On How Post-Colonial Fiction Can Contribute to a Discussion of Historical Reparation: An Interpretation of As Telefones (2020) by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida

Abstract

Post-colonial Portuguese literature published since 1974 has obscured the trauma of the colonised. In the context of Portuguese prose fiction published since the beginning of the second decade of the present millennium, authors of African descent follow on from the generation that brought about the African liberations. However, due to the years of political and economic instability that followed in the former colonies, these writers became part of the African-heritage diaspora that has grown up in Portugal. As such, they form the visible face of the post-colonial cultural entanglement that was produced by colonialism. Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, the author of As Telefones (The Telephones, 2020), the novel that is the focus of this article, provides an example of African-heritage writing and lived experience that has points of reference in Portuguese and Angolan cultures alike. This article argues that Portuguese prose fiction by authors of African descent destabilises cartographical imaginaries to reflect on the cultural complexity of the lived experience of people of African descent, contributing to a polyphony that has been absent from collective memory in the public space, and consequently creating possibilities for historical reparation. This article maintains that, on the one hand, As Telefones decolonises the experience of loss that literature published after 1974 has associated not only with the memory and experience of the coloniser’s body, but also and significantly, with the feeling of saudade (nostalgia or longing) that is so central to Portuguese culture; on the other, it argues that the narrative focus on the telephone as the sole means of transmission of post-memory introduces a rupture in Portuguese literary convention — in which writing is a privileged witness — by endorsing the orality that feeds into the origins of African literatures.