"Can the underling speak?"

Considerations on the muting of the enslaved subject in A gloriosa família, by Pepetela

Abstract

The present work analyzes the (re)creation of voices silenced by the colonizer in A gloriosa Família, published by Angolan writer Pepetela in 1997. If the novel has Baltazar van Dum as the protagonist, it is not, however, he who presents the facts, but rather his inseparable slave, a narrator that is illiterate and mute by birth. Through such an impossible basis that is essentially metafictional, Pepetela problematizes the marginalization brought by the removal of the word, reinforcing it as a crucial element for the construction of subalternities. To deal with the strategies used by the author to compose the speech of the subordinate subject, muted by Portuguese colonial violence, we will turn to researchers such as Homi K. Bhabha (2007, 2010), Linda Hutcheon (1991), Mbembe (2014) and Gayatry Spivak ( 2010).