23. LITANY OF LIFE: AESTHETICS OF DEATH, REAL AND SYMBOLIC, IN MOZAMBICAN LITERATURE

DELIMITATION OF THE THEME The presence of the element of death in Portuguese-language African literature, more precisely as a real element that adheres to the metaphorical symbol, is striking in Mozambican literature. Several authors have touched on it, including Virgílio de Lemos, José Craveirinha, Eduardo White and Carlos Patraquim, to name but a few. It is worth highlighting the poet and prose writer Nelson Saúte (1993, 1999, 2000, 2007) who, as Professor Carmen Lucia Tindó Ribeiro Secco points out, creates an “‘aesthetic of Thanatos’, bringing the dead into his verses” (Secco, apud Dopcke, 1998, p. 223), we could say, into life, with the delicacy and strength of literature that creates the rhetoric of death of the “Years of an illusion destroyed before our eyes by human hands like ours. Years of a great chimera (…) years of death, of violence” (Saúte, 2000, p. 141). From this narrative of survivors based on the thematization of death, the panel LITANIA DE VIDA: ESTÉTICA DA MORTE, REAL E SIMBÓLICA, NA LITERATURA MOÇAMBICANA reveals itself as a study of and about social, historical and literary scarifications and, therefore, about real and symbolic violence in Mozambican literature. In it, we find “a wander through the recent history of a country that has recently arrived in the world and of people who have not demarcated themselves from the state of ghost” (Couto, apud SAÚTE, back cover, 2007) on a literary level, because literature and history, sociology and literature, for example, do not deal with different objects, they deal with the same objects, but in a different way, the word. Thus, in dialogue with Ana Mafalda Leite (1998), the African word presents “the conflict between the traditional world and the urban world, between the mythical values of peasant culture and the cold rationality of war events, characterized by the sophisticated technology of war” (Leite, 1998, p. 41), or rather, the wars experienced in Mozambique. In their works, the poets make it possible to recover, through the icons of the wars, the real and symbolic violence, the social scarifications suffered by Mozambique, and also to awaken the conscience of the subject who is objectified by the terms of the truth about the colonial system: violent, oppressive and nefarious, with surprising words and language that is refined in the sense of the verisimilar – from the ‘margin of silence’ that reveals the atrocities of life: “The mother kissed the gunpowder/ on her son’s dead smile./ She took off her capulana and covered him // And then she put on her tears” (Saúte, 2004, p. 596). THE STATE OF THE ART Mozambican literature produced in the 1980s has a literary death drive, it is a literature of denunciation, since “the authenticity of a physically and culturally subjugated people” (Cosme, apud Ferreira, 1976, p. 289), visible here in the sign of thanatos literature, is transmitted, according to Leonel Cosme, in the only way possible: “revolt, to which a certain literary realism has given a more sensitive form”. This study aims to highlight the presence of Mozambican writers whose theme of death is also a poetics of survivors, since they are writers of clandestine confessions, creators of a denunciatory literature, imprinted on the symbol of death. These are creations that lead us to understand the historical and social moments that African subjects went through under the rule of the colonizers. This is because, dialoguing with (Ricciardi, 1971, p. 80), we understand that “The writer is therefore a creator, but at the same time his work is all immersed in the historical memento that originates it”: a literature that reveals the problems and difficulties that Mozambicans went through during the 1980s. In this sense, our gaze on the texts of poets and prose writers will scan, as an action and passage of influence from the historical to the social and, from this, to the literary, through the knowledge provided by linguistic sensitivity and aesthetic creation, since “we apprehend in the whole its own beauty” (Candido, 2006, p. 30). 30), because, “In these stories, there are dead people who don’t meet Death, men in perpetual mourning who only visit life during funeral ceremonies” (Couto, apud Saúte, back cover, 2007). The texts awaken us to the tragic plot that probes the human being as an eternal main character – death. The authors carve out the inaccessible enigma of the existential mystery, tracing the paths of the same and ever-transient, the death that puts and proposes the events that sustain time and narrative as the original impulses of ending existence. A problem that is revealed to the reader through prose, almost always poetic, and succinct, objective poetry, as a symbol of binarism: African poets and subjects united in literature, listing death as a motif and the motif as the personification of men who are victims of real violence. From an anthropological perspective, the poet, a social actor, vivifies his artifacts as cultural products, creating images that awaken silence by reduplicating the power of symbolism: opposition and conflict as political-literary engagement. In this historical compulsion, he rescues words from the rubble of time and memory to probe the unfathomable, translating “the Mozambican becoming in a way that is exceptionally committed to the facts of the real world”. And, from then on, there is a pressing duality, because, as Pires Laranjeira states – “The men who write are the same men who think and who politicize. And they do it in Portuguese, domesticating the language according to their virtualities and purposes, creating national literatures in an international language” (Laranjeira, 1992, p. 14).