Abstracts Language, Literature, and Linguistic

Identidades em movimento : uma análise da memória enquanto ferramenta de construção identitária santomense na obra de Olinda Beja

by Mithiele da Silva Scarton

São Tomé and Príncipe, an African island country located in the Gulf of Guinea, is the smallest Portuguese-speaking country. In it, however, we find literature that breaks linguistic parameters and is also produced in Forro, a language originated from the encounter between Portuguese and African languages that made up, together with its different aspects, the Santomean cultural mosaic. From this context, we understand that literature in this country emerges as a possibility of historical and cultural contestation of a people once silenced by the colonial yoke. Based on post-colonial studies, we highlight the production of the Santomean writer Olinda Beja as a possible voice to the cultural multiplicity of the country, mainly Cape Verdeans, Angolans and Mozambicans, hired for the cocoa and coffee plantations, and their descendants which, through stories passed down from generation to generation, re-signify the space of these individuals in the nation's narrative. Thus, the methodology used here encompasses a basic bibliographical research based on fictional readings and the comparison with historical events. It is from the memory of the characters present in the works of this writer, especially in Chá do Príncipe (2017), that we seek to understand how this encounter with the past reconstructs the present and allows a visit to the identity of the Santomean people. For this, we rely mainly on the studies of Aleida Assmann (2011), Márcio Seligmann-Silva (2003) and Maurice Halbwachs (1990), who work with memories and give the support the perception of its work in the permanence and representation of identities. Still regarding the importance of African literature in Portuguese, we use texts by Inocência Mata (2008, 2018) and Francisco Noa (2015), followed by studies by Homi Bhabha (1996, 2013) and Stuart Hall (1996, 2013, 2014, 2016), who develop concepts such as hybridity and representation, which are important for the investigation proposed here. From these considerations, we understand that history is sewn through its narrative, memory and identity, and that Olinda Beja inscribes the imaginary of the islands in a movement of fluidity between the self and the other, between the roots in the islands and a distant growth from them, in which everything seems to gain the dimension of discovery and becomes knowledge, from its origins, its people and the paths taken so that these stories get to be told today.