Banca de DEFESA: ROCLAUDELO NDAFA DE PAULO SILVA NANQUE

ON THE GENESIS OF THE NATION: ethnicity, colonialism, diaspora and memory in Fausto Duarte

Fausto Duarte, ethnicity, colonialism, diaspora, memory, and Guinea-Bissau.

Colonial literature on Guinea appears only in the third decade of the 20th century. XX was marked mainly by exoticism, paternalism, ignorance of the natives, etc. The literary work of Fausto Duarte, born in Cape Verde and resident in Guinea as an employee of the colonial administration, although written within the field of colonial literature, differs from other works for its narration of Guinea as if from the interior and for telling stories of the natives and present them as humane as Europeans. Guinean literary studies almost always focus on the post-colonial period, leaving the entire colonial period and its rich collection of complex existential questions in the dark. With an analytical and hermeneutic approach to Fausto Duarte's narratives, this thesis brings to the debate on Africa (and Guinea, in particular) the most significant literary work of the Guinean colonial period. Thus, based on the perception that there is in Duarte's work an Africanist attempt to see-reveal Guinea and the soul of the black and still considering this attempt as an outline of Duarte's African literature project, the present study investigates how the author literarily imagines the nation of Guinea, in full anticipation of what it would become, and shows that he achieves this through literary representations of ethnicity, colonization, memory, and the diaspora as components of the nation. Ethnicity is manifested in the representations of the Guinea-Bissau ethnic groups as nations, their ways of life, social organization, and cultures. Colonialism is seen in the presentation of a colonial situation in the search stage for total territorial domination and in the relations between the colonizer and the colonized. Memory is the element with which the pre-colonial and colonial history of Guinea is constructed by the characters in their conscious, unconscious, and nativist resistance against the colonial presence. The diaspora appears in many forms, but above all as an exile, restlessness of the soul, and lack of freedom of the natives in their homeland. This investigation problematizes the concepts that these components of the nation carry, considering the ambiguities that encompass a mestizo author who builds his work in the colonial situation, divided between two distinct and conflicting worlds, the African and the Portuguese.