Title: AND SO THE WORM TURNS: THE IMPOS? SIBILITY OF IMPERIAL IMITATION IN UNA LANZA POR EL BOAB? BY DANIEL JONES MATHAMA
Abstract:The first African novel in Spanish was, arguably, nothing of the sort. Una lanza por el Boab?, written by Daniel Jones Mathama and published in Barcelona in 1962, claims on its title page to be the pr...The first African novel in Spanish was, arguably, nothing of the sort. Una lanza por el Boab?, written by Daniel Jones Mathama and published in Barcelona in 1962, claims on its title page to be the product of the Primer autor de la Espa?ola. The first novelist, however, from Spanish Guinea?a land known today as Equatorial Guinea, the only hispanophone country in Africa?was Leoncio Evita, whose 1953 Cuando los Combes luchaban disappeared so quickly and thoroughly from the horizon that Jones Mathama was evidently unaware of it nine years later. As for the African locus indicated in the title page, while it is true that Jones Mathama himself was a colonial subject and that the plot develops in Guinea Espa?ola, various other elements outline Una lanza por el Boab? from elsewhere: the publication in Catalonia, for instance, and the narrator's explicit positioning of himself aqu? en Espa?a throughout his many metatextual musings (51). Furthermore, even the question of whether the text is a novel in the first place is disputable. No other genre exists to describe the text's three hundred pages, but Una lanza por el Boab? reads more like a failed attempt at imitating a foreign form than anything else: a bil dungsroman whose structure repeatedly breaks down as the narrative digresses time and again away from the presumed protagonist. The reality, however, that Jones Mathama's text is not the first of Spanish Guinea, nor conceived from there, nor perhaps even a novel, makes it compelling precisely because of its non-conformities. This text, widely but inaccurately dismissed as collabo? rationist, reveals through its equivocations and ambiguities the hesitations of an indigenous and colonial author who believes he is launching a national literary tradition in synchrony with empire. Jones Mathama's failures at metropolitan mimicry, both of ideology and form, are the true success of his novel and the reason why it should be read. Equatorial today, a composite of the island Bioko and the mainland region Rio Muni, is on the verge of metamorphosing from one of the African nations least known in the West to one of the more familiar. This is due to the fairly recent discoveries of large off-shore oil re? serves. The promise of petrodollars is presumed to be a primary inspiration for a March 2004 coup attempt in which Mark Thatcher, son of the former British prime minister, was implicated; and a root cause of an Equatoguinean money-laundering scandal that broke the same year in Washington, D.C., that forced the complicit and hitherto eminent Riggs Bank to close and be sold off. Readers of canonical Latin American literature, however, long ago came upon references toRead More
Publication Year: 2007
Publication Date: 2007-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 3
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