In the flow of resistance: literature, (still) universe of difference’s reinvention

Abstract

In his book, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Portrait du colonisé, précédé du portrait du colonisateur, 1957), the Tunisian author Albert Memmi states that “the essential dilacerations of the colonized is particularly expressed and symbolized in the colonial bilinguism” (1989, p.96). This mustn’t be taken by linguistic dualism, once the language is now thought in its broader meaning, as a vehicle of culture. Memmi says that the domain of both languages by the writer who writes in a Colonized situation (in that case, African): the European language of the Colonizer and the African language throughout he interpret the world (even though it´s not his mother language) – allows the writer to participate in both “psychical and cultural kingdoms”, that is, the ideological and multivision interaction between the presented cultural universes, African and European, what builds the African literatures written in European languages. This article is offered as a reflection over this process of elaboration of “another language” that emerges of this reinvention process and transliguistic metamorphosis of (the same) Portuguese linguistic system, through which the cultural representation game is actualized to translate different nations, through different literary articulation, taking as an instance of reflection, the work of three different African writers: Luandino Vieira, Uanhenga Xitu (Angola) and Mia Couto (Mozambique).