‘We, the ones from Makulusu’ and José Luandino Vieira’s utopic perspective

Abstract

The definitions of tradition as an ongoing process, on the one hand, and modernity as rupture, on the other, are nowadays social optical illusions (BALANDIER, 1976). The continuous confrontation established between the maintaining factors of a popular culture and knowledge and the chai­ned disruptions brought by progress generate a third type of sociocultu­ral system, eminently unstable, that emerges within post-colonial societies. As a space determinant of identity construction, this new world engenders wandering individuals. For the Angolan writer José Luandino Vieira, the utopian dream of an Angolan nation free from the shackles of the colonial power is precisely the result of a sum between the traditional knowledge and that knowledge which is gained from the experience of modernity. Based on the notions of tradition and modernity presented in As Dinâmicas Sociais, by Georges Balandier (1976), and O discurso filosófico da modernidade, by Jürgen Habermas (2000), this study aims at understanding how the utopian perspective of Luandino Vieira (1974) is revealed on the novel Nós, os do Makulusu. It analyzes the figure of the narrator (Mais-Velho), who wanders by the streets of Luanda led by the time of war and cut off by the filters of his memory. Here, past, present and future are diluted to encompass in this narrative structure, simultaneously, tradition and modernity.