5 - Mami Wata, Migrations, and Miscegenation: Transculturalism in José Eduardo Agualusa, Mia Couto, and Germano Almeida

Summary

The defining legacy of colonialism in the Lusophone world lies in the enduring relics of cultural miscegenation. While each nation responds differently to this intercultural exchange, some writers deploy the transcultural phenomenon to question and embrace cultural contacts and the aftermath. This holds especially true for the subjects who remain marginalized and oppressed by the realities of the unfulfilled promises that constitute the logic (or lack thereof) of that cultural contact. This chapter selects three texts by “representative” writers from Angola, Mozambique, and Cape Verde as case studies of transculturalism within the postcolonial condition in the Lusophone world.

My understanding of transculturalism stems from José Martí, who defines the term as “the very complex transmutations of culture that can be phased in acculturation, deculturation, and neoculturation. In other words, transculturation highlights the creation of a new cultural phenomenon.” By analyzing José Agualusa's Nação Crioula (Creole nation), Mia Couto's O Outro Pé da Sereia (The other foot of the mermaid), and Germano Almeida's O Testamento do Senhor Napumoceno (The last will of Napumoceno), I problematize the racial inequalities and power relations within those supposedly empowering “neutral spaces” while highlighting the sexual oppression, physical violence, and persistent silencing camouflaged under fashionable terms such as modernity, multicultural identity, and cosmopolitanism. While the transcultural “migration of the subject” will vary from one narrative space/text to the other, the essence of shifting identities and negotiation of power relations and equality will remain an inextricable constant.

Lusophone African literature of the new millennium is faced with a constant series of transitions from the memory of, and struggles for, independence, the equally devastating civil wars and the efforts at reconstruction, reconciliation, and integration into the global cultural patterns without losing its own identity. Mia Couto, a renowned Mozambican writer who won the 2014 Neustadt Prize, offers some pertinent thoughts in his volume of critical opinions, Pensativities, in which he postulates about the Mozambican as a “cultural frontiersman” who must refrain from looking externally for someone to blame for (and solutions to) internal problems. The Mozambican—and, by extension, the African—is a “multicultural” being who must celebrate other cultures that have intersected their culture for no nation can boast to be culturally pure.