NEW PUBLICATION

ARTICLE BY CIAC’S COLLABORATOR PUBLISHED IN CONEXÃO LETRAS MAGAZINE

The Conexão Letras magazine recently published in volume 16, nº26, an article by CIAC collaborator José Paulo Cruz Pereira, entitled “Mia Couto: Memória e Esquecimento em ‘A Varanda do Frangipani’”[“Mia Couto: Memory and Forgetfulness in ‘A Varanda do Frangipani'”]. The articles and reviews in this issue discuss issues related to memorialistic narrative, individual and collective memories, the political uses of the past, or the uses of forgetting, the politics of memory and the archive.

“Mia Couto: Memória e Esquecimento em ‘A Varanda do Frangipani’” consists on a deconstructive reading of the ethical and political problems posed by the development of Mozambique, as the novel faces and addresses them. It is, in substance, to observe how Maria Alzira Seixo’s notion, expressed in her book Outros Erros, about A Varanda do Frangipani – according to which, different times are “opposed” there, in a “contingent” way – can help us understand the fundamental issue of memory and forgetfulness, in the construction of the country. Following Ana Mafalda Leite’s observation, we examine the differences in the characters’ ways of thinking about natural and social life, events and time. And it will be in the light of both Michel de Certeau’s L’Écriture de L’Histoire’s perspective on modern history and of certain precise intuitions contained in Jacques Derrida’s O Gosto do Segredo and Histoire du Mensonge that we will try to think about the meanings of Mia Couto’s novel with regard to Mozambique’s current dramas and hopes.

Conexão Letras is a publication of the Graduate Studies in Literature at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, which seeks forms of articulation between different disciplinary domains of the area of Letters and publishes theoretical and applied studies. It does so in the areas of linguistics and literature, with alternating or shared production between the two areas every semester.