The Other, the Same, in Three Times: Poetic Circularities Between Angola and Brazil

Abstract

Studies, in different fields of knowledge, about territories whose histories have been crossed by colonial processes often suffer from a centralizing premise: the conception of influence or the use of a certain notion of tradition that comes from the colonizing element. In the Portuguese-speaking world, this centrality is attributed to Portugal, where the cultural base and mediation between its colonized territories would have come from. This article, however, proposes a South-South analysis between Angola and Brazil without the intermediation of the northern country. Recognizing the imaginary surrounding some images and the Western poetic tradition, it proposes going beyond the simplistic notion of influence, putting into dialogue productions from three distinct temporalities in the literary history of these countries, the 17th, 19th and 21st centuries, using the concept of “cultural memory”, by Jan Assmann. Although the temporal trajectory begins in the colonial period of both spaces, the poetic circularity is read on the axis of the South Atlantic, between poems by Antônio Dias Macedo (Angola) and Gregório de Matos (Brazil). In the 19th century, the moment of Brazilian independence and intensification of Portuguese colonization in Angola, the focus is on the production of José da Silva Maia Ferreira, author of what is considered the first Angolan book, published after his return from Brazil to Angola and contact with poets such as João D’Aboim and Gonçalves Dias. Finally, in the 21st century, it proposes a comparison between poems by Angolan Ondjaki and Brazilian Ana Martins Marques, a dialogue that, regardless of effective contact between the poets, focuses on a shared ethos via “cultural memory”.