Tradition and the Effects of the New in Modern African Fictional Cartography

tarting with the idea of voices in which, according to Antonio Cornejo Polar, is embedded the ancient voice of precolonial peoples, we should emphasize that in those modern African literatures whose principal language of expression is Portuguese and to which in this article, and in Entre Voz e Letra (Between Voice and the Printed Word) and the essays brought together in Novos Pactos,Outras Ficqies (New Pacts, Other Fictions), we dedicate our research and critical analysis, tradition continues to be configured as a productive element of meaning. Such was also the case in the past when the process of decolonization brought about an urgency as it sought to erase the blot left by the imposed political and social regime that indulged in repression and censorship. As has been duly documented, what scholars have sought out in that past historical period, as we have recorded and analysed in previously published critical works, was also searched for in the antiquity of the millennia. What is and long has been sought is the rupture that would permit the to be established, in the sense elaborated on by Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet and essayist, in his Os Filhos do Barro: do Romantismo h Vanguarda (Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-garde). What has resulted is that the ancient tradition is used as a means of subverting the aesthetic traditions of imposed European cultures. This subversion occurred at the very time that heterogeneity resists the pressures of the homogeneity also imposed by the European colonizers. At this juncture it is should be stressed that tradition, as the term is used here, is not to be taken as denoting something not subject to change nor as, to quote the Jamaican ethnographer and critic Stuart Hall, uma viagem de retorno 'a journey of return' (74) to the essences contained in origins and beginnings. The traditional should be seen as another map or, as Stuart Hall puts it, a repert6rio de significados 'a of meanings' (74). In the process of decolonising the other repertory-i.e., the one imposed by Western symbolic norms-those who produce texts for that purpose make use of the repertory of meanings. The act of substitution or, more often, of amplification, was not undertaken by a number of authors merely as a means of discovering a new aesthetic solution, but rather, at a given moment, as a kind of reinforcing of the very utopia of creation of the nation

Cartography · Geography · Cultural, Media, and Literary Studies · History · Literature, Culture, and Criticism · Urban Development and Societal Issues

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