Memórias ilustrando a história nos contos “Encontro de Acaso” e “O Despertar”, de Luandino Vieira.

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the construction of memory and the past-present in the short stories “Encontro de Acaso” and “O despertar”, from the work A cidade e a infância (1960), by Angolan writer José Luandino Vieira. In particular, the way the work is situated in the historical path of Angolan literature in the mid-1960s/1970s, pointing to a verification of how the memory of the past is configured as the corpus of the narrative in question. In addition, our research explores how the Angolan author appropriates memory as a literary resource to re-signify the personal and collective history of the characters, both in the colonial and post-colonial contexts. We therefore set ourselves the following question: How does the memory of the past constitute a guiding thread for the construction of the present in the short stories “Encontro de Acaso” and “O despertar”? In order to answer this question, we defined our general objective, which aims to differentiate the conceptions of memories, based on the social, political and cultural aspects that recur in the stories. In order to meet this objective, we have outlined two specific objectives: 1) to identify the elements that provide receptive characteristics of the past and the present in the construction of characters in the short story “Encontro de Acaso” and how this procedure contributes to reframing an idea of time and memory; 2) to situate the importance of the psychological evolution of the protagonist in “O despertar”, as a questioning agent of the Angolan past. Methodologically, this is a qualitative research project (Oliveira, 2007), based on an interpretative reading and bibliographical analysis (Gil, 2002), based on the studies of Pollak (1989), Izquierdo (2018) and Halbawachs (1990), who provide concepts of individual and collective memory and their ideal of belonging. To this end, we selected the works of Moraes (2006), Mendes (2011) and Loureiro (2017), who point out the similarity between the character’s identity and that of the person who invents it. To describe Angolan literature in relation to the country’s historiography, we used Aló (2006). In this way, we found that, by observing and absorbing the existence of a personal link between the fictional and the real, we found reasons for the co-(existence) of an engaged literature in which memory is used as a tool for resistance and reconstruction. Therefore, the short stories bring the past and the present together as a way of reaffirming a memory that must not be forgotten, be it individual or collective, but also re-signifies an idea of memory as an essential part of the historical transition.