3. EVALUACIÓN DEL POTENCIAL DEL MUNCIPIO DE SANCTI SPÍRITUS PARA EL
3.5. Conclusiones del tercer capítulo
Having conquered its independence much more as a result of the
Portuguese Carnation Revolution than for any victory in the battlefield, São
Tomé and Príncipe’s non-violent transition from colony to sovereign state
did not account for a free and peaceful independent society. The single-
party Soviet-style State installed by the country’s first government in July
1975 brought along its typical iron-handed approach seasoned with civil
intra-elite struggle for power and resources, conducted by intrigues and
conspiracies, and accompanied by actual or alleged coup attempts, which in
return served to increase the authoritarian and repressive character of the
regime” (297). Although comparative perspectives tend to pay little
attention to the impact of the Santomean statist single-party political regime
(1975-1990) and its legacy, preferring to focus on the expressive and
dramatically bloodier regimes of bigger countries such as Angola and
Mozambique, what its literature shows is that the weight of the State in the
way society is narrated is no less expressive in São Tomé and Príncipe.
The literature of the archipelago-country is small if compared to the
continental literatures of Portuguese-speaking Africa, and even if compared
with its insular Cape Verdean counterpart. However, as the literary critic
and Santomean citizen Inocência Mata replied when a Brazilian interviewer
asked if São Tomé and Príncipe already had a literary system like that of
Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde: “[o] fato de um escritor não ser
publicado em Portugal não quer dizer que ele não exista. . . . Gosto daquela
afirmação do vosso Antonio Candido acerca da literatura brasileira:
‘Comparada às grandes, a nossa literatura é pobre e fraca. Mas é ela, não
outra, que nos exprime’. É isso.”5 (“A essência dos caminhos que se
entrecruzam” 6). And as a matter of fact, one can state that the Santomean
experience has been more often expressed in poetry than in prose. As Mata
5 “[t]he fact that a writer is not published in Portugal does not mean that he does not exist . . . . I like that statement of your Antonio Candido about Brazilian Literature: ‘Compared to the large ones, ours is poor and week. But it is this one, not another, that expresses us’. That’s it.”
described in detail in her Polifonias Insulares: Cultura e Literatura de São
Tomé e Príncipe, poetry was already a prolific genre in pre-independence
days and kept its pace after a short period of literary silence after
independence. Prose, on the other hand, with the exception of the work of
Sum Marky whose first publication dates from 1956, developed mostly after
independence. In this context, the works of Albertino Bragança can be
distinguished by what the Santomean critic terms as a writing that “centra-se
no ideológico, no político e no sociocultural do pós-independência: o
universo é agora o das relações internas de poder entre os vários atores
sociais, no diálogo entre a tradição e os imperativos da sua actualização,
marcas afinal da escrita pós-colonial”6 (Polifonias 88).
It is slightly different than the project of Bragança’s previous
narrative, Aurélia de Vento is a novel about a woman. Put briefly, the plot
brings us the story of Aurélia, a correct, honest, beautiful and fearless
woman who lives life her own way. She helps others (she is the president of
the Civil Association for Mutual Help), and seeks justice and conciliation
even when attacked. Her final victory comes when she survives an
assassination attempt ordered by her stepmother Clotilde. Nevertheless, the
story within the story seems to betray the author’s declared aim to simply
“trazer as nossas raízes, encontrar também muitos dos nossos medos, as
6 “focuses the ideological, political and sociocultural aspects of the post-independence: the universe is now internal power relations between the various social actors, in a dialogue between tradition and the imperatives of its updating, finally marks of post-colonial writing”.
nossas superstições. Não obstante estar de acordo com elas as trouxe ao
público, para que pudéssemos reflectir sobre as mesmas e chegarmos a
consenso”7 (Bragança, Interview). Taking up six of the seventeen chapters
of the narrative, the story of Aurélia’s father, the Portuguese-born white
farmer Pedro Santos, from whom the State – with a capital “S” as the
original Portuguese Estado is capitalized throughout the book – wants to
take a legitimately owned plot of land at any cost.
Regardless of Aurélia’s alleged place as protagonist in the narrative,
a matter that will be further discussed in Chapter 3, the softness of her
actions and her relative first-person silence, as she speaks less than she is
spoken about – mostly by the voices of other men such as the omniscient
narrator or male characters – turn the quest for justice of Pedro Santos
against the State into the beating-heart section of the narrative, being just as
intense as the episode of Aurélia’s assassination attempt, which is the
climax of the narrative. Pedro is the one character actively seeking justice
by naming, along with its perpetrators, the injustice that victimizes him.
After a mild introduction in the first chapter of Aurélia, whose voice we
never hear, the book turns to Pedro’s voice, in a conversation with his
partner Clotilde, the one that opens the following chapter:
– Infelizmente, parece que você tem razão. Pela conversa
que eu tive com o diretor, fiquei a pensar que há gente que
7 “bring up our roots, but also face many of our fears, our superstitions. Besides not agreeing with them I have brought them to the public, so that we could reflect and reach consensus over them”.
julga que tem mais direito sobre aquelas terras do que eu que
sou o seu dono. – Tamborilou os dedos sobre o tampo da
mesa descolorida, o ar congestionado, o rosto alagado em
suor – Mas, eu digo você, eu vou até o fim nesse negócio.
Para já o terreno de Potó Zamblala nunca foi do Estado...
– É verdade, mas se Governo quer comprar, como é que
você faz?
– Comprar? Qual Comprar? Eles querem obrigar-me a
vender contra a minha vontade e a um preço mais do que
barato, para mais tarde facilitar as terras aos amigos deles.
Isso é o que eles querem. Mas eu é que não vou calar a boca
nesse assunto. Você vai ver!...8 (Bragança, Aurélia 23-24)
In its first mention the State is designated for its corruption.
Embodied mostly by the character of Minister Domingos Ventura, the State
is actually the only place in which we can find corrupt people throughout
the narrative, as the other characters who commit villainies in the novel did
not do so in order to obtain material advantage. Clotilde’s ordered attempt
against Aurélia’s life is a crime of passion. The defamation of Aurélia by
her husband’s cousin is an act of jealousy, and the very assassination
8 Unfortunately, it seems you are right. By my conversation with the director I even think
that there are people who judge themselves more worthy of that land than me, who own it. – He drummed his fingers over the discolored table, his breathing heavy, his face sweaty – But, I tell you, I’ll go through with this until the end. Now I tell you that the land of Potó Zamblala has never belonged to the State… / --It is true, but if the government wants to buy it, what are you going to do? / -- To buy it? They want to force me to sell it against my will by a more-than-cheap price, so that later then can transfer the lands easily to their friends. That is what they want. But I will not be quiet about it. You will see!...
attempt against the protagonist does not appear to have brought the doer any
kind of material compensation, as it is never mentioned in the course of the
story. It seems as if, in a counterbalance to the immoral pursuit of material
advantage sought by those in government, the whole of the country’s
population is portrayed as living in a sort of economic mutual respect and
solidarity in which the rich help the poor and the poor help the rich,
suggesting the absence of class struggles and confining the existing conflicts
to the order of social conviviality. The only person or entity in pursuit of
financial advantage is the State, in the guise of Minister Ventura. In doing
so, this specific novel seems to suggest that the nation is already there; it is
the State that has to be reinvented.
It is almost as if the feeling of brotherhood that underlines the
national sentiment arises as a result of mass opposition to the State. This is
similar to the raising of national consciousness that took place in the final
colonial days, in which a sense of sameness among the colonized is
achieved through opposition to the colonizer. It would account for the
popular support given both to Pedro Santos’ case against the State and to
Aurélia after her attack despite the social abyss that separates the people
from these two elite characters. In fact, Aurélia’s attacker will be captured
and brought to justice by the free initiative of three simple men of the
people who, although not knowing the victim personally, feel compelled to
risk their lives to protect her for the sake of justice. In another passage, after
following the case and who celebrated his victory against the system as their
own. Aurélia “[r]econhecia que o pai, pessoa de poucas falas, não era um
homem verdadeiramente popular; por isso, considerava a enchente no
quintal mais como à espontânea reação de quem não se habituara ainda à
ideia de que um ministro pudesse, em qualquer caso, sair derrotado perante
um qualquer cidadão...”9 (86-87). Would it be a “iniludível sinal dos tempos
ou um facto isolado, casual, a que se não deva atribuir especial
significado?”10 (86).
New times or not, the solidarity and collaboration between social
classes in Aurélia resonate with the not-so-new, yet powerful, idea of
Amílcar Cabral (2008 [1966]) for an alliance between the bourgeoisie and
peasantry, in which it was the duty of the first to use its privileged position
and to come to terms with its historical responsibility, paving the way
against colonialism towards a more equal future in post-independence
society (“A arma” 198). The meaningful difference in the context of this
novel is that Pedro and Aurélia – along with the lawyer Altino Castro – are
not fighting colonialism. They oppose the independent State instead. On the
other hand, the conciliatory scene of the narrative’s final chapter in which
State, religion and law – given the presence of two ministers, one of which
9 “she knew that her father, man of few words, was not a truly popular man, for this reason,
she considered the multitude of people in his yard as a spontaneous reaction of people who are not yet used to the idea that a minister could, by any chance, be defeated by an ordinary citizen”
10 “inescapable sign of the times or an isolated, casual fact, to which one should not attach
is Domingos Ventura, the Bishop and the Director of the Judiciary Police –
come together to visit Aurélia after the assassination attempt does not signal
a disillusioned critique of the State. In an ending in which the postcolonial
State - defeated on lawful grounds by a citizen who is a white man born as a
colonial settler - still agrees to pay respects to the victor’s daughter, we see a
fictional projection pointing towards a constructive and positive future. The
formation of a productive critique, as portrayed in the image of a future in
which the organized people obtain the power to influence the heavy hand of
State, parallels the writing of a devenir of active postcolonial political and
social consciousness.
The experience of time as entanglement in Aurélia de Vento,
articulates the postcolonial present in the terms put forward by Mbembe and
discussed in Chapter 1 as “precisely that moment when different forms of
absence become mixed together: the absence of those presences that are no
longer so and that one remembers (the past), and the absence of those others
that are yet to come and are anticipated (the future)” (Postcolony 16). As a
result the narrative portrays the critical aspect of postcolonial time in which
both the absent colonial past, making itself present in the deployment of
(anti)colonial reason, and the promise of a future with equality, based on the
performance of justice, cling together. In that way the juxtaposition of the
colonial, anticolonial and intracolonial mentalities and practices in the
postcolonial present constitutes a structuring feature embodied by the
Pedro Santos’s character and struggle – central to the narrative –
illustrate the different strands intertwined in the Santomean postcoloniality
woven in Aurélia de Vento. The same way the color of his skin signifies the
colonial difference of the past, his present defiance of the post-independence
intracolonial intransigence of the State signals the lingering of a colonial
logic of race whose surpassing is already anticipated, at the time in which it
was claimed:
- Pedro, outra coisa é que você esquece que você é
estrangeiro, num país em que a independência nem tem ainda
muito tempo, raiva contra branco ainda não passou tudo. É
preciso você compreender isso. Nem sempre coisa anda com
pressa que a gente quer...
- Estrangeiro, eu? Não nasci aqui, mas a filha que fiz, todo o
amor que demonstrei ter para com este povo? Só fiquei em S.
Tomé porque é aqui onde eu quero viver, onde me sinto bem.
É por eu defender os meus direitos que têm que esquecer
todo o passado?11 (Bragança, Aurélia 24)
The State’s choice to forget Pedro’s personal history in the
promotion of a homogenizing and Manichean version of a collective history,
11 - Pedro, something you forget is that you are a foreigner, in a country where independence has just happened, anger against whites is not yet all over. You have to understand this. Its not always that things go as fast as we want…/ -Me, foreigner? I was not born here but the daughter I had, all the love that I have always shown for this people? I have only stayed in S. Tomé because it is here that I want to live, where I feel good. Is it because I fight for my rights that all my past has to be forgotten?
adds some realistic color to the way the individual is too often obliterated
for the establishment of grand narratives. Pedro’s manipulation by the
power in charge is made explicit throughout the novel, as we can see by the
words of minister Ventura, as he seeks to convince his lawyer of the
legitimacy of his claim:
mas, diga-me lá doutor, afinal de contas, desde quando é que
o Estado tem de se submeter à vontade [refere-se na verdade
ao direito] de um cidadão, ainda por cima estrangeiro?
. . .
Acha mesmo que eu baixo os braços assim à primeira,
podendo invocar o interesse público e expropriar o terreno ao
maldito agricultor? Será que não existe mesmo nenhuma
hipótese de forçar o tipo a vender ou, tratando-se de um
estrangeiro, ameaçar expulsá-lo senão se dispuser a fazê-
lo?12 (Bragança, Aurélia 46-47)
The minister’s manipulation of Pedro’s belonging as an argument to
strip him from his civil rights (for despite the fact that he was born overseas
he is a Santomean citizen) reflects the intracolonial appropriation of the
colonial discourse of exclusion based on race. Despite referring to Pedro
12 But tell me, doctor, at the end of the day, since when has the State to submit to the will [actually to the right] of a citizen, a foreign citizen on top of that? / . . . / Do you really believe that I give up so fast when I can evoke public concern to take the land from the damned farmer? There would not really be any way to force the guy to sell, since he is a foreigner, threaten to expel him if he is unwilling to do it?
simply as a foreigner – a term which would not, in itself, necessarily imply a
connection with the former colonizing power –, his Portuguese birthplace,
white skin color, and landowner status are enough to surround the proposal
of his expulsion with the specters of (anti)colonial resentment, too present in
its absence in Ventura’s words. As affirmed by Fanon “we see that the
primary Manichaeism which governed colonial society is preserved intact
during the period of decolonization; that is to say that the settler never
ceases to be the enemy, the opponent, the foe that must be overthrown”
(Fanon 39).
Within a post-independence context, the resort to anticolonial reason
in Aurélia is made into a mode of critique. Shown to be contradictory, and
embedded in the very colonial reason it sought to dismantle, the nationalist
roots of the State apparatus constructed in the narrative are conceived in
their spectrality. Personified by the figure of the recently deceased San
Labeca, mother of Ventura’s faithful secretary Aydi, who is described as
“uma nacionalista exacerbada tentando impor aos outros os padrões da sua
visão das coisas”13 (Bragança, Aurélia 42), Labeca’s intransigency is
regarded as a problematic legacy: “Desde jovem San Labeca guardava no
peito o sonho de um país livre e por isso se juntou à Cívica logo no início da
fase final da luta. Fê-lo de forma quase religiosa, fanática mesmo, tal como
acontecia com a grande maioria. Ela era dos que consideravam que a
verdade só havia uma, a do Movimento e mais nenhuma”14 (Bragança,
Aurélia 36). It is due to its negative legacy that the law, personified by the
righteous lawyer Altino Castro, moves away both from minister Ventura
and Aydi; from the State and its supportive nationalist argument. The
lawyer refuses to represent the State against Pedro Santos, and decides to
separate from Aydi, the wife who could not escape the extremist influence