Sheila Khan, Jessica Falconi and Kamila Krakowska Introduction We present this set of interviews carried out with writers from Angola and Mozambique in response to the need for methodological approaches and positions that go beyond those of a literary nature and for greater openness to the integration of perspectives and contributions from supplementary sources. As a tool, the interview can be regarded as a trans-disciplinary practice. Readers and scholars who are already familiar with the literature of Portuguese-speaking Africa will recall the interviews carried out by Michel Laban (1991, 1998), and, specifically relating to Mozambique, by Patrick Chabal (1994) and Nelson Saúte (1998). We are dealing with a way of working that stakes itself on the construction of sources heavily marked by orality, by a narrative and dialogic mode, and by the autobiographical dimension of the interview itself (Portelli 2010: 4). To analyse and critically interpret what today is Angolan and Mozambican literature forces us into an ecology of knowledge (Santos 2002: 250), where the contributions made by sociology, anthropology and cultural studies are combined. Above all, it requires knowledge of local and everyday dynamics and situations that have shaped the production of knowledge around the societies that have emerged from colonial experience. Consequently, with this set of interviews, we have sought to revalue the local knowledge and know-how grounded in Angola and Mozambique, as independent nations after a long trajectory of colonial repression. The testimonies of the writers translate territorial and cultural universes that open up new avenues within the field of the narration of postcolonial nations. Following this perspective, a set of questions was prepared which included topics centring on: a) the author and his or her social period
2 Sheila Khan, Jessica Falconi and Kamila Krakowska (socio-cultural, political and historical context of the author; his or her experience as citizen and as writer; social memories); b) nation, narrative and identities (the manner in which the concept of the nation reflects the phenomena of configuration and/or disfiguration of identities as part of an ongoing process of narrative construction, be it of identity or be it of the nation); c) the role of the intellectual and literature in Angola or Mozambique (the influence of the intellectual and his or her work, socio-cultural, political and historical engagement); and finally d) the comparative context of African literature (representation and perceptions among those who write Angolan or Mozambican literature in Portuguese). With regard to the central topics of this project, we may observe that the idea of the nation presented all through the interviews is viewed as a process which evolves with the passage of time and the shifts in sociohistorical context. As Ana Paula Tavares has noted, in the first years after independence, there was a need to proclaim the nation and, accordingly, literature interacted profoundly with changes in society. With the deepening of national identity, there is subsequently some distancing between literature and the nation, in the sense that there is an opening up to other themes and, moreover, there is space to look critically at the nation that was born. However, literary narratives cannot be analysed merely as a product of their grand national historiography, without the incorporation of the performative side of national construction. The idea that the narrative is not a mirror that is faithful to reality, but rather a reflection and reconfiguration of this reality, is an idea present in many of the interviews of the present volume, such as, for example, those with Paulina Chiziane, João Paulo Borges Coelho, Ana Paula Tavares, and Ondjaki. On the one hand, works of literature may be viewed as systems that are independent of the nation, understood as a social and political phenomenon. On the other, the factors which shape literary narratives are necessarily social, political and economic. Mia Couto reflects in a profound way on this synergy between reality and fiction when he observes how readers rediscover Mozambique in his fiction. The writer says: People invent themselves and, when they invent themselves, they perform this double
Introduction 3 function of creating a nation, of creating part of the nation and also of creating Mozambican literature. (see page 195) As Ondjaki states, literature can function as an alternative archive that is capable of granting access to other visions and versions of the nation s historic past.. Furthermore, there is a set of spaces which has come, in various forms, to reclaim its place in the representation of the nation. Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa deals with the question of the oral heritage which, in his opinion, still needs to be preserved through writing and, more especially, evaluated and regarded as worthy of belonging to the archive, to history, the official narrative of the nation. From this perspective, aside from the question of oral heritage, another central aspect is constituted by the predominantly patriarchal nature of the discourse of the nation, as postcolonial feminist criticism has demonstrated. This in fact, raises a variety of gender issues, as evidenced by the interviews. In this regard, the literature produced by Ana Paula Tavares or Paulina Chiziane the number of female writers in Angola and Mozambique is still very small, hence the fact that that these are the only two female interviewees featured in the present volume sheds light on precisely these issues. In fact, these two writers have come to envisage their places as women women having been generally sidelined or excluded from the archive by the narratives of colonialism and nationalism as spaces of political negotiation, of agency for the ongoing writing of history and the nation. In conclusion, these interviews, carried out as part of the Postcolonial Nation and Narration project, complement the recent volume of analytic and critical studies edited by the members of the group (cf. Narrating the Postcolonial Nation: Critical Essays on Angola and Mozambique, 2014). Indeed the testimonies of writers who have accompanied the process of nation-formation in Angola and Mozambique raise crucial questions for an understanding of the complex mechanisms of interaction between nation and narration. Thus, the interviews presented here, similarly to language and literature themselves, constitute a reality that invests us with the imperative to re-consider and re-view the very terms of aesthetic and ethical sense; that is, to rethink the very conditions of reality (Chambers 2014: 9).
4 Sheila Khan, Jessica Falconi and Kamila Krakowska References Chabal, Patrick, Vozes Moçambicanas: literatura e nacionalidade, Lisbon: Vega, 1994. Chambers, Iain, Power, Language and the Poetics of the Postcolonial, in Ana Mafalda Leite et al. (eds), Narrating the Postcolonial Nation: Critical Essays on Angola and Mozambique, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014: 5 14. Laban, Michel, Angola: encontro com escritores, 2 vols, Porto: Fundação Eng. António de Almeida, 1991. Laban, Michel, Moçambique: encontro com escritores, 3 vols, Porto: Fundação Eng. António de Almeida, 1998. Leite, Ana Mafalda, et al. (eds), Narrating the Postcolonial Nation: Critical Essays on Angola and Mozambique, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014. Portelli, Alessandro, L inter-vista nella storia orale, in M. Pistacchi (ed.), Vive voci: l intervista come fonte di documentazione, Rome: Donzelli, 2010: 3 12. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, Para uma sociologia das ausências e uma sociologia das emergências, Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais 63 (October 2002): 237 280. Saúte, Nelson, Os Habitantes da Memória, Praia/Mindelo: Embaixada de Portugal/ Centro Cultural Português, 1998.