Dialogue between nature and a pirate: ecocriticism for a decolonial perspective in Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s A visão das plantas

Abstract

This article proposes to read the novel A visão das plantas by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida through an ecocritical and postcolonial perspective, in order to highlight the relevance of this book in the author’s literary production and in the overview of Afro-descendant post-memory literature. In Portugal, ecocriticism is a discipline that has not yet been sufficiently used as a methodological possibility for the deconstruction of the binary oppositions between culture/nature and human/non-human that create the colonizer/ colonized binomial. A visão das plantas enables this ecocritical reading of postcolonial issues, emphasizing in particular the theme of guilt. To insert itself in the great debate of literature, the novel tells a colonial story in order to decolonize that same past that the second and third generations of African descendants question in contemporary Portugal.