THE PORTUGUESE DIASPORA IN THREE CONTEMPORANEOUS LITERATURE NOVELS: POINTS AND COUNTERPOINTS

In O retorno (2011), Dulce Maria Cardoso invite us to know the Rui’s story, a Portuguese Angolan teenager that returned from Angola, together his family. He is compelled to rebuild his life in Continental Portugal, from a precarious and limited financial situation. The scenario was the seventies and the turbulent period of return of more than a half million of Portuguese citizens, during the decolonization of former Portugal overseas territories in Africa. In this paper, we have analyzed the theme of diaspora in the contemporaneous Portuguese Literature, considering as the start point the sociocultural context contained in the book O retorno. Thus, we have established a bridge with two other novels, within a comparative perspective, in order to find similarities or dissimilarities among them, once they address the same theme: Pouca terra...Poucá terra, by Júlia Nery (1984), that brings to the center of the narrative the emigrants story from France, under the approach of a girl called  Leonor, and Livro, by José Luís Peixoto (2012), which has the main focus, among the multiplicity of themes, the emigration scenario from France, and the loving disagreements between two young lovers: Ilídio and Adelaide. The goal is to sketch a viewpoint, clarified by the cultural studies, which conduct us to understand more largely some questions which come by the Dulce Maria Cardoso novel, and also the two other books in question.  They give us the measure of the construction of the contemporaneous Portuguese novel, and reflect the idea of a nation which uses to have a condition of discomfort. This discomfort is proper to who are at the mercy of the diasporic fateful experience, since the most remote past.  

"LEVY’S FRUIT OF THE LEMON" (1999) AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY

The slave-system, with extant repercussions on contemporary society, is accountable for the globalized exclusion scheme not only in the ex-colonies but even in the former metropolises. Official History is subverted by re-narrating what happened to non-Europeans during the last five hundred years and in Fruit of the Lemon black British author Andrea Levy utilizes orature to trigger the subjectification process in Faith Jackson, a British-born black female whose parents hail from Jamaica. Orature involve the construction of a new subject through revelations on the daily struggle for work, friendship, community-building, racial inclusion and the dire facts of the Caribbean diaspora. Since transindividual social tensions affect the British black subject, native or immigrant, the novel denounces the immigrants’ “amnesia” as a policy and the myth of a British multicultural society accepting peacefully ex-colonial subjects. Results show that remembrance through orature is a powerful means of subjectification and identity, besides being an antidote against a racialized society. In Fruit of the Lemon Levy installs an agonistic stance in which the authority of hegemonic discourse is subverted and a new liberating and hybridized discourse produced.