The “Papéis da prisão” from Luandinho Vieira: between the self writing and the testimony of barbarism

Abstract

In 2015, José Luandino Vieira publishes the book Papéis da Prisão, featuring a selection of letters, notes about his writing, newspaper clips, thoughts about theory and literary practice, apart from his prison diaries. In the end, the book presents the interview The Tarrafal is the prison in me, where the author, already with eighty years old, reevaluates his path as a writer and as a activist for the liberation of Angola from the Portuguese colonialism, and the marks that the long years in prison left in his life. The objective of this study is to analyze the book Papéis da Prisão from two complementary potencies: the constitution of the testimony from Luandino Vieira about his experiences in the fight for Angolan independency – examining the book as a space of remembrance and highlighting the writing of testimony as constitutive not only of the individual memory, but of a dimension of public memory of political nature of the period in the relations that establishes with the history of the spaces of Portuguese language, branded by extreme events during the twentieth century; and the elaboration of the autobiographic notebooks as self writing – exercises of the writing of the self for himself and for others, constituting a mechanism of self-investigation, self-training and self-individuation from the literatures.

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/abriluff.2018n20a463