Novel
Portagem
Not translated into English
Orlando Mendes · 1966
Synopsis
The novel opens on the old Alima, grandmother of João Xilim, whom her daughter Kati had by a white man, on the lands of the Marandal where the mine house stands. Neither black like the other children of the country nor white, he learns in adolescence that he is the illegitimate son of a white man, and both worlds keep him at a distance. He sets out, works here and there, always employed, always in transit, through encounters that force him to ask who he is; along the way, he falls in love with Maria Helena, daughter of the white family of the boss Campos.
Context
Written in the fifties, the novel was published only in 1966, in Beira, in the Prosateurs du Mozambique series issued by the newspaper Notícias da Beira; the same series published a play by the author in 1970. Its story has as its hero a mulatto kept at a distance by Whites and Blacks alike, and follows a course made up of successive misfortunes. After independence, it was reissued in Lisbon in 1981 by Éditions 70, in a series of Mozambican authors, and also appeared in Brazil.
Who it is for
In Portuguese, with no French or English translation. The narrative assumes familiarity with colonial Mozambican society, where whites, blacks and people of mixed race lived apart.
Prizes and reception
Scholarship regards it as the first Mozambican novel on the condition of the mixed-race person; Russell Hamilton saw in it a “racial novel”, one of those that open the country's fiction.
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