(In)conformação amorosa e fragmentação subjetiva: colonização emocional em Niketche, de Paulina Chiziane

Abstract

This study discusses Mozambican author Paulina Chiziane’s novel Niketche: uma história de poligamia (2002) mostly in the light of Gender Studies, analyzing how the narrative replicates colonial values in the protagonist narrator’s discourse, that, eager to denounce the affective catastrophe she suffers, ends up (unconsciously) validating the very domination structure that oppresses her. We reveal how this emotional colonization occurs, i.e., how the interference of a Judaic-Christian episteme affects the colonized subjects psyches’ deepest corners; although (intellectually) aware of the oppression suffered, they are not capable of totally avoiding it, thus perpetuating the colonial ideary, particularly in regard to the love experience. It is precisely concerning love that the narrator appears more chained to the exogenous logic, and because of this she struggles to conciliate her intimate desires with the harsh autochthonous reality that surrounds her, as if stuck in a limbo between tradition and modernity, unable to satisfactorily solve the interior fragmentation that dilacerates her and contaminates her discourse. By situating the transmission of occidental patterns in a level that goes beyond the involved subjects’ volition, it is possible to verify how the colonization effects in the African country still reverberate nowadays, polluting the ancestral gnosis and metamorphosizing the local knowledge, whose new amalgamated form is yet to be fully comprehended.