The Living and the Remnant
[Angola] by José Eduardo Agualusa
Translated by Wang Yuan
Century Wenjing | Published by Shanghai People's Publishing House in April 2022
Dozens of writers from various African countries, including the protagonist Daniel Bensimoll (a journalist in The General Theory of Oblivion), came to Mozambique for the literary festival, which is only connected to the African continent by a bridge. One day, the island's communication with the outside world was suddenly completely interrupted, the network and electricity were lost, the storm made it impossible for the ship to go to sea, and the bridge was mysteriously impassable.
The writer's characters seem to have entered reality, some people's fictional characters are running down the street, and some people see their past and future in mysterious manuscripts. The real and the virtual, the present and the past, the living and other beings, all the boundaries are quietly disintegrating...
Writers walk through the stories and memories of this small island, begin to reflect on their own writing and identity, and also move towards rebirth in writing.
The island and bridge after the end of the world
In the epic poem Song of the Luzitanians (1572), the Portuguese poet Cammons used the Island of Love as a symbolic space, arranging for Nyingv to give the da Gama fleet physical and spiritual comfort and reward them with courage to sail to India. Centuries later, in the turbulent year of 2020, angolan writer Agualusa published the novel The Living and the Remnant, a completely new interpretation of island imagery in the context of apocalypse.
The setting of the novel is on the island of Mozambique. The island is close to the coast of East Africa, and although it is small, it has witnessed centuries of cross-cultural exchanges and has become a bridge between the two writers. Camons stayed on the island for several months on his way home, and Agualusa, a native of the world, settled on the island for several years. In The Living and the Remnant, the island, where the African Literary Festival is being held, is suddenly cut off from the world. At first, the communications disruption was blamed on storms hitting the continent, as Cammons wrote about the wayward actions of the gods. It wasn't until a few days later that the island learned that Jerusalem had been hit by a nuclear bomb, and a global unrest ensued. Beyond this superficially plausible explanation, however, the plot hints at another possibility: the resurgence of the extra-island world may have been due to the literary work of African writers on the island. Just like the experiences faced by epic heroes, there is always opportunity in crisis.
The Living and the Remnant adopt a seven-day narrative similar to that of the Bible's Genesis, and the community of writers as protagonists seem to have acquired the divine power to break the boundaries of virtual reality. Their previous fictional characters appear in reality, and this impossible encounter prompts the writer to write new works on the island, thus creating new heroes who truly solve the crisis. The protagonist of the new work either excavates a once-disappeared world or builds a bridge between the living and the unknown, echoing the title of the novel. Eventually, the island emerged from isolation, and African writers gained a new understanding of their mission and identity.
Author of The Living and the Remnant, Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa
Redemption: In the name of literature and love
Logically, the increase in apocalyptic writing in contemporary literature, the fear of the end and the desire for re-creation, are mostly due to dissatisfaction with the current world system, and the helplessness of defects eventually turns into the expectation of large-scale, revolutionary upheaval. In addition to Africa's marginalization in literature and politics, The Living and the Remnant raises more pervasive contemporary issues: the separation of writing from local reality; the proliferation of social networks and the lack of social skills in life; and the mediation of different identities in a globalized world. Together, these dysfunctional mechanisms converge into a slowly rising flood that threatens to inundate the entire world.
Whether it is Africa's island-like marginality or the more general dilemma mentioned above, its eventual resolution clearly requires a full range of action. And what writers like Agualusa can do is, first and foremost, to make and call for more meaningful literary creations, exposing the problems most closely related to The reality of Africa. In this sense, the novel uses the literary festival as the background of the story, reflecting a distinct realistic consideration. There are many African languages, and the audience of indigenous language literature is mostly limited to one place, while writers who use English, French and Portuguese belong to different social networks, and lack cross-language African literary community identity. The fictional organization of an African literary festival on a small island in the poor country of Mozambique, with semi-marginalized Portuguese as the working language, and the successful invitation of writers from Nigeria, Mali, South Africa and other countries in addition to Portuguese-speaking countries such as Angola, Mozambique and Portugal, is itself a challenge to the operating mechanism of real society.
At the festival, African writers from different backgrounds interact with each other, repeatedly talking about the contradiction between their own desires and the expectations of the outside world. Agents, journalists and readers, often from outside the continent, have fixed expectations of African literature. Uli exploded in popularity at the Berlin Literary Fair, not because of his work, but because he mastered the Mozambican tradition of Tynolo divination; the setting's most famous writer, Cornelia, was most upset on the island, in part because she could not complete the next book, which had been hyped up by the Times Literary Review as "Africa's Second Decolonization." Faced with this gap, some authors rebelled by adopting unorthodox writing. Jude did not publish a second book because he refused to repeat himself; Julio wrote the same story in each book, but from a different perspective.
It was in the process of sharing outside stereotypes about African authors and exchanging personal experiences of rebellion that a preliminary identity was established between the authors. In their own way, they tap into the potential of African literature and explore how to contribute to contemporary creation, even beyond mainstream Western literature, which has stagnated in some respects. Jude, for example, found that "imaginary pleasures" are no longer visible in contemporary European literature, but African storytelling remains vibrant. If we consider that the etymology of "utopia" is not just "where it doesn't exist", but may also point to "happy places", then the seemingly easy description of the daily chats of these writers on the island, and the improvisational games of Uli, Jude and Lucia (guessing whether other people's stories are true or fictional), are no longer trivial pastimes, because the core of the new generation of African utopias stems from this close connection between everyday pleasures and literary creation. The three writers later revealed that all the stories were true, again blurring the boundaries between narrative hierarchies, between fiction and reality.
However, the redemptive function of literature also undergoes a major test in the text, the characters created by the writers are separated from the paper and come to reality, and the fusion of the two worlds exacerbates the cognitive crisis of the writers. Some began to wonder if their presence on the island was a form of death. In fact, the novel's island of Mozambique is a clear departure from the classic pastoral imagery, as it points to both heaven and hell. Daniel and Moira chose to settle on the island and let their daughters be born and raised here, not because they thought it was a "perfect paradise", because in Daniel's eyes, the statement was not synonymous, but contradictory rhetoric. They chose this because Moira could finally be herself on the island, and Daniel had an unconditional love for her. "And he, Daniel, hit the big luck and harvested not only Moira, but also her island."
(Excerpted from the epilogue of the translation of "The Living and the Remnant")
Author: Wang Yuan
Editor: Yuan Zhenlu
Editor-in-Charge: Zhu Zifen