Paper short abstract:

What does it mean to be / to feel African and European at the same time in cities like Luanda and Maputo? Writers like José Eduardo Agualusa and João Paulo Borges Coelho reflect cultural clashes and controversial identities in their novels.

Paper long abstract:

Some African cities such as Luanda (Angola) and Maputo (Mozambique) have a recent convulsive and controversial history. After the independence of the metropolis, the descendants of Portuguese officials, businessmen or emigrants are driven to an uncertain destiny and feel themselves as sudden foreigners in the country they were born. In Luanda and Maputo, however, a strange coexistence starts between those who have remained, clinging to an identity questioned by the victors of the struggles for independence, and the legitimate residents of the same streets and houses, eager to regain their identity, so often denied by European settlers.

In this paper I analyze the metaphorization of the space that José Eduardo Agualusa and João Paulo Borges Coelho propose in their novels Teoria geral do esquecimento (2012) and Crónica da Rua 513.2 (2006), respectively.

In both Agualusa's Luanda and Borges Coelho's Maputo a process of identification takes place, inevitable and necessary, between the individual and the space that inhabits, which causes cultural clashes amongst (apparently) opposite identities. What does it mean, in these cities, to be European or African?

In a turning point, when the former settlers cross the distance between Europe and Africa in the opposite direction to the usual (from south to north), those who remain in these large, already independent cities are responsible for building a new network of relationships between locals and foreigners and for redefining new identities, way beyond the color of the skin, in order to withstand and face what the future holds.