EMANUELLE SANTOS

After Nationalism: Literary Configurations of

Contemporary Postcolonialities in Cape Verde,
Guinea-Bissau and Sao Tome e Principe

Nationalism is not a political doctrine , nor a programme. If you really wish your
country to avoid regression, or at best halts and uncertainties, a rapid step must be
taken from national consciousness to political and social consciousness.
- Frantz Fanon (1999: 2.02.)

ABSTRACT
Through the comparative analysis of three novels from Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde
and Sao Tome e Principe , Tiara (1999 ),Marginais (2.010)andAurelia de Vento (2.0n)
respectively, this essay focuses on the visible evidence of a second postcolonial phase
in the literatures of these countries. Differently from a first postcolonial moment,
rooted in the clash between the colonial and anticolonial logic inherent to the national
liberation struggles, that favours the rise of a literature conceived in the bosom of
nationalism, what we understand as a second postcolonial phase emerges when national
sovereignty is no longer under threat. Comparative analysis of these literary works will
show that contemporary postcolonialit y, deeply grounded in the post-independence
period , constitutes a time of transition from the national paradigm to the paradigm
of political and social consciousness, demanding a reevaluation of postcoloniality as
a critical concept applicable to these countries' contemporary realities.

In the current economic and social situation ofliterary studies in contexts

governed by neo-liberal logic, a cross-wise comparative study like the one
proposed here may seem to lend itself all too easily to an apology for the
global or the 'Lusophone' in that it erases differences and depoliticizes
(Mata 2ou: s). The present study, on the contrary, proposes a further dia-
logue with studies of the literatures of Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and Sao
Tome e Principe as national literatures. Seeking to emphasize the trans-
national scope of particular characteristics common to these literatures, a
2.74 EMANUELLE SANTOS
comparative perspective contributes to viewing the regional ramifications
of the world system to which each national reality is, inevitably, connected.
In this way, investment in a comparative study of representations of
the nation in literary works published in Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and
Sao Tome e Principe in a time we call contemporary postcoloniality cannot
be dissociated from either a reflection on what is understood by postcolo-
niality, or the impact of this condition on the internal dynamics of each of
these literary histories. Given that these two aspects feed back into them-
selyes, it is obvious that phenomena arising out of the evolution of those
literatures add to the critical theories brought together under the heading
of the postcolonial and enable them to fulfil their function of illuminating
and interacting with the literary material.
This study is based on the hypothesis that, with regard to the literary
representation of the nation, contemporary literary works from Cape Verde,
Guinea-Bissau and Sao Tome e Principe produce a critical reconfiguration of
the fictional representation of their respective countries. Published around
three decades after the long and victorious campaign that culminated in
the political independence of the five African countries whose official lan-
guage is Portuguese, the three novels under scrutiny in this study seem to
frame the necessary moment of transition from a national consciousness
to a social and political consciousness with which Frantz Fanon closes his
meditation on 'The Pitfalls ofNational Consciousness' ([1961] 1999: 2.02).
A moment in which the critical gaze, which previously lent itself to the
exaltation of the emerging nations, goes on to enunciate from a present
time distanced from the context of the anticolonial success and produces a
retrospective evaluation of the promises of equality and justice that fuelled
the dreams and efforts that won their independence. Such a feature is sig-
nificant in the scope of both national and comparative literary studies, for
it denotes a thematic shift that attests to the progression of the national
literatures in question at the same time as it adds a different dimension to
our understanding ofliterary postcoloniality.
The three novels that comprise our corpus are Tiara, published in
1999 by the Guinean writer Filomena Embal6 who was born in Angol a;
Marginais, 2010, by the Cape Verdean author Evel Rocha; and Aurel ia de
Vento, 20II, by the Santomean Albertina Brag ani;a. The cho ice of works
After Nationalism 2.75
was determined by the common features of genre and relative contempo-
raneity within the framework of novel production in the national litera -
ture to which they belong. 1his study does not follow the widespread and
important practice of comparing works that clearly share thematic features.
Rather, it focuses on the representation of the nation in literary artefacts
which, at first sight, only have in common the fact that they may be classi-
fied as contemporary novels from independent African countries which, in
the past, shared the same colonizer. The apparently random nature of the
comparison derives, in fact, from the empirical attempt to map out common
factors around the representations of a systematic reality underlying the
ongoing process of formation of the postcolonial states.
As such, the choice of the contemporary novel is justified not by the
strength of its representativeness in the literary scene of its contexts of pro-
duction, given precisely the factual force and abundance of genres such as
poetry and oral literature, above all in the literatures of Guinea-Bissau and
Sao Tome e Principe, but by the intimate relationship its form establishes
with the type of posccolonial society, inevitably bourgeois, chat came to
be formed. The intrinsic fusion of aesthetics and history in the form of a
'bourgeois epic', as Hegel points out and Lukacs reiterates (1999), makes
the novel an appropriate form for decanting the systemic socio-historical
content of postcolonial capitalise society. Through its form, in the 'relai;oes
do individuo com a sociedade, no destino individual, manifescam-se trai;os
essenciais do ser hisc6rico-concreto de uma determinada forma social'
(Lukacs, 1999: 95) [relations ofthe individual with society, in the individual
destiny, essential traces of the historical-concrete being of a particular social
form are manifested], and this imprints, in literature, the contradictions
of the respective extraliterary contexts in which declarations are made and
on which one reflects.
Inheriting the markedly Manichean logic that shaped both the colonial
ideology and the revolutionary anticolonial thought, the literature pro-
duced in the first postcolonial phase, when the recently attained national
sovereignty still felt threatened, favours the appearance of typical charac-
ters and situations chat can concretely represent a collective social struggle
between colonized and colonizer. Unlike the previous phase, contemporary
prose forged in th e hc:irc of soc ieties that are simultaneously posccolonial,
 EMANUELLE SANTOS
post-socialist and markedly neo-liberal opens up a space for the emergence
of characters able to represent much more clearly the contradictory and
multiple nature not only of their capitalist societies, but also of the politi-
cal regimes that have inherited control of the destinies of their respective
countries from the nationalist movements.
After National Unity: Belonging, Exclusion and Marginality
Let us begin, then, with the analysis of Aurelia de Vento by the Santomean
Albertina Bragarn;:a.This novel tells the story of a female protagonist , brave
and stereotypically without faults, who tackles everything and everyone in
her search for social justice. Aurelia is of mixed race, the daughter of a black
woman from Sao Tome and a white man, Pedro Santos , whose trajectory
certainly constitutes a segment that stands out in the novel. Although he
is the son of a settler, white and a landowner , Pedro Santos is passionate
about Sao Tome e Principe. Endowed with a keen sense of justice, Pedro
is the victim of a takeover engineered by the corrupt Minister Dom ingos
Ventura, who for less than noble reasons, begins a legal crusade with the
aim of taking the honest farmer's plantation :
Acha mesmo que eu baixo os bra<;osassim aprimeira, podendo invocar o interesse
publico e expropriar o terreno ao mald ito agricultor? [... ] Sera que nao existe mesmo
nenhuma hip6tese de for<;aro tipo a vende r ou, tratando-se de um estrangeiro, amea-
<;arexpulsi-lo senao se dispuser a faze-lo ? (Bragan<;a 20u: 47)
[He really thinks I'll give up the fight at the first obstacle , when I can invoke public
interest and expropriate the land from the damn farmer? [...] ls there really no pos-
~ibility of forcing the man to sell, or if he is a foreigner, threatening to expel him if
0
h e doesn't agree to do it?]
The malicious manipulation by the State of the important status of belong-
ing with a view to setting a preced ent for obtaining personal gain is op en ly
discussed throughout the plot . Ju st as w e see in a speech by Ped ro Santos:
After Nationalism
Estrangeiro, eu? N ao nasci ag ui, mas a filha gue fiz, todo o amo r gue demonstr ei
ter para com este p ovo? S6 fiquei em S. Tom e po rgue e agui onde eu quero viver,
onde me sinto bem. Epor eu defender os meus direitos que tern gue esquecer tod o
o passado? (Ibid ., 24 )
[A foreigner, me? I wasn't born here, bur the daughter I made , all the love I've shown I
have for this people? I've only stayed in Sao Tome because th is is where I want to
live, where I feel good. Because I defend my rights they'll discount everything th at
has passed?]
The struggle between Pedro Santos and Minister Ventura in Aurelia bring s
out some of the nuances that mark the postcolonial present of countrie s
like Sao Tome e Principe . The minister is the face of a state bureaucracy
that, in times of econom ic neo-liberalism, doesn't scruple to appropriat e,
for his personal advantage, a discourse of belonging that is dear to th e
memory of the national liberation struggle. Voiced and politicized when
a community feels threatened (Yuval-Davis 20n), belonging was a ke y
category for achieving th e relative national unity without which it would
be impossible to mobilize the rural masses for the liberation struggle. In
this way, the historical association between ideas of unity and freedom
placed great importance on categories of belonging around which th e
anticolonial ideas crystallized, that is, belonging in terms of race and class.
Still, even with the fluctuating level of miscegenation in each society allied
to Marxist nationalist rhetoric, whose discourse on class consciousness ,
at least in theory, overrides racial and ethnic affiliations (Cabral [1966]
2008 ), the relationship between national unity and race in the ant icoloni al
period is certainly present in the first postcolonial phase in the societies in
question. The clash between Pedro Santos and M inister Ventura reveals
precisely those social contradictions arising out of continuous use, in th e
post independence period, of ideological tools forged for the underst and -
ing of the needs of a revolutionary nationalism.
The close relationship between national unity and authorit arian ism
is not unfamiliar to a range of postcolonial African societie s, mai nl y in
the period afi:er independence was achieved . The historical impo rt ance of
the national liberation struggles permits, in postcolonialit y, reco urse to an
anachronistic authoritarianism , sinc e it was inherent to th e org anizatio n o f
 EMANUELLE SANTOS
the rural masses in revolutionary times ( Cheeseman 2.013:r4). It is precisely
this movement of historical progression in which one notes the transition
from a mode of revolutionary government to the democratic mode, which
is striking in Aurelia de Vento. In the novel, Minister Ventura is advised by
Aidy, whose mother, the late San Labeca, is described as 'uma nacionalista
exacerbada tentando impor aos outros os padroes da sua visao das coisas'
(Bragan<ra2.0rr: 42); '[e ]la era dos que consideravam que a verdade s6 havia
uma, a do Movimento e mais nenhuma' (36) [an exacerbated nationalist
trying impose on others the norms of her vision of things; [she] was one of
the ones who considered there was only one truth, that of the Movement,
and none other]. It can therefore be inferred that the connection between
Ventura and San Labeca, in which the government of one is facilitated by
resources (human and ideological) offered by the other, exemplifies the pro-
cesses of continuity that mark the politics of the country. Direct heirs of the
anticolonial revolutionary movements, the political parties that monopolize
the power in the single-party socialist period appropriate an authoritarian
discourse masked as nationalism which, not rooted in the revolutionary
cause that encouraged it, is, in neo-liberal times, transformed into an argu-
ment to maintain the privileges of an ex-revolutionary bourgeois.
Whereas the SantomeanAurelia de Ventoproblematizes a time of polit-
ical transition in which belonging is transformed into a rhetorical weapon,
the Guinean Tiara offers a very much deeper and subjective depiction of
the exclusion caused by political and ideological manipulation of different
categories of belonging in the turbulent historical period that extends from
the liberation struggles in Africa to the process of internal stabilization of
the recently created independent postcolonial states.
Unlike Aurelia, which is narrated from and in Sao Tome e Principe,
the author opts to situate the novel in a strictly fictional world. Thus, the
protagonist Tiara Ribas is born into a mixed-race family in the African
country o(Porto Belo, from which she is obliged to emigrate in the post
independe~ce period due to the outbreak of civil war. During her stay in
Terra Branca, in exile, Tiara meets the African Ken um who she marries and
with whom she sets off on her new journey to the liberation struggle for her
husband's country, Muriti. The distance created by allegorizing nam es of
countries as well as maintaining th e idea of Afric a as a h idd cn conri ncnr, as
After Nationalism 279
some critics have pointed our , derives from the autobiographical nature of
the novel, which brings Tiara Ribas' s journey between two African coun-
tries close to that of Filomena Embal6, whose life story is divided between
Angola and Guinea-Bissau. According to Naira de Almeida Nascimento
( 2.0u), although taking Porto Belo as a representation of Angola and Muri ti
as an allegory of Guinea-Bissau entails a fictional anachronism, since on
the historiographical level Guinea-Bissau achieves independence before
Angola, this approximation broadens the critical discourse of the novel.
Tiara's first-hand experience of two different and markedly racialized forms
of nationalism - her flight from Porto Belo was motivated by a 'ca<raaos
mesti<ros'(Embal6 1999: 4r) [persecution of mixed-race people] while her
inability to adapt in Muriti is connected to her being of mixed race and a
foreigner (r4r) and shows the emotional and human cost of the process
in which belonging is instrumentalized, a process of which she is a target.
In the course of the many trials to which she is subjected in Muri ti,
Tiara is rejected as a wife by her husband's traditional family both because
she is a foreigner and because she can no longer be a mother after being the
victim of an attack by the colonial forces during the Muri ti liberation war.
However, it is disbelief in the way that the country's destiny is ruled by
the revolutionary elite in the post-independence period that finally defeats
her. Even after years of dedication to a country that she had embraced as
her own, Tiara loses the opportunity to carry out a role in public service:
Como poderia ela pretender dirigir um Centro desses? Uma estrangeira! Fizeram
muito bem de impedir o ministro de cometer esse erro de nomea-la . [... ] Foi preciso
virem ordens do Comite Central, para que o fizessem mudar de ideias. (Embal6
1999: 205)
[How could she possibly expect to run a Centre like that? A foreigner! They did the
right thing preventing the minister from making che mistake of appointing her. [...]
Orders had to come from the Central Committee to make him change his ideas.]
Ultimately, the ominiscient narrator declares: '[O] MLM [Movimento
de Liberta<rao do Muriti] acusava uma decadencia . A corruViao tinha-se
tornado pratica corrente no seio dos seus dirigentes e os ideias revolu-
cionarios tinham dado lugar a luta pelos interesses pessoais' (2.07-208)
 EMANUELLE SANTOS
[The ] MLM [Muri ti Liberation Movement of Muriti] was showing a
decline. Corruption had become commonplace in their leaders and revo -
lutionary ideas had given way to the fight for personal interests ]. The victim
of continuous processes of exclusion, by the end of the novel Tiara is a
marginalized woman:
Lembra-te que rive que fugir do meu proprio pais por motivos raciais. Em Terra
Branca eu cambem era escrangeira ! Como ves, em qualquer pais do mundo, eu estou
sujeica a ser alvo de rea<;:6esdescas. No fundo sou uma cidada do mundo, sem terra
propria ... (208)
[Remembe r chat I had to flee from my own country for reasons of race. In Terra
Branca I was a foreigner too! As you can see, in any country in the world I'm subject
to being the target of these reactions. Basically, I'm a citizen of the world, without
a country of my own ... ]
And so at the end of the novel she decides precisely to move to the margin
to which she has been relegated. Tiara abandons her marriage because she
finds out that her husband was keeping a second, traditional family in the
interior of the country, and she leaves her work after resisting pressure to
be complicit in a corrupt state administration:
Nada mais lhe restava. A revolu<;:ao,que ha vinte anos, a empolgara ea arrastara para a
Luca, cambem se cinha diluido no sono moroso do pos -independencia. Os seus ideais
tombaram, com o desmoronar dos valores revolucionarios. A sua vida deixava agora
deter um sentido. No emprego, tinha perdido a guerra. la demitir-se dentro de dois
meses. Na vida privada, tinha disso ja demitida, havia quacro anos, da sua fun<;:aode
esposa, aos olhos da familia do marido. ( 240)
[She had nothing more. The revolut ion, which twenty years before had filled her with
enthusiasm and drawn her to the Struggle, had also been diluted in the sluggish sleep
of the pose-independence. Her ideals had come tumbling down, with the collapse of
revolutionary values. Now her life had stopped making sense. In her job, she had lost
the war.'She was going to resign within two months. She'd already resigned from her
private life,four years ago, from her role as wife, in the eyes of her husband's family.]
After twenty years of dedication to Muriti, Tiara leaves the capital for
Guesso, a place that is geographically distant and psychologically liminal,
her first address in the country during th e period betw een her arrival an d
After Nationalism
the achievement of nation al independence. Her refuge in a space steeped in
memories of a time when it h ad been possible to live the libertarian utopia
amounts to the rejection of a pr esent and a future led by empty nationalist
rhetoric that reserves the margin for her as the only possible space to exist.
The margin, both in its sense of peripheral space vis-a-vis the centre
and in its metaphorical sense of place of the excluded, whether social, cul-
tural or economic, is also the place inhabited by Sergio do Rosario Araujo,
or Sergio Pitboy, the protagonist of the Cape Verdean novel Marginais.
Born in 1977, Sergio is the son of an independent Cape Verde that during
the protagonist's childhood moves steadily towards a multi-party political
system and, during Sergio's adolescence, achieves an accelerated growth
in neo-liberalism that engenders social exclusion. The social marginaliza-
tion to which the protagonist of this novel is condemned from birth is so
great that it leaves no possible way out, it does not present any possibility
of redemption. Thus Sergio's life is marked from childhood by a poverty
that forces him to steal, pulls him out of school and exposes him as 'naked
life' (Agambem 1998) to feed a voracious capitalism that consumes bodies
as raw material for the tourism, sex, organ trafficking and drug industries.
While the decadence of nationalism as a discourse is enacted on the
political level in Aurelio do Vento,and on the ideological and identity level
in Tiara, in Marginais what is in play is the economic drift resulting from
the failed commitment of nationalist governments that do not keep their
revolutionary promise to curb an economic system that is based on the
exploitation of man by man. The world of this novel is the one crushed by
the pistons of the class struggle: 'Aqui, procurei descrever os dois mundos
onde vivi comprimido: o mun do da pobreza e dos abastados, como alguns
chamam, mas para mim sao os mundos dos exploradores e explorados'
(Rocha 2011: 13) [Here I sought to describe the two worlds in which I lived,
compressed: the world of poverty and the affluent, as some call them, but
for me they are the worlds of the exploiters and the exploited ]. The nar-
rative, in the form of a memoir, describes a State whose ideological and
repressive apparatus (Althusser 1971) serves the purpose of educating and
repressing in the name of the economic system in vogue.
School, the police and justice, however, play crucial roles in the exclu-
sion chat condemns Sergio Picboy co th e margin alization chat will lead him
 EMANUELLE SANTOS
to commit suicide at 23 years of age. It is in school that Sergio learns his
true place in society:
Na escola ou em qualquer lugar tinhamos um tratamento diferenciado em rela<;ao
aos filhos dos engomados que exerciam cargo de destaque na zona do Aeroporto.
No final do ano tinhamos notas mais baixas. Nos nasdamos com a marca da besta,
carregando a sina do fracasso na escola. Nao faltava alguem para nos lembrar da nossa
condi<;ao e, bem cedo, comecei a odiar todos aqueles que feriam a minha integridade.
A escola, tao apregoado centro de continuidade no processo da socializa<;ao, nao
passa de um centro autoritirio, um campo de concentra<;ao que exerce a violencia
selectiva sob re os desfavorecidos e esquece que cada dia nas nossas vidas e um marco
de sobrevivencia. A escola ensinou-me que sou um individuo incapaz e predestinado
a ser ruim. Os professores nao fazem ideia do que e ir aescola de estomago vazio, de
ter que aturar cinco aulas de bombardeamento de inutilidades, enquanto o estomago
troveja, de ter que enfrentar uma turma de preconceituosos e bem comportados e
de lutar contra o pr6prio pensamento que insiste em plan ear um furto para enganar
a fome. (Rocha 2.ou: 42.)
[In school or any other place we were treated differently in relation to the children of
the stuck-up employees who had important jobs in the Airport zone. At the end of
the year we had the lowest marks. We were born with the mark of the beast, destined
to fail at school. There was always someone to remind us of our lowly condition and,
from very early on, I began to hate everyone who wounded my integrity. The school,
much vaunted centre of continuity in the socialisation process, is no more than an
authoritarian centre, a concentration camp that exercises selective violence on the
disadvantaged and forgets that every day of our lives is a landmark of survival. School
showed me I'm an incompetent individual and predestined to turn out badly. The
teachers have no idea what it means going to school on an empty stomach, having to
stand five classes being bombarded with useless things, while the stomach grumbles,
having to face a class full of well-behaved students with prejudices and struggling
with your own thoughts that insist on planning a thefi: in order to tide you over
when you're hungry.]
Likewise, a police force that rapes under-age criminals, aided by a legal
system that protects it, destroys Sergio's beliefin the existence of any inher-
ent values in law and order. For this reason, his main antagonist is the unjust
lawyer and politician who lives in the neighbourhood, Dr Apolinario.
Witnessing the rape of his friend, Pianista, Sergio confesses: 'Aquela cena
horrorosa abriu na minha alma uma ferida que jamais haveria de sarar. [... ]
After Nationalism
Aguele momento marcou uma viragem radical na minha vida' (Rocha
20n: 61-62) [That dreadful scene opened up a wound in my soul that
would never heal. [ ... ] That moment marked a turning point in my life].
However, it is only when Dr Apolinario refuses to take on his friend's case
seeking justice against his rapists that Sergio, in a manner similar to Tiara,
withdraws: 'Decididamente, isolei-me do mundo e procurei refugio entre
os marginais' (Rocha 20n: 62) [Resolutely, I cut myself off from the world
and sought refuge among the marginals ].
Even despite the various differences that separate many of the aspects
dealt with in each of these works, such as a reflection on the continuation
of traditional customs in Guinea-Bissau in Tiara; a criticism of the single-
party political system in Sao Tome e Principe in Aurelia do Vento; or the
social ills of the unrestrained development of the tourism industry in Cape
Verde that underlies Marginais, it is important to note the emergence of
a common criticism that questions precisely the uses and abuses of the
manipulation of the principle of belonging present in the most profound
ideological bases that encouraged the liberation struggle on which the
states that need the discourse of the nation were built. Placed side by side,
it is possible to see how each of the works addresses different aspects of
the drift in revolutionary national ideology in the second postcolonial
phase. Nevertheless, despite their differences, these aspects are related as
far as it is possible to understand the impact of the intersection between
the manipulation of the discourse of belonging, and social class.
Just as we see in Aurelia, when the victim of unjust internal policies
possesses influence and financial resources like Pedro Santos, there exists
the possibility of justice being restored by the courts. Tiara's case seems
to show that, despite her educational level and importance in the libera-
tion struggle, her lack of substantial economic means along with her scant
influence in the socio-political scene of the country, given her difference in
colour and nationality, increases her invisibility and maximizes the impact
of the exclusion to which she is relegated. Finding out that her appoint-
ment to the public office for which she had competed had been sabotaged
for reasons completely unrelated to her competence, Tiara turns down the
opportunity to enter a legal appeal- 'nao vale a pena' (Embal6 1999: 206)
[It's not worth the trouble] . Even more harrowing is the situation of Sergio
 EMANUELLE SANTOS
and his equals who, born into the most abject poverty, not only find them-
selves completely unprotected by justice, but directly oppressed by it. The
State, inMarginais, uses its repressive ideological apparatus to defend the
interests of those who own the capital, guaranteeing it a continuous supply
of citizens converted into 'naked life' to feed the machinery of a predatory,
savage capitalism - 'Nesta terra, s6 vai para a cadeia ladrao de galinha e
filho de pobre' (Rocha 2010: 206) [In this land, the only people who go
to jail are chicken thieves and children of the poor ].
By Way of a Conclusion: Two Moments of Postcolonialism
At the b eginning of this study we drew attention to the potential impli -
cations of the criticism implicit in the literary works under scrutiny for
the field of postcolonial thought. Just as we have sought to demonstrate,
among the range of points of view that run through the three novels, their
retrospective evaluation of the paths of revolutionary nationalism in the
post-independence period is certainly indispensable for a reasoning that
seeks to understand the tensions entailed in the historical development
of postcoloniality.
Faced with the now canonical discussions between those who exam-
ine the postcolonial (Shohat 1992: McClintock 1992; Dirlik 1994; Mata
2007 ), the proposition of an historicity within postcoloniality may appear
suspect. However, it is essential to remember that the understanding of
postcoloniality which the texts analysed above support does not lend itself
to maintaining the binaries that underlined much of the criticism of the
term through the 1990s (Hall 2003: 106). On the contrary, what the kind
of postcolq~iality presented in Aurelia do Vento, Tiara andMarginais does
show is that the term encompasses multiple intersectional continuities.
In Aurelia do Vento we are presented with a critical approach to the
dissemination of the racial logic for a corrupt politics that approp riate s
the nationalist discourse. Equally, in Tiara, we are exp osed to th e h um an
consequences of the approp riation of a exclud ing nat io nalist discourse,
After Nationalism
revealing multiple cont in uities inhe rit ed from a time before colonialism ,
such as the continuati on of exclu d ing tra dit ional practices within the
nationalist movements and the p ost-in dep endenc e governments . Marginais
offers a record of the continuation of pract ices of human exploitation in
a post-independence that claimed to have been revolutionized. Colonial
exploitation becomes exploitation by transnational capitalism, while the
local bourgeoisie maintains the same intermediate position as facilitator
that it had already assured for itself during colonialism . Thus, the view of
postcoloniality offered by these texts does not emphasize a break with the
colonial, but the exact opposite . In this respect, they approach the formu-
lation of Achille Mbembe, who sees the postcolonial as a 'time ofexistence
and experience, the time of entanglement [... ] an interlocking of presents,
pasts, and futures' (2001 : 16) in the here and now of the textual fabric.
1
A view that is the opposite of the idea of a 'post-' as a radical rupture that,
as Timothy Brennan (2014) states, is at the centre of a problematization
of the postcolonial as critical-theoretical tool, whose productivity would
be substantially extended were there to be analysis of the impact of the
politico -ideological affiliations that it inherits.
In conceptualizing postcoloniality outside the paradigm of radical
rupture, the texts analysed above contribute to a vision of that time and
that postcolonial condition in a longue duree (Braudel 2012). Seen in an
historical context of continuities that privileges the anal ysis oflong cycles
instead of an episodic conception of events, the postcolonial condit ion -
or postcoloniality - as longue duree presents different internal temporali-
ties that accentuate slight but important differences that continually alter
their perception . In this context, the novels mark a clear difference in the
depiction of their respective contemporary postcolonialities. In the end,
a painful critical reflection of the post -independence drift of the discourse
and practice of revolutionary nationalism is only shown to be possible
once this nationalism has fulfilled its historical role of ensuring, one way
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