A confissão animista de uma realidade felina: a Confissão da Leoa, de Mia Couto

Abstract

Although African literatures are written in European languages, they express a different cultural reality of the European context, distancing themselves from the Occidental literary canon. Given this relation of difference, the theoretical and critical contributions based on Occidental literatures are inappropriate to nominate the African literatures. Bolstered by cultural studies that offer a wide literary texts understanding, independent of the conventions that long if-titled universal, this study adopts by reference the aesthetic animist realism, basis of African religion, to address their literatures. This proposal, which has been adopted by many researchers of these literatures, is suggested by the researchers and African writers: in the Lusophone context Pepetela (2015) and Henrique Abranches (s.d.) and, in the academic context, the considerations of Harry Garuba (2012) and the reflections of Sueli da Silva Saraiva (2007a, 2007b) about the subject. Taking for granted the notion of animist unconscious proposed by Garuba, understood as a kind of social imaginary that are animistic societies based, the animist realism is configured as a linguistic and social practice whose representation strategy, synthetically, is in the materialization of abstract and spiritual. In light of these considerations is analyzed the representation of character Mariamar in A confissão da leoa (2012), by the Mozambican writer Mia Couto. As a dissociated vision into concrete abstract would tend to a metaphorical interpretation of "human-feline" transformation which contains the character, the real-animistic perspective transcends the pair animalization/humanization to read it in the textual presentification.