Legados de uma [H]história: Memórias e identidades em Se o passado não tivesse asas, de Pepetela.

Abstract

Literature as a breeding ground for interdisciplinary approaches provide studies such as this that proposes a reflection on it and its relationship with history, memory (individual and collective) and identities in the contemporary novel entitled Se o passado não tivesses asas (2017), by the Angolan writer Pepetela. For such, we examine, in this narrative, how the historical writing, built by Eurocentric epistemology, is problematized and desecrated by the author. Furthermore, History, as an organic part of the Pepetelian novel, is doubly investigated: first to contextualize Angola in the privileged space / time in the narrative, the period of the civil war, in the 1990s, and the post-war and its democratic and economic opening from the second decade of the 21st century; and, second, to discuss the novel, as a place of memory when treating the characters as historians of themselves and builders of different narratives through different loci of enunciation. Thus, using memory as a constitution of oneself for oneself and for others, we observe how the identity representations in the novel are linked to the space-temporal actions and tensions in which the characters act as active and passive subjects. Therefore, to carry out this study as it is a basic research of comparative bibliographic nature, we make use of the critical reflections by of Linda Hutcheon (1992), Hayden White (1992), Innocent Mata (2012; 2015), Solival Menezes (2000), Douglas Wheeler (2013), Rita Chaves (2004; 2006), Carlos Ervedosa (1963), Tânia Macêdo (2002; 2006; 2008), Pierre Nora (1993), Maurice Halbwachs (2006), Paul Ricoeur (2007) and Stuart Hall (2006).