In the Americas, the slave trade and the slavery system generated an important African diaspora. Throughout history, the psychological and social experiences of the diaspora gave rise to original and hybrid manifestations in the field of politics, culture and the arts. Despite the diversity of these manifestations, a panoramic observation allows us to discern recurrent themes that permeate political debates and cultural production, such as the historical developments of slavery in contemporary societies, as well as transatlantic identity bonds, through the theme of the search for roots and the return to motherland. These issues, very present in the literary production of the diaspora since the colonial period, began to be explored by African writers only in the last decades of the twentieth century.
The purpose of this paper is to analyze these issues in contemporary African literary production, highlighting two novels, Pelourinho (1995) by the Guinean Tierno Monénembo and O outro pé da sereia (The Other Foot of the Mermaid) (2006) by the Mozambican Mia Couto, written respectively in French and Portuguese.
The presentation is divided in two parts. In a first moment, I will give a brief presentation of the historical and literary discourses of the diaspora in the memories of slavery, the journey back, and the search for roots in Africa. Next, I will look at the original perspective that the works of Monénembo and Mia Couto bring to these themes. In Pelourinho, the protagonist is an African man who travels to Brazil in the end of the 20th century with the aim of finding traces of his ancestors, formerly deported as slaves. There is a shift of direction in his search for identity: the journey back to the origins is not taken from the New World to Africa, but rather reversely. In the novel O outro pé da sereia, a poetic, allegorical and critical portrait of contemporary Mozambique and the globalized world, these same themes are approached differently, namely through the report of a trip undertaken by a couple of Afro-descendant anthropologists, an American and a Brazilian, to a small city called Vila Longe. The interesting point here is the fact that the people of Vila Longe – living in precarious conditions after years of war and interested in potential financial gains – try to adapt the local society and their memories of the colonial past to what they believe the foreign couple would hope to find in Africa.