Memory is a province of imagination

a reading of Parts of Africa, by Helder Macedo

Abstract

This article intends to think about the novel Parts of Africa, by Helder Macedo, from the relations between memory and imagination. The novel mixes the author’s personal and family memory, the history of the last throes of the Portuguese empire and the novelistic investment in diluting the boundaries between factual and fictional. Remembrance and elocution are the fundamental raw materials of narrative construction where the only truth that matters is the novelistic truth itself. In the novel Parts of Africa are also not exactly geographical, but the fictional reconstruction of experiences spatialized in discourse. This game with textuality in its various parts is also present in the structure of the novel, which mixes fiction, testimony, drama, poetry and essay. To undertake the proposed analysis, I will use as theoretical reference authors such as Paul Ricoeur, Teresa Cristina Cerdeira, Vilma Arêas, Márcio Seligmann-Silva, Gilles Deleuze, among others.