ROMANCES QUE ARQUIVAM, ARQUIVOS QUE NARRAM:AS AREIAS DO IMPERADOR DE MIA COUTO E A ARQUEOLOGIA DA HISTÓRIA DE MOÇAMBIQUE

The thesis aims to analyse the trilogy of novels As areias do imperador by the Mozambican writer Mia Couto, highlighting the processes of silencing enacted by power that have led to a distortion of historical “truth,” problematized through the concept of the archive. The work seeks to foreground the role of literature in the construction of historical memory in Mozambique, with the intention of fostering an epistemic and epistemological debate capable of contributing, today, to the building of a more democratic form of social justice. The analysis develops from a postcolonial perspective that considers the overlapping systems of oppression that shape the nation’s pasts, with a particular focus on the processes of identity representation produced by power and their effects on the present of a nation still in the making. More specifically, the trilogy is examined through the lens of the archive, questioning its materiality and revealing the epistemological dimension that underlies it. I will argue that the trilogy As areias do imperador, by challenging the archaeology of Mozambican History and itself performing the double inscription of preservation and oblivion inherent to archival logic, does not preserve in order to close, but rather to suspend, unveiling the potential dimension of the past as a space in which to seek answers to the needs of the present. In this sense, the trilogy reconfigures archival temporality, whereby the past transcends experience and becomes an immediate presence of itself, detached from lived reality. On the contrary, the novels, by becoming a (potential) archive, look to the past in its infinite unrealized possibilities, demonstrating that its operationality does not end in the bygone dimension to which the archive relegates it.