Ele não compreende nossos costumes: literatura, colonização e memória na Trilogia africana, de Chinua Achebe

Abstract

Being considered one of the greatest writers within the modern African literary field, Chinua Achebe is one of great relevance nowadays because of his literary political project that joins history and literature in order to create a fiction writing made from African perspectives and experiences as a counterpoint against colonial speeches, literature and representations. Thus, this work aims to investigate how the African Trilogy, written by Achebe between 1958 and 1964, contributed to set a new way of representing traditional experiences from the perspective of those who were put aside of history and colonial speeches. Moreover, we will analyze how colonization caused social, cultural, religious and identity transformations to Igbo people. As theoretical background to this work, it was used the works of Pollack (1989; 1992), Quayson (2000), Benjamin (1987), Said (2011), Bhabha (2011), Noa (2015) as they encompass postcolonial theory and memory studies. This research also made use of some critical works of Achebe (1988, 2000, 2012a, 2012b) himself. Hence, it was observed that Achebe’s literature by being aligned to Nigerian social-politics requests tried to represent not only Igbo people experiences before colonization as a way of rescue and celebrate traditional memories, but also cultural, religious, identity and linguistic transformations that was brought by colonization.