The Angola that contemporary romance allows us to hear:

silence and song, bodies that float, bodies that weigh in Os Transparentes, by Ondjaki

Abstract

Based on research developed during my doctorate, in this article I appropriate Ondjaki's work, notably The Transparents, to develop a post-colonial critical reading around it. The novel, released in Portugal in 2012, by Editora Caminho, and in Brazil, in 2013, by Companhia das Letras, has as its backdrop a post-independent, post-civil war and post-socialist Luanda, marked by colonial ruins (Stoler, 2016), the unbridled exploitation of natural resources, the precarious access to housing, basic sanitation and other fundamental rights of more vulnerable socioeconomic classes, who could well be designated as sub-citizens (Mamdani, 1998). Interspersed with this most apparent theme, Ondjaki's narrative contemplates other sensitive themes that characterize the post-independence political and cultural scenario, such as systematic violence, the attack on the diversity of voices and ideologies, culminating in the fraying of the pre-independence utopian democratic political project – as the narrator of A Geração da Utopia, by Pepetela, warned us. Therefore, in this analysis, I am interested in the (secondary) characters that modulate the relationship between voice and silencing, citizenship and sub-citizenship, in order to critically reflect on the Angola that contemporary literature makes us see and hear.