Bernardo Élis and Luandino Vieira from a comparative perspective

encounters in the depths of Brazil and Angola in the short stories “Nhola dos anjos e a cheia do Corumbá” and “Vavó Xixi e seu Neto Zeca Santos”

Abstract

This article analyzes some intersections between the short stories “Nhola dos Anjos and the flood of Corumba ”, by Bernardo E lis, and “Vavo Xixi e seu grando Zeca Santos”, by Luandino Vieira, considering the transits that permeate the constitution of Brazil and other countries Portuguese-speaking Africans. To do so, we resort to the theoretical and methodological assumptions of Abdala Jr (2014) and Chaves (2005), which lead to a comparative look at the cultural, historical and political trajectory between Africa and Brazil. The analytical exercise reveals, in both works, the preponderance of stylistic resources dear to orality in the aesthetic construction of a political denunciation, both of the alleged process of modernization that traverses the history of Brazil – and, in more detail, of the state of Goia s – from 1930, regarding the Portuguese colonization process in Angola. Other meeting points, such as the relationship between the grandeur of nature in the face of the impotence of beings, as well as the constitution of the characters themselves, alienated from their respective historical processes, reveal that the proximities and distances between the depths of Brazil and Angola are also realized on a linguistic and literary level.