Bernard McGuirk

Re-Writing the Estado Novo: Antonio Tabucchi's Sostiene [Afirma] Pereira

Abstract Portugal, 25 July 1938; self-isolated from but ideologically the neighbour of Fascist Spain. An ageing, literary editor, for long a crime reporter now charged with a supposedly harmless culture page for the weekly Lisboa, Pereira is a Catholic “a modo mio” and a widower preoccupied with resurrection; shy and bookish, given to eating and drinking alone. Into his sheltered life comes the half-Italian, half-Portuguese, Monteiro Rossi, an idealist activist prone to leftist thinking and to penning articles on living writers rather than anodyne obituaries commissioned on safely departed authors. ‘Onore a Francesco Franco Onore ai militari portoghesi in Spagna’ (‘Viva Francisco Franco Vivam os militares portugueses em Espanha’) proclaims the banner slung from tree to tree in the Praça da Alegria in Lisbon, where Pereira is snatched back to reality amidst the singing and dancing of ‘uma festa salazarista’ … , now alerted to the danger of fellow-travelling with Francos Spain. Can there ever be a terra firma? Has there ever been a terra firma Nation? A sovereign State controlled, tight, constructed within borders … alone? In António Salazars Estado Novo, which was to perdure/perjure from 1933 to 1974, were the Portuguese ever to be sustained, affirmed, (re)claimed, maintained—or detained, ‘even violently’—merely by being deemed (and as late as 1965, defiantly declared, by Salazar himself) as … ‘orgulhosamente sós’? How can/may any such position/posture have been anything but pretence, the later dictum ‘proudly alone’ anything but a lingering (paranoiac? still colonizing?) pretention? That is the aporetic question confronting the eponymous Pereira in Antonio Tabucchi’s novel Sostiene Pereira.

Intra-Colonialism or l’Animotion of the Black Atlantic: J. E. Agualusa’s O Vendedor de Passados

Abstract O Vendedor de Passados/The Book of Chameleons won for the Angolan novelist José Eduardo Agualusa The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The Book of Chameleons in 2007, thus extending to an international readership, and in English, the writing of a controversial protagonist in the fictional representation of post-independence Africa. Jacques Derrida’s meditation on ‘les animots’ is redeployed as an instrument of access to and analysis of an economy of transformed pasts and a present subsumed by post-colonial intra-colonialism, laundered through a currency of the exchanged identities evoked in the novel’s title. The plot is voiced through a gecko-narrator’s commentary on the eponymous protagonist, Félix Ventura, an albino with an unusual occupation, a seller of pasts. An Atlantic-facing Angola re-inscribes its history, after failed intrusions of Soviet expansionism and Cuban interventionism, exploring a pardo — a shade of grey — dimension less of paralysing animosity than of imaginative risk-taking. O romancista angolano José Eduardo Agualusa emprega protagonistas ou narradores propensos a ser menos porte-paroles do que animots. O ‘Ecce animot […] assumindo o título de um animal autobiográfico, sob a forma de uma resposta arriscada, fabulosa ou quimérica à pergunta ‘Mas eu, quem sou eu?’’ de Jacques Derrida é apropriado de modo a traçar a redisposição da história no e do mosaico da memória angolana. O epónimo protagonista albino de O Vendedor de Passados é um homem com uma ocupação invulgar. Félix Ventura é um vendedor de passados. Mas quem o observa? Quem conta o seu conto? Esta reflexão sobre o intra-colonialismo pós-colonial versa sobre uma economia de passados transformados, branqueados através da moeda de troca de identidades em permuta. A análise de uma função albino explora uma dimensão parda na Angola pós-colonial e voltada para o Atlântico, reinscrevendo a sua história, após as intromissões fracassadas do expansionismo soviético e do intervencionismo cubano, envolvida agora numa linguagem globalizante não tanto de animosidade paralisante quanto de animots desafiantes?

On the Trajectory of Gnosis: Pierre Reverdy via (obscura) St John of the Cross

Invisibly visible, an oxymoron drawn from the association of the sacred with the written; for in scripture is the holy at once, purportedly, hidden and revealed. Writing in its most distilled form is often, and across cultures, identified as a poetic discourse and the purest poetry runs the risk of being regarded as exclusively formal, as removed as possible from any material reality or even the representation of such.

Latin America-Interventions/Border Lines

Creative literature in the Latin Americas has consistently engaged with, and in, critical discourses more readily associable, in some cultures, with the traditions of philosophy, political theory or even literary criticism. Contemporary texts also often deal differently with colonial imprints highlighted by territorial and border relations, as in the performance-poems analysed in this essay. Treatments of the colonial, the postcolonial and, here, intracolonialism, are shown to emphasize how pervasive differences between are represented inseparably from no less invasive differences within societies. Whether the tensions provoked by discursively as well as geographically shifting boundaries arise from the Malvinas-Falklands conflict of 1982, within Mexican-US border of the 1990s, a strongly performative strain characterizes the staging of often raw, day-to-day, contacts. Here, strategic interventions of Susana Thénon, Tato Laviera, Guillermo GÓmez-Peña, Coco Fusco and, eventually, in a dialogical gesture, my own, are addressed in a critical discourse which exploits the ludic language and disruptive play of the performances under review.