Our paper proposes to address the discourse of violence related specifically to women, depicted by two writers and one artist/performer: Paulina Chiziane (Mozambique), Dina Salústio (Cabo Verde) and Grada Kilomba (Portugal). This choice was inspired by these women’s singularity in representing Africa from a feminine point of view and also for their approach to very controversial matters in their works like racism, gender violence, war violence or sexual violence.
This research is part of a more generic research project – On Violence. Depictions of violence in Portuguese-speaking African literature – in which we consider a number of contemporary works by Portuguese-speaking African authors (novel and poetry) from five ex-colonial countries: Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, Sao Tome and Cape Verde, and lead a survey collecting excerpts that depict a certain type of violence: colonial violence, gender violence, domestic violence, military violence, sexual violence, child violence, psychological violence, language violence (as it is the imposition of silence). We’re developing a data base that soon will be uploaded online aiming to serve the (scientific) community with all the texts and the information about the authors and their works. Thus enabling a more detailed research about violence in these corpora.
The main objective of the project is to understand how violence is written in different countries, to detect similarities and dissimilarities, to meditate on the different narratives with some regard to the singularities of the colonial violence inheritance. As so, this proposal, regarding the literary and artistic production of these three African (or African descendent) women, intends to develop a comparative analysis in order to understand how violence has been depicted in each work and in what way has influenced their narratives.