido, ora o apanhava com uns grandes ganchos em forma de rolo. Ela desprendeu o rolo para intervir.

... a mulher de músculos alenares desfeitos...

(ACM: 108, 188, 184)

Such partial representation of a marginalised group of people fetishises it

through a politics of knowledge that belongs to the discourse of the exotic. As a

33

reproducer of the colonial discourse, Ev/ita engenders images of a fixed, limited

and recognisable colonial Other by projecting onto her alarming fantasies that

highlight latent savageries and imagined psychic pathologies. This is clear in the

episode where a pair of scissors, thrown by a little girl down from the terrace,

falls on a woman’s head. The woman’s latent aggressiveness is directed towards

a child that is severely punished:

Como a menina foi castigada, fechada, amarrada atrás duma janela! A mulher do Fonseca quis que essa garota ficasse lá enquanto ela contava como tinha visto uma tesoura passar de bicos abertos diante dos seus olhos.

(AMC, 109-10)

Although the narrator perceives the women of the hotel as a marginal group, still

her view of them is bound up in a sympathetic identification with them. This

identification is visible in her decision to stay at the Stella Maris instead of

moving into a house on her own. Clearly, exoticism is here used as a control

mechanism relaying the Other inexorably back again to the same (Huggan, 2001:

14). When the narrator reports that ‘as mulheres estavam no hall do Stella

Maris’ (ACM: 159), the reader wonders whether Ev/ita was also there among the

women or observing them from a distance. In fact, right at the beginning of part

II, Eva Lopo mentions her younger self ‘atravessando o hall do Stella Maris’

(ACM: 44) where the other women are constantly depicted. The constitutive

paradox in Ev/ita’s account of the women of the Stella Maris is her attempt to

translate the community as an exotic Other without ever being either a true

outsider or insider. This implies that the ambivalence of her authority repeatedly

turns from mimicry (a difference that is almost nothing but still something) to

menace (a difference that is almost total but not quite). Here, I use Bhabha’s

concept of mimicry as ‘camouflage, not a harmonisation or repression of

difference, but a form of resemblance that differs/defends presence by displaying

it in part, metonymically’.49

Also belonging to the discourses of the exotic are the politics of

authentication/legitimisation activated by Ev/ita in her attempt to translate the

community as an Other, from her privileged position as an insider/outsider 49 H. Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 131.

34

(living at the Stella Maris but not belonging to the collective of females). These

are found especially in chapter IV of A Costa, where a number of answers to

questions uttered by an invisible audience (presumably the narrator of Os

Gafanhotos) about the officers’ wives are uttered:

Mas porque me pergunta pelos nomes verdadeiros das pessoas que dançavam durante esses dois dias no terraço? Porque insiste nesse hotel?

Pergunta-me se não tive conhecimento directo.

(AMC: 107, 130)

Ev/ita’s effort to authenticate her experience is deeply ironic: she does not

believe in the existence of true accounts, as specified through the peach metaphor

right at the beginning of the second part of the novel (‘O sentido da sua

recordação, atendendo ao que recorda, mantém-se tão inviolável quanto o é, por

exemplo, a razão profunda do pêssego.’ [AMC: 41]). By staging the authenticity

of a community’s (staged) marginality, the narrator leads her audience to

decipher narrative and, consequently, her characters, in terms of a

deconstruction of ‘authenticities’ and ‘marginalities’.

Staging marginalities and authenticity around the female community of the

Stella Maris is tied up with Portugal’s colonial problem of self-representation.

This army of Penelopes weaving exoticism at the hotel are made to tactically

perform Portugal’s imaginary of the colonial past. The twist that turns the

national perception of colonialism against itself is intimately connected with the

exotic portrayal of the wives, made by someone who was also a wife and

therefore an insider, from whom was expected a contribution to the construction

of a micro-environment in the hotel that would reproduce Portugal’s supremacy

as the coloniser. Instead, she reproduces Portugal’s complex semiperipheral

condition by miming the colonial system backwards, against the colonisers

through their (colonised) wives.

According to Sousa Santos, nowadays Portugal finds itself in an unstable phase

characterised by the overlapping of two forms of hierarchisation: the world

system (centre, periphery, semiperiphery) and what in the world system is

35

produced or defined as local and global.50 These premises justify the Portuguese

colonial problem of self-representation, which gives way to an unsuspected

complicity between the colonizer and the colonized. This is rendered visible

through Ev/ita’s exoticised perception of the wives of the Portuguese colonisers.

It implies that in the Portuguese case there was not one single ‘other’, but two

‘others’ that ‘neither conjoined nor disjoined, originating complex, chaotic and

mutual mimicry games’ (Santos, 2002: 18). It also implies that Bhabha’s mimicry

games require a much more complex approach in the Portuguese case.

Exoticism and gender open here a debate on how knowledge about a country’s

culture and past is effected and in whose interests it is deployed. By

orchestrating a critique of gender inequality from within the system of exoticism,

Jorge embarks upon an analysis not only of the conflictive postcolonial Africa,

but also of a peripheral postcolonial Portugal, largely through issues of gender.

As a filter through which the reader perceives national reality, the narrator’s

gaze mobilises a number of metaphors for the reading of the national culture’s

own inner peripheries or internal colonialisms that may be said to fuel an

internal exotic.

2.4. Conclusion

As argued so far, Ventos and A Costa link gender inequality and armed conflict

by means of the authors’ dealings with the past with regard to female characters.

Chiziane’s move from gender identity towards national identity is grounded on a

gender-becoming process that gradually accompanies the country’s nation-

becoming, while Jorge relies on exoticism to relocate gender issues within the

country’s notional world of the colonial past. One cannot escape Jorge’s attempt

to define national identity by tying up the Portuguese colonial specificity

overseas with gender issues. Similarly, Chiziane defines the identity of her

country through a cultural interpretation of the past that re-reads gender and

also places the feminine at the core of Mozambique’s social agenda. If Chiziane’s

novel, by means of its Portuguese publication, represents the arrival of an exotic

50 B. Sousa Santos, ‘Between Prospero and Caliban: Colonialism, Postcolonialism and Inter-Identity’, in Luso-Brazilian Review, 39/2.

36

periphery in the centre of the former coloniser, in the case of A Costa, the author

wittily presents the arrival of the exotic centre in the periphery of the colonial

empire. Both authors’ strategic manipulation of the memories of the past are

closely linked with issues of exoticism and gender. Whether or not Chiziane and

Jorge manage to critically subvert exoticised readings of their narratives is one

of the questions the following chapter attempts to address.

37

3. Telling the Exotic: Becoming Strategic

3.1. Introduction

As demonstrated so far, Chiziane and Jorge explicitly align themselves with the

expression of a gendered perspective on the Mozambican and Portuguese history

and society during the colonial period and the post-independence era. The

previous chapter maintained that gender plays an important role in the

generation of new meaningful outlooks into the past and in the negotiation of

valid perspectives for the future. Closely related to the analysis of gender and

performance issues is the political value of the aesthetic practices that tell the

past, specifically the colonial past, through the feminine. Expanding the

argument previously put forward that problematises Huggan’s insights into the

postcolonial exotic, this chapter analyses the extent to which Chiziane and Jorge

defy exoticised readings of their women-centred postcolonial narratives.

3.1. Guilt and the Anthropological Exotic

Chiziane’s particular use of the story is deeply connected with a storytelling

crisis: the tradition of memory is under the threat of extinction due to the

slaughters of the civil war. The subversive interplay between war, death, gender

and memory is here analysed as a strategically exotic device, a device that seeks

to challenge dominant systems of representation by politicising family and social

relationships, too often turned apolitical for the sake of easy and simplified

cultural translations of marginalised people. With these thoughts in mind, a

question needs to be considered: how are the author’s linguistic dealings with the

memory of the past strategically manipulated in order to critically subvert

exoticist readings of a gendered cultural other in the name of anti-imperialistic

resistance?

As I have argued, women are at the core of Chiziane’s novel. If most of the

characters die throughout the narrative, there is one that defies the Darwinist

38

view of the survival of the fittest. That character is Minosse. Despite being old,

weak and a woman, Minosse survives the constant drought, famine and the

merciless RENAMO attacks, reaches Aldeia do Monte and lives long enough to

pass her wisdom on to her adopted grandchildren, João, Mabebene and Sara. In

the evening, they sit together by the fire and share their knowledge of life:

[Minosse] ensina-lhes as manhas da terra, os segredos da semente, as voltas da água e os movimentos do vento. ... Quando a noite chega, sentam-se à volta da lareira e contam histórias. Falam do futuro.

(VA: 231)

Death as a central theme in Chiziane’s narrative dramatically reduces the

occurrence of scenes such as the one depicted above. On every corner of a page,

the leitmotif of telling stories and sharing knowledge is repeatedly affirmed

through its denial. When the community of Mananga is slaughtered due to the

civil war, the bearers of wisdom die before they can share their memory of the

past. During their exodus to Aldeia do Monte as war refugees, many pass away,

and with them the memory of their culture. War collapses central components of

memory, turning the Mozambican world upside down. After the attack where

Wusheni and Manuna kill each other, the people of Mananga try to rise from the

ashes by appealing to the wisdom of the elders. But there are no elders left:

Mataram os velhos, mataram os novos. O povo não tem biblioteca nem escreve. A sua história, os seus segredos residem na massa cinzenta dos antigos, cada cabeça é um capítulo, um livro, uma enciclopédia, uma biblioteca. As cabeças foram decepadas e em breve será o enterro. Semaremos entre as pedras os segredos da vida e da morte, a sabedoria da água e da nuvem. Reina em nós uma escuridão absoluta. Que faremos agora?

(VA: 132)

To what degree is this ‘storytelling crisis’ embedded in a politics of

representation that favours a ‘critical re-engagement with Western

anthropological metaphors and myths’ (Huggan, 2001: 40)? Departing from

Huggan’s view on African literature as having both a recuperative (putting the

text at the service of a continually refashioned cultural identity) and a

deconstructive (challenging Western readerly expectations) dimension,

Chiziane’s skilful use of the cultural crisis theme seems to call for a certain

anthropological (recuperative) reading that reveals the workings of the exotic

categories of cultural otherness. The book’s commercial viability is attained

39

through the depiction of a disappearing authentic African culture. In the

enticing prologue to her novel, Chiziane summons up an earnest call for a

gathering around the telling of stories. The promise of authenticity surrounds

this call, because the stories ‘come from the heart’:

Vinde todos e ouvi Vinde todos com as vossas mulheres E ouvi a chamada. Não quereis a nova música de timbila Que me vem do coração?

By buying/reading the novel, one believes to be contributing so that a

subordinate culture can reclaim its place. As Huggan notes, this depends on the

construction of a ‘western model reader who views African literature, Africa

itself, through the distorting filter of the anthropological exotic’ (Huggan, 2001:

41). The anthropological exotic serves to celebrate, in Huggan’s words, the

notion of cultural difference while at the same time assimilating it to familiar

western interpretative codes.

But, as the novel shows, authentic ethnicity can be twisted to reveal the

prejudices of those who require it. Chiziane’s nodding at the ‘western romantic

ideal of ethnographic salvage’ (Huggan, 2001: 43) is accompanied by a wink of

an eye. Parodying her self-appointed role as cultural translator, Chiziane injects

a strong personal sense of authorial guilt, particularly visible in a passage where

the narrator depicts poets getting inspiration from observing other people’s

suffering:

Os poetas encontram no sofrimento dos outros a melhor fonte de inspiração e fazem carreiras de pompa na arte de escrever.

(VA: 238)

The narrator’s reference to these ‘filantropos de ocasião’ points the finger at the

transformation of marginality and resistance into valuable intellectual

commodities. The argument that reads the novel as strategically exotic is

grounded on an interpretation of guilt as the engine behind the action of the

narrative, fuelling deconstructive readings and destroying western expectations

built upon anthropologically exotic readings. One cannot dodge the question of

40

who to blame, echoing throughout the chapters of Ventos. A van driver,

responsible for the transportation of a group of people from Mananga to Aldeia

do Monte, blames everyone and everything compulsively before his broken van:

A culpa é do responsável do parque de viaturas... Mas a culpa não é bem desse homem, não. Ele por sua vez fez uma carta aos maiores solicitando peças sobressalentes e ferramentas que nunca mais chegam. ... A culpa toda está com Deus que aprisiona a chuva e o povo não pode produzir algodão-ouro. A culpa é do diabo que fermenta o génio do mal nos corações dos homens que se matam uns aos outros. ... Ri-se. Ridiculariza-se. É mesmo estúpido falar de Deus e do Diabo, injuriar os homens por causa de uma viatura meio apodrecida. ... O culpado de toda a situação é a estrada, sim é a estrada.

(VA: 153)

The very title of the book, encouraging the establishment of a parallel with the

Apocalypse (the last book of the Bible, also known as the Book of Revelation),

which sustains the metaphor of the punishing God, clarifies the role of guilt in

the narrative. Another reference, at the end of the novel, to baptism

(representing the application of salvation through the removal of the guilt of

sins) also elucidates this point. Among the world of things and entities held

responsible for all the calamities, women are always singled out as guilty:

O tribunal estreou-se com o julgamento das mulheres. ... A mulher é a causa de todos os males do mundo; é do seu ventre que nascem os feiticeiros, as prostitutas. É por elas que os homens perdem a razão. É o sangue impuro por elas espalhado que faz fugir as nuvens aumentando a fúria do Sol. Os juízes instigados pelos homens do Sianga flagelam impiedosos as mulheres desprotegidas. ... A chuva não cai, mulheres, a culpa está convosco.

(VA: 92)

This supports the argument according to which the question of who or what to

blame is tactical. While leading to the point made previously, that gender

inequalities are at the heart of the Mozambican civil war, it also critically

undercuts exotic codes of representation based upon anthropological readings of

the novel. Such deconstruction is attained through a strategic use of guilt that

links, within the particular context of Mozambique, gender inequalities and

armed conflict in a cause-effect logic.

3.3. Guilt and the Epistemological Exotic

Chiziane and Jorge share the way in which they retool history with a

deconstructive accuracy that explores some of the contradictions embedded in a

41

certain way of reading. Jorge’s counter-narrative may contain an unannounced

hidden politics of its own addressing particular ways of reading. As noted in the

previous chapter, Jorge’s production of gendered exoticism is achieved largely

by manufacturing national exotic otherness. Here, I would like to expand the

topic by emphasising the author’s manipulation of storytelling, through which

she explores the contradictions of a particular mode of perception and

consumption based on a series of metaphors for the writing and reading of

national culture.

In A Costa, a dialogue is established between the narrator of Os Gafanhotos and

Ev/ita, the narrator of the second part of the novel. Ev/ita speaks from the

position of an eyewitness whose personal story helps the other narrator to gain a

deeper understanding of a particular period of the Portuguese past. As the

narrative unfolds, a meaningful engagement between the two is established

through what seems at first to be a face-to-face encounter over what Portuguese

colonialism really was. At times, it is possible to perceive a model of enquiry that

focuses on extracting Ev/ita’s personal story rather than attempting to document

all the details, which helps establish a personal rapport between the narrators,

and subsequently, between them and the reader:

Se vejo algumas cenas vivas? Claro que revejo cenas vivíssimas.

Prefere a harmonia? Eu também. É por isso que tanto estimo a paz que se respira na noite d’ Os Gafanhotos.

(AMC: 48, 69)

The idea of ‘disappearing memories’ and ‘untold personal stories’, often

responsible for an exaggerated regard for events that need to be remembered

and explained if they want to be retrieved from total oblivion, is at work in A

Costa. P. Nora discusses today’s obsession with the archive: ‘the fear that

everything is on the verge of disappearing … invests even the humblest

testimony, the most modest vestige, with the dignity of being potentially

memorable’.51 Jorge’s use of the story is not solely a tangible reminder of what

no longer exists except in memory, but mainly a reminder of how the colonial

51 P. Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’, pp. 1-20, in Rethinking the French Past of Memory, vol. I (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 8.

42

history can be exoticised through a memory that spectacularises cultural

otherness in a mythical space and imagined time. The complexity of Jorge’s text

seems at times to succumb to readings based on a western romantic ideal of

cognitive salvage fuelling what I coin an epistemological exotic.

The epistemological exotic is deeply connected with the epistemological theory of

empiricism, which claims that knowledge is a product of human experience.

Naïve empiricism holds that ideas and theories must be tested against reality and

accepted or rejected on the basis of how well they correspond to the facts.

Explaining this correspondence is a central problem for epistemology.52 Also

central to Ev/ita’s story is a preoccupation with ‘uma correspondência

pequenina, modesta’, responsible for the formation of characters and the

narration of episodes according to a gathering of coincidental facts. Cognitive

salvage is here based on epistemological misapprehensions of what happened:

Ah, como admiro essa figura que encontrei espalhada por várias!

A verdade é que me lembro de fragmentos. E para quê mais? ... Convenhamos que me lembro imperfeitamente, o que não deve ter nenhum significado secundário.

(ACM: 43, 127)

In Jorge’s one to one correspondence one can point out the dangers of

misunderstanding anthropological readings ‘that assume literature to be a mere

reproduction of reality, and language a tabula rasa that expresses a one-to-one

correspondence between words and things’ (Huggan, 2001: 39).

Misapprehensions such as this inevitably prove useful in the reconfirmation of

western ethnocentric myths. What the narrator seems to be selling is not only a

western gendered middle-classness as commodification (through the frequent

recourse to exoticism in relation to the middle-class women of the Stella Maris,

discussed in the previous chapter), but also herself as an authoritative

epistemological interpreter of the uses of such exotic merchandise: a personal

account of a past that has systematically been forgotten by the official historical

accounts.

52 Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology [Accessed 02.09.2005].

43

How does the author carry out a subversion of exoticist readings based upon the

epistemologic exotic? In this chapter it is argued that the limits of an

epistemological way of reading A Costa are tested through the novel’s politics of

representation. The narrative is grounded upon a double-faced dilemma

continuously addressed by the narrator: Ev/ita is invariably caught between the

need to capture the past as she experienced it – the Archive complex - and the

awareness that she will never truly grasp it. This predicament is held responsible

for the narrator’s desire to destroy the official and unofficial accounts of history

– the Alexandria library complex – verbalised throughout the pages of A Costa in

terms of a craving for ‘querer desconhecer’:

Ah, Biblioteca de Alexandria, como eu te estimo tanta vez incendiada! – disse Eva Lopo. O conhecimento subtil dos teus papiros amarelos, queimados, transformados em caracóis de fumo, escreveu ao longo dos séculos quilómetros e quilómetros de desconhecimento. ... Aprecio imenso esse esforço de tudo apagar para se colaborar com o silêncio da terra.

(AMC: 130-1)

This dilemma strongly incites readings that intend to ‘salvage’ all that can

(never) be grasped, reincorporating it into ‘an available body of western cultural

myths’ (Huggan: 39).

An examination of what is here coined as the Archive complex is tempered by the

awareness that losing the memory of the past is responsible, in Jorge’s narrative,

for the arrival of guilt. A Costa is partially the narration of Ev/ita’s interminable

search for what has been year after year officially forgotten: exemplifying the

need to restore the past is Ev/ita’s refashioning of Os Gafanhotos, or Ev/ita trying

to solve the mystery of the sudden deaths caused by methanol and attempting to

denounce the Portuguese deeds, or even Ev/ita’s acknowledgment of her

husband’s gradual loss of identity, followed by the recognition of the problematic

consequences of not remembering the past experiences and the future plans that

held them together as lovers:

Não fazia mal, alguma vez se perde a memória do que desejámos, e o noivo podia perdê-la já, mas de facto complicava bastante haver-se esquecido assim.

(AMC: 47)

44

Signaling the narrator’s persistent interrogation of the past, and her constant

attempts to preserve and archivise the unforgettable truth, is the journalist’s

question addressed to Ev/ita, symbolically left unanswered:

Porque procura tão desesperadamente o que procura? (AMC: 143)

The narrator’s compulsive repository of facts is accompanied by a positive,

reflective nostalgia for what was once lived. S. Boym notes that reflective

nostalgics are aware of the gap between identity and resemblance. This sense of

distance drives them to tell their story, to narrate their relationship between the

past, present and future:

If restorative nostalgia ends up reconstructing emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and spacialise time, reflective nostalgia cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporalises spaces.53

Reflected nostalgia emerges as a correlate to the physical deterioration of the

Stella Maris, itself a symbol of the deterioration of memory. The hotel also shares,

rather symbolically, some characteristics with the devastated Alexandria

Library, whose emblematic importance is consistently knitted into the narrative.

Unable to ‘encontrar o que procura’, Ev/ita expresses her desire to destroy not

only historical accounts, but also her account and all accounts in general. A new

sense of guilt arises, now for having attempted a retooling of history through her

own personal account. A Costa suddenly resembles the ruined Stella Maris, itself

equivalent to the ragged memory of the past put into words, a personal

ideological construct based upon fantasy, slowly decomposing. The Alexandria

Library complex, intertwined with negative, ironic nostalgia for the memories of

the past, is used to critically deconstruct deeply suspect explanatory accounts,

namely the account of Ev/ita, someone who was, despite her involvement in the

stories, an outsider, a visit, a mere observer in Mozambique.

The interplay between institutional and personal memories tends to produce

ironic comments on national, imperialist nostalgia for the lost territories of

53 K. Hodgkin and S. Radstone, Contested Pasts: the Politics of Memory (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 84.

45

‘Ultramar’. Ev/ita’s description of Forza Leal’s open-necked shirts, displaying

the scar on his chest in an excessively assertive manner, as if constantly parading

a medal of heroic endurance, exemplify the sarcastically nostalgic tone in which

she deals with ‘o último homem de qualquer coisa’ who walked around wearing

transparent shirts ‘nesses primeiros dias de África’ (ACM: 64). When referring

to the decadent opulence of the hotel, Ev/ita ironically exclaims:

Ah, esse tempo de banheiras com pé de garra, importadas da Europa! ... Que cheiro antigo, que cheiro a arte a envelhecer e a passar!

(AMC: 44-5)

As Zilli argues, the narrator, always between what is narrated and the reader,

‘rompe com a unicidade da voz narrativa tão decantada pela teoria clássica do

foco narrativo’.54 Behind the interminable narrative breaches of A Costa is a

criticism destructive of history and of the narrative itself. More than a reflection

on the partiality of historical selection of events, Jorge’s novel is also a

meditation on the partiality of personal selection of events. In her analysis of

Jorge’s narrative, Zilli introduces the image of a narrator-Penelope who weaves

her text only to undo the strands that were woven together, isolating them before

she weaves them back again:

Nessa attitude de afastamento e aproximação temos a marca do narrador pós-moderno que se abre e se doa ao discutir/afirmar e/ou negar as suas conveniências narrativas.55

This emphasis on a narrator who keeps moving to and fro between the partiality

of personal and historical selection of events effectively lays bare the

contradictions embedded in a certain way of reading based on the

epistemological exotic of cognitive salvage. Events, descriptions, narrations,

characters, places, curiosities are the author’s stepping stones, her personal

pathway to achieve yet another disposable version of Os Gafanhotos. Clearly, a

strategic use of memory is being waved against recuperative attempts to

authenticate disappearing memories. As Jordão mentions, the quest for identity

54 T. Zilli, Ruínas da Memória: Uma Arqueologia da Narrativa. O Jardim Sem Limites (São Paulo: Editora HUCITEC, 2004), p. 105. 55 T. Zilli (2004), p. 117.

46

does not lie in the question of how one interprets the world, but rather ‘which

world is this?’ and ‘which of my selves is to do it?’.56

3.4. Conclusion

In Ventos and A Costa the deployment of exoticist modes of representation is

ironically mediated through guilt, which has a destabilising effect on the readers,

driven by either an ethnographic or a cognitive salvage impetus. Both narratives

entail a critical negotiation of Huggan’s anglo/phallo-centric analysis of the

postcolonial exotic. Contrarily to what happens in Ventos, where memory is

swept away by history (civil war, colonialism), in A Costa history (historical

official accounts) is clearly swept away by a fallible, shattered memory that

focuses on gender and defeats what still sustains a tradition of Portuguese

colonial authority. This is attained through a persistent undercutting of national

identity labels and a disruption of the normative relationship between the

colonial margins and the imperial centre (by means of the formation of an

internal exotic). As a narrative of a colonising country about the colonial

experience, Jorge’s novel calls for a particular approach to the postcolonial

exotic. It introduces the topic of the colonised nature of the Portuguese coloniser,

and the problem of self-representation (similar to that of the peoples colonised

by the British) which can be defined in terms of the impossibility to represent

himself without confirming his subaltern position. The analysis of the women of

the Stella Maris, which also reveals the hybrid identity of Ev/ita (similar to what

Bhabha calls the ‘fantasy of the native’: to occupy the master’s place while

keeping in place as the slave’s avenging anger)57, only confirms Sousa Santos’

thesis of a national problem of self-representation.

56 P. Jordão (2001), p. 167. 57 H. Bhabha, ‘Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Contradiction’, pp. 112-123, in Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory, ed. by P. Williams and L. Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p.117.

47

If Chiziane questions the processes that translate the African gendered Other

into a strangely familiar Same, Jorge politicises the processes that render the

Portuguese gendered Same into a familiarly strange Other. From this chapter, it

is possible to conclude that both authors attain these goals by parodying their

self-appointed roles as cultural translators, and by perceiving memory of the

past in terms of a fluid prone to transfiguration through writing. In her study on

Jorge, Jordão argues in favour of this notion of memory as a construct,

something that can be modified as a means to come to terms with one’s

identity.58 The next chapter addresses the extent to which this notion of memory

is verbalised in terms of a specific narrative style and structure.

4. Telling Stories: Becoming Transgressive

4.1. Introduction

Following a discussion of the global market value of Ventos and A Costa as

unsettling postcolonial novels, this chapter focuses on the style and structure of

the narratives in terms of a critical reengagement with the Deleuzian theory of

‘becoming’ and his concept of imperceptibility. Notions of becoming are here

intertwined with notions of writing as non-representational and against a

literature of commodification. Ventos and A Costa are analysed as narratives

whose open structure and deregulatory style significantly confront the confines

of regulatory systems and disciplinary societies.

4.2. Style and Structure in Ventos:

58 P. Jordão (2001), p. 54.

48

In Ventos, the reader embarks on a storytelling experience, as the prologue

blossoms into three short stories. The introductory plea for a gathering around

the narrative transforms the book into an object that is oral within its pages.

Linguistically, this is achieved through a repetition of the verbs ‘escutar’, ‘ouvir’

and ‘contar’ in the imperative mode, the use of short sentences, the emphasis on

sound (‘A xipalala soou’; ‘O búzio enfureceu meus tímpanos’; ‘o caminho do

som’), colour (‘comungando a sua cor com a cor da noite’), and the reiteration of

the present simple. The ‘body-fication’ of a clearly feminine landscape (‘’no

sangue das ervas’; ‘figueira enlutada que derrama lágrimas pelos filhos

abortados’) (VA: 15, 16) transforms the act of reading into an experience that

unfolds the feminine. Hélia Correia’s suggestive description of what she calls ‘o

surpreendente pequeno mundo’ of feminine writing aptly coincides with

Chiziane’s introduction:

É um mundo diligente e agitado, onde os pormenores contam, onde os sons orientam a escolha dos vocábulos. É um mundo com música, com alguns atropelos e pausas nas sequências, e uma grande abundância de voz e sentimentos.59

Each short story depicts a woman’s reactions to men’s actions. In ‘Marido

Cruel’, a woman leaves her husband because of his betrayal to the family: in

times of famine this cruel husband does not share the food he finds with his

family and he is exposed to public shame by his wife. ‘Mata, que amanhã

faremos outro’ introduces motherhood in the context of armed conflict and

depicts a mother murdering her own baby at the request of her husband. Finally,

in ‘A ambição de Massupai’, a very beautiful woman, the prisoner and later the

lover of Muzila, kills her children for the love of this General who incites her to

murder, and goes mad after realising that she was used by two factions of a war.

The concluding remark at the end of the three stories links them together and

establishes a point of contact between the prologue and the two other parts of the

novel, by means of an emphasis on historical cyclical repetition.

59 H. Correia, ‘O Surpreendente Pequeno Mundo – Escrita feminina’, pp. 49-62, in Gender, Ethnicity and Class in Modern Portuguese-speaking Culture, ed. by H. Owen (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1996), p. 62.

49

Throughout the book, it seems as if the narrative unfolds in terms of a

rephrasing or extension of the short stories’ plots. Indeed, the main narrative

deals with the same thematic issues (hunger and drought, lack of solidarity,

betrayal, love and resistance in a war context). However, a reading of the novel’s

structure and style, specifically in the light of Deleuze’s theory of ‘becoming’ and

his notion of de-territorialisation, discloses distinctive narrative traces that

significantly oppose the traditional stories presented initially. A close reading of

part III in particular reveals a tendentious movement away from the initial

short-stories in favour of a movement towards more personal fictional

concretisations.

Let us consider the short story ‘A ambição de Massupai’ and its supposed

counterpart, found in part III (the narration of Emelina’s story). In the

introductory short story, most references to love are made from Muzila’s point

of view. Massupai follows the orders of her lover and is punished for that.

Although Muzila is killed, Massupai’s life is spared because she is a woman and

therefore does not pose any danger per se. She goes mad due to multiple

processes of victimisation and transforms into a wandering ghost escaping to the

sea. Emelina’s madness, on the contrary, does not carry the mark of

victimisation but of nonconformity. It is preceded by a number of insurgent acts:

telling her own story to the outsider Danila (a nurse); killing her own children of

her own accord; organising an attack on the village. Chiziane’s recreation of

Massupai in terms of Emelina’s empowerment carries a clear message: by

negating the outcome of the traditional story, Chiziane significantly de-

territorialises memory.

Emelina’s crescent imperceptibility is read both as a response and a result of the

villagers’ continual unawareness of Emelina as a woman, a mother and a

potential danger for their society. Imperceptibility is here a sign of her process of

‘becoming’: gradually, Emelina initiates a journey of diminishment, until she

becomes almost unnoticed to the population of Aldeia:

Mas a Emelina é uma louca tenebrosa, misteriosa. Enquanto nós trabalhamos ela dorme. Enquanto nós dormimos ela desperta, vagueia pelas ruas todas as noites, vai ao matagal e volta.

50

(VA: 271)

More than underlining the de-territorialisation of memory, the story of Emelina

emphasises the openness of the narrative through the emergence of a new

ending, left ajar through a reference to baptism (perceived as the symbolic ritual

that celebrates the beginning of life):

E a Aldeia do Monte recebe o seu baptismo de fogo. (VA: 275).

A close reading of the episode where Emelina tells her past to Danila confirms

the argument in favour of the stylistic openness of Ventos. During Emelina’s

account, Danila listens carefully and from time to time, she asks questions. Her

questions seem at times to oppress and at times to liberate:

E o que aconteceu com o teu homem, mãe da menina? Mas como foi possível, Emelina?

(VA: 249, 252)

One notices that just listening and asking clarifying questions from a position of

curiosity becomes very therapeutic for Emelina. In Narrative Therapy it is argued

that ‘discourses powerfully shape a person’s choices about which life events can

be storied and how they should be storied’. Answering someone else’s questions

is said to be ‘a process of expanding and saying the ‘unsaid’ – the development,

through dialogue, of new themes and narratives and, actually, the creation of

new stories’.60 This approach to Emelina’s story seems to be guided by the belief

that all stories have many possible meanings and interpretations. Style actively

contributes to a de-ter ritorialisation of memory since it opens space for new

stories to appear within and beyond the traditional ones. If, in the introduction,

each story describes a woman’s reactions to men’s actions, throughout the rest of

the narrative the author portrays women acting instead of reacting. They

repeatedly denounce, fight, lead, love, kill and save men, and are often

represented according to their defiance of traditions and their capacity to

overcome the psychological effects of war, hunger and death. This authorial

60 J. Freedman and G. Combs (eds) ‘Opening Space for New Stories’, pp. 42-76, in Narrative Therapy: The Social Construction of Preferred Realities (New York and London: Norton & Company, 1996), pp. 43, 45.

51

appropriation is here interpreted as an act of reclaiming a writing space which

problematises the position of African women within a postcolonial traditional

society by means of a feminine outlook depicting identities and subjectivities

shaped by women.

Parallel to this structural and stylistic de-territorialisation of memory is a

semantic displacement translated into the characters’ long and excruciating

exodus from Mananga to Aldeia do Monte. During their journey from one

territory to another, the people of Mananga acquire nomadic features. Walking

during the night, and hiding during the day, they are always in between places,

between life and death, between day and night. They are always in the

‘intermezzo’.61 During the painful and dangerous journey, men and women lose

identity as individuals: the arrival in Aldeia do Monte is marked by the

awareness of their misery and nakedness. Men and women have grown

physically alike, their bellies pregnant with the effects of starvation:

São todos iguais. Não há velhos nem novos, a turbulência da vida nivelou-lhes as idades. Não se distingue o homem da mulher pelos contornos do corpo. A fome comeu as curvas das ancas, as laranjas dos seios, deixando apenas os ossos. Nos homens cresce apenas a barba que supera a exuberância da floresta medonha. Os ventres de todos competem em volume como qualquer mulher no último mês de gestação.

(VA: 184)

The exodus is thus another journey of diminishment similar to that undertaken

by Emelina, ‘a step on the road to becoming imperceptible’.62 As mentioned

before, imperceptibility is to Deleuze the cosmic formula for ‘becoming’. The

Deleuzian slogan: ‘loss is enabling’ is illustrated by Sixpence. His loss allows him

to ‘Become-Woman’ in Deleuzian terms: he becomes Other by becoming less.

Having reached Aldeia, this group of people does not gain emancipation as a

collectivity with a shared identity similar to what they shared in Mananga.

Although they are warmly welcomed by the citizens of Aldeia, no outcome of

‘becoming’ is emphasised. What is stressed is their experience of living forever

in-between, far away from any path that leads to a stable identity. Once more,

61 Deleuze uses this word in relation to what he calls nomadic culture, an anti-hierarchical way of conceiving the subject, against the state organisation of property and materiality. See G. Deleuze and F. Guattari , A Thousand Plateaux: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone, 1987), p. 379. 62 C. Colebrook (2000), p. 39.

52

Deleuze’s ‘imperceptibility’, understood as a radical change in ways of being and

thinking that leads to an eternal recomposition of subjectivity, is at stake.

Deleuze’s radical atomistic materialism seems to condemn the characters of

Ventos to a limbo space where individuals dissolve into anonymous particles in a

constant movement of ‘becoming’ that creatively (and gloomily) denies

subjectivity. Does Deleuze’s conceptual matrix of the subject’s paradoxical non-

existence, and consequently this interpretation of Ventos according to his theory

of ‘becoming’ and the notion of imperceptibility, interfere with the affirmation of

female subjectivities or does it constitute a way out of sexual polarisations

governed by phallogocentrism? It is my opinion that ‘becoming’ read as such

contributes to a feminist project, in the sense that it implies a non-nostalgic

detachment from the past and tradition, offering a pattern of ‘work in progress’

that privileges continuity in spite of paralysis. Furthermore, as Braidotti rightly

argues, ‘it is a path of transcendence that goes via and through the body and not

away from it’. 63 Shukin criticises Deleuze for never addressing ‘the

overdetermined historical, mythological or affective associations between the

female gender and domesticity’, nor conceiving ‘a molecular women’s politics

that slips into molar confrontations’.64 The point for me is that Deleuze’s radical

problematisation of sex as a-centred is precisely what denies its rigidity even as

a-centred. His merciless attack on rigidity should be perceived as the concavity

where to carve a feminist niche.

The interpretation of the novel’s structural, stylistic and semantic de-

territorialisation also opens room for a feminist critique of time in Ventos. Time,

according to Bergson’s concept of ‘duration’ (revisited by Deleuze as a co-

existence of the present with the past, both conspiring to overthrow rigidity in

the name of a continual elaboration of the new) provides the tools for a

reconfiguration of time in terms of a radical openness of the future. According to

‘duration’, remembering is not the consequence of jumping into an accumulated

past outside our perception of the present, because it can be found in co-

63 (2002), p. 62. 64 ‘Deleuze and Feminisms: Involuntary Regulators and Affective Inhibitors’, pp. 144-155, in Deleuze and Feminist Theory, ed. by I. Buchanan and C. Colebrook (Edinburgh: University Press, 2000), pp. 147-50.

53

existence with the present. The previous analysis of the open ending of Ventos

clearly propels the present into the future through a negotiation of the present

through the past. Exorcising the past is achieved through a gathering of time-

threads whereby memory and present become one.

4.3. Style and Structure in A Costa

The structure of A Costa favours the erasure of the introductory account Os

Gafanhotos. While the initial account is the end product of a historical zapping

operated by an imperialistic hand using the remote control of memory to jump

from one recollection to another, the second part is a process of distinguishing

the individual scenes that were mingled in the initial zapping, unfolding a new

(dis)order that is creative because it echoes the problem of gender and sexual

difference in a postcolonial context.

How does A Costa produce a creative and generative memorial (dis)order

through its structure and style? It is Jordão’s contention that in this novel the

narrator reformulates her identity through an act of remembering and of

writing down those memories by an enunciating Other. This is translated into a

construction of identity depending on memory rather than on reality. Memory is

adapted according to one’s identity. In her opinion, A Costa is also about the

erasure of a discourse of truth through memory.65 I would like to expand this

argument by questioning memory’s role in the erasure of a discourse of truth

that strikes as capitalist, exploitative, imperialist and Oedipal. The relevancy of

this discussion is linked not so much with the extent to which memories are true

or false, but mainly with the degree to which a particular use of memory unfolds

new transformations that can fuel a feminist project. Who remembers? What is

remembered? How is it remembered?

The answer to the first question seems fairly straightforward: Ev/ita. Jordão’s

usage of the expression that amalgamates the two narrators reflects a state of

‘becoming’ of the main teller of memories. Interestingly, both the critic and the

65 See P. Jordão (2001), p.33, 35.

54

author adopt the same strategy to overcome the conservative or nostalgic

accounts of Portuguese contemporary culture: while Jorge does so through

conceptual and structural creativity, Jordão does so by means of linguistic

inventiveness. Not only do they stress a continuous state of becoming, they also

stretch it to the limit. This results in a creative and exponential unfolding of new

possibilities pointing to new developments of identity alternatives, so that what is

remembered cannot escape discontinuous variations. In Ev/ita, the same person

becomes two narrators inhabiting different times and zones simultaneously. As

an in-between entity, she becomes what Braidotti, instigated by a Deleuzian

notion of becoming, aptly calls ‘an enfleshed sort of memory that repeats and is

capable of lasting through sets of discontinuous variations, while remaining

faithful to itself’.66 This produces interconnections between moments, people,

places and memories. Such state of affairs, while mirroring the paradoxes of

remembering (receiving and processing information), also problematises the

binary oppositions governing the ‘discursive truth’:

O que você nota não são causas e efeitos mas soberbas simultaneidades. (ACM: 168)

Among the world of ‘things’ remembered in A Costa, I would like to draw

attention to the ‘body’, following the line of though used to analyse Ventos. A

physical imperceptibility in Ventos gives way to a physical indeterminacy in A

Costa, as bodies become simultaneously over-exposed (Helena’s body, Forza

Leal’s scar, the baby of Gois’s wife), hidden (Alex’s sexuality) and fragmented

(fluids, the destroyed sphincter, the fat man’s eye ball that Evita mentally

deconstructs, women’s hair). The body becomes the fetishised obsession of the

narrator, an object of concern and care. An appreciation of the body throughout

the narrative allows for a rethinking of human subjectivity immersed in a

complex network of simultaneous and conflicting structures. Subjectivity is

revealed not through the characters but through their becomings, that are often

physical.

66 R. Braidotti (2002), p. 230.

55

Body indeterminacy runs parallel to a structural and stylistic erasure of truth.

To demonstrate my case, I would like to analyse Evita’s sexual encounter with

‘um homem enorme, com um ventre enorme e sem cabelo’ (ACM: 175). The fat

man that Evita meets at Moulin Rouge, mocking Portugal’s linguistic myth of

ownership around the word ‘saudade’, is described in terms of his romantic,

idealistic eyes. His whole body disappears as the physical encounter advances

and Ev/ita remembers that ‘[a] boca dele cheirava ao que cheiraria uma garrafa

de whisky se a garrafa de whisky em vez da rolha tivesse uma boca’:

Fazer amor com aquele homem encontrado no Moulin Rouge era como nadar numa tina cor de azeite. ... A única corda que levava agarrada na mão era a imagem dos olhos que encimavam aquele corpo enorme, que nunca antes tinha visto na cidade, como uma pétala saindo do alto de um gigante cacto feito de corpo.

(ACM: 178)

The description of the fat man by-passes the masculine, opening up towards a

broader sexual horizon, less anthropocentric. He strikingly personifies Deleuze’s

notion of BWO (body without organs, used to overcome sexual differences in his

Becoming-Woman theory), in terms of the implied body-bottle metaphor and the

comparison with a dog’s eye:

Mexia no olho, beijava aquele olho intenso, castanho, dolorido como o olho dum bom cão que viajou para dentro dum mar de sopa, e não tem patas nem pêlo nem faro nem esqueleto nem cauda...

(ACM: 176, my emphasis)

Moreover, the regenerative power of this sexual encounter is emphasised by

Ev/ita’s comment: ‘Tudo estava excitantemente perdido’ and calls for a recycling

of Cixous’s concept of NBW (newly born woman).67 To use these theorists’

abbreviations, one might say that the performative possibilities of the encounter

with a BWO man transform the narrator (Evita + Eva Lopo) into a NBW

(Ev/ita).

The semantic obsession with the body is translated into a range of linguistic

choices that thrive to remember the experience lived by the body through the

fetishisation of particular body parts:

67 H. Cixous, Newly Born Woman, trans. by Betsy Wing (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996).

56

Era impossível não avançar com o dedo, não espetar o dedo na pálpebra daquele olho que navegava perdido na bola de sopa. O gordo agarrou o dedo. ... Nela também o corpo se agitava e doía e queria. ... Evita achou de facto que a sua boca se orientava na direcção do olho castanho e pestanudo do homem que estava escanchado na sua mesa.

(ACM: 176)

In this excerpt, the woman is not perceived as the Other of the Same, because the

Same (the man) is depicted as an Other. This allows for a rethinking of woman

within a heterosexual relationship.

In terms of style, A Costa offers an alternative economy that exceeds binary logic

and overturns the existing patriarchal order. The narrative style proves enabling

because it actualises virtualities and scorns representations of reality fixed upon

clichés. The previously mentioned episode at the Moulin Rouge emphasises

Cixous’s proposition of the writing of scenes filled with intensity and desire. In

this line, Jorge also rejects a ‘mercantile idea of literature that mimes the effects

of everyday life’.68

Ev/ita’s ragged account of personal memories leads to the disturbing awareness

that one cannot learn from the past, because the past is continuously dissimilar

and cannot be easily pinned down. Written in a way deliberately calculated to

cause the death of historical accounts of the past, Jorge’s kamikaze-novel finally

bursts inwards causing storytelling to collapse on itself until only a murmur of

what it was can be heard:

A pouco e pouco as palavras isolam-se dos objectos que designam, depois das palavras só se desprendem sons, e dos sons restam só os murmúrios, o derradeiro estádio antes do apagamento.

(ACM: 259) 4.4. Conclusion

Deviancy (linguistic, structural and stylistic) has been registered to argue in

favour of subjective transformation processes that keep the subject non-unitary

and memory disruptive. Chiziane’s significant de-territorialisation of memory

68 V. Conley, ‘Becoming-Woman Now’, in C. Colebrook (2000), p. 23.

57

opposes traditional memorialisations of the past both structurally and

semantically. The long journey to Aldeia do Monte also reconfigures

subjectivities, transforming them into works in progress. Similarly, A Costa

creates a productive memorial (dis)order that destabilises accessibility to the

past. These structural and stylistic (dis)orders rebound on the body in terms of

physical indeterminacy. A problematisation of style gives birth to a narrative

that becomes transformative through its triangular performance between the

narrators and the reader in a sort of national narrative therapy session where

not only the past but also issues of sexual difference and gender are put on the

table for new figurations to emerge. In both narratives’ dealings with

subjectivity vis-à-vis painful historical processes, there is an emphasis on

becoming through passionate encounters with a virtual reality that surpasses

commodified fictional expectations.

Conclusion

Of exorcisms and the (un)spoken amulet of Gender

58

There is a pain – so utter –

It swallows substance up –

Then covers the Abyss with Trance –

So memory can step

Around – across – upon it –

As one within a Swoon –

Goes safely – where an open eye –

Would drop him – Bone by Bone.69

The meaning of ‘exorcising history’ finally becomes clear, as the chapters unfold

the pivotal role of gender in the coordination of the topics guiding the analysis of

Ventos and A Costa: fictional landscape, production and consumption processes,

de-territorialisation of memory, narrative style/structure. It is not incidental that

an enquiry into Portuguese constructions of the memory of colonial Africa

follows an analysis of the unsettled memory of the Mozambican postcolonial civil

war in relation to gender and marginality. The confrontation of two national

memories’ contribution to the critique of power intends to define an inter-text

that is not solely based upon the language (Portuguese) used. This work brings A

Costa and Ventos together in the creation of a new empowering textual voice that

shares the same thematic (gender), tactical (strategic use of exoticism and

gender) and structural grounds (the novels’ reliance on initial short-stories that

become transformative in their performance throughout the narratives).

Even less incidental is the choice to initiate and end this study quoting E.

Dickinson. As a poet, Dickinson encouraged feminist criticism from narrative

explanations of women writers into stylistic analyses of their work and

intensifying a feminist focus on language.70 Margaret Homans even suggests that

‘Dickinson’s greater originality lies in her breaking out of the terms of gender

altogether’, emphasising the poet’s elaborate cross-dressing, for example, in the

poem ‘My life had stood – A Loaded Gun - ’.71

69 E. Dickinson, ‘There is a pain – so utter - ’, in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. by T. Johnson (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1970), p. 294. 70 Margaret Dickie, ‘Feminist Conceptions of Dickinson’, p. 342-55, in The Emily Dickinson Handbook, ed. by G. Grabher et al (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), p. 342. 71 Martha Smith, Rowing in Eden: Re-reading Emily Dickinson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), p. 116.

59

The ongoing processes of memory work in relation to both a colonial war and a

civil war seem to have one thing in common: the ‘pain – so utter - ’ that

‘swallows substance up - ’. Jorge and Chiziane attempt, through writing, to look

at the Abyss with an open eye, so that memory can step into it and not ‘around –

across – upon it’. Ventos and A Costa are important literary performances of

personal stories exorcising, through storytelling, the official records of the past.

The decision to analyse and compare these novels rests on the recognition that

the combination of the two opens room for the discussion of how the memory of

the past contests mechanisms of power in the present, in both Portugal as the ex-

coloniser and Mozambique as the ex-colonised country raising from the ashes of

a civil war, through an ingenious handling of gender. These novels’ oppositional

value lies in their deliberate move towards the disturbing implications of the

local/personal realities. This focus on the personal/local is a cry against common

generalising interpretations of war and violence that leave little space for more

politicised readings of the past, and consequently, the present.

Exorcists of days gone by, Chiziane and Jorge are also the makers of days to

come. Their stories are an invocation of the past, inasmuch as they are a flight

from grief through memory, a frantic attempt to beat back time, death and

passive oblivion. In their invocation of the past they use gender as the (un)spoken

amulet opening up a space for a rethinking of the act of remembering that

refashions the retrieval of memory and transforms it into an active, productive

process. National imaginaries of the past are dislodged by the authors’ particular

writing skills that annihilate a-critical and universalising official accounts of

history so often responsible for the perpetuation of the past in the present.

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