Edible Encounters and the Formation of Self in Baltasar Lopes' Chiquinho and Paulina Chiziane's Niketche: uma história de poligamia (original) (raw)

Food in a Context of Disjuncture While Cabo Verdean author Baltasar Lopes da Silva (1907–1989) in his coming-of-age novel, Chiquinho (1947), and Mozambique's first female novelist Paulina Chiziane (1955–) in her novel Niketche: uma história de poligamia (2002), write from different historical and cultural perspectives, a comparison between these two works opens a critical space for probing the authors' respective conceptions of social normativity. In a sense, their divergent style and subjective content allow us to juxtapose their works and, in doing so, delineate the ways in which the two authors differently construed their social worlds and critically assessed their respective realities, while also uncovering their distinctive subjectivities. We suggest that a comparison between these two works has the potential to unravel commonalities in the authors' conception of an ideal social order where kinship and sustenance remain the principal glue and guarantor of social cohesion and well-being. Theoretically, these commonalities, we argue, are best extricated through the conceptual scope of David Sutton in his extension of James Fernandez' theorizing in Persuasions and Performances. Fernandez argues that the 'whole', a space imbued with a sense of conviviality with a community, is reached through the selection of metaphors that decrease the inchoateness between phenomenological human perception and the communicative act. Sutton furthers this idea through his argumentation that food, specifically in the sensorial nature of its consumption, is one of the most potent mechanisms in the process of returning to the 'whole'. We argue in particular that, in a colonial situation of cultural and linguistic oppression and in a post-independence situation of rapid change, the use of food tropes allows the authors to unmask colonial and postcolonial modalities of domination and assist the main characters in reaching a space of wholeness and self-liberation.