“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

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