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“You Are the Prisoner, the Discoverer, the Founder, the Liberator”: Contextualizing Decolonial Paths of Afro-Hispanic Literature in Latin America, Equatorial Guinea and Spain
Elisa Rizo The predilection for realism amongst Afro-Latin American writers is paralleled among their Equatorial Guinean counterparts. While the African worldview is, of course, ever present in Equatorial Guinean works of fiction and there is an evident determination to preserve oral tradition-based knowledge in many of their texts, there is also an impulse to explain global dynamics in relation to local circumstances. This is, perhaps, due to the extreme poverty endured by most of the population and to the fact that this widespread scarcity stands in sharp relief to the astonishing national oil-based wealth which is enjoyed only by the oligarchy. Adding to this situation, the highly visible presence of American, European and Asian oil and construction companies, make logical the relevance of theorizing global economic dynamics to these writers. Examples of this vein are found in the abundant works of Juan Tomas Avila Laurel, who in his 1999 poetry collection An Intimate History of Humanity (Historia Intima de la Humanidad) wrote: The world no longer has cemeteries for suicidal people and produces bombs for Colombian children, because Egypt no longer opens Its temples for the curious crowds. My poetry escapes, Say the erudites, “but it does not account the history of your neglected land”. Guinea has no hands to grab the poverty of the famous, Leona, Haiti, and the Third World, and it listens from the outside to the voices that come from inside. Freedom is incalculable if measured in oil barrels when blackness is gold for this millenary racism. Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 |
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Essays in this Forum
Break out of the Prison House of Hierarchy!
by Mukoma Wa Ngugi A Globalectical Imagination by Ngugi wa Thiong'o World Literature and the Postcolonial: Ngugi's Globalectics and Glissant's Poetics by Duncan McEachern Yoon “You Are the Prisoner, the Discoverer, the Founder, the Liberator”: Contextualizing Decolonial Paths of Afro-Hispanic Literature in Latin America, Equatorial Guinea and Spain by Elisa Rizo Globalectics Beyond Postcoloniality by Carole Boyce Davies |