Angola is Wherever I Plant My Field by João Melo

Author:João Melo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Iskanchi Press
Published: 2022-11-29T16:05:58+00:00

Caricature of the Author as a Young Man

The Word: just like that, with the first letter capitalized. HK had been searching for it since he saw the hallowed poet Pedrito Manungola on television and decided that he too would become a writer. To tell the truth, the hallowed poet Manungola wasn’t yet thirty years old, but he was already celebrated. During a poetry session at the Angolan Writers’ Association, he had started yelling that the greatest Angolan poet was not—as the propaganda of the regime insisted on telling both the Angolan population and the international community—Agostinho Neto. The greatest Angolan poet, including (or excluding?) the dead ones, was Manungola himself. He was the only one capable of discovering that primordial word, the one which was enough on its own and did not require any other word to be uttered with it (since the day Manungola heard a provincial commissioner using it while introducing the poet-president and the ministers in his entourage, he had been using it all the time, only regretting that he hadn’t had the wit to create it himself) in contrast to what Agostinho Neto and his clique had been thinking throughout their lives.

In those days, the country was going through very complex times. Some people wished to get rid of all the icons, monuments, and symbols from the revolutionary past even though they had not been real revolutionaries themselves—which was why, against the simplest and most straight-forward expectations, they had survived. They had to metamorphose into democrats and liberals, allowing a few demonstrations of rebellion and dissent, especially if such demonstrations were little more than a colorful carnival parade. It is from this neutral and objective perspective that one should, therefore, frame (a verb that evokes older times indeed) or at least explain the invitation to Manungola from state television, following the scandal at the Angolan Writers’ Association, asking him to participate in a live program on the hardships faced by young Angolan writers.

That program has not left HK’s mind to this day. During the televised interview, Manungola gave a real show, demonstrating his fabulously histrionic qualities. To begin with, he said that political poetry is shit. He said that worrying about the content of literature was a residue of democratic centralism. He said that Jdánov was the son of someone whom he could not mention because he was on television. He said that older writers were too obsessed with colonialism—a topic that did not preoccupy his generation—and that they did not even notice the errors committed by the so-called revolutionaries. He said that, more than being merely discursive, political poems were verbose and cantalutista11 (itself an unclear adjective created by some Angolans and which will never be possible to translate into Mongolian). He accused the elders of plotting to do everything they could to stop the emergence of new literary values in the country. He said that those of Portuguese descent were the worst because they were always awarded all the literary prizes and were always arguing with young writers who they accused of failing to master the Portuguese language.

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