Identidade feminina em A costa do murmúrios, de Lídia Jorge

Abstract

“Female identity in The Murmuring Coast, by Lídia Jorge” aims to study the work of Lídia Jorge mentioned on title, dating back to 1988, the first publication of this work. This novel brings to light events in the city of Beira, in the Afro-Portuguese territory during the troubled period of the colonial war between Portugal and Mozambique. Inside the warlike aspect, the subjective wars of the characters stand out, in both society and in their marriage, mainly in the routine shared by the female characters of the novel, that provide a change identity to some characters. These aspects are experienced in the novel in different ways, as a result of the space of twenty years, set by Lídia Jorge in a narrative constituted by two parts: the first story is entitled The Locusts, told by an external voice, and the second narrative is guided by the testimony of Eva Lopo. Thus, this Master's dissertation aims to analyze the female identity formation process in the literary work The Murmuring Coast, by Lídia Jorge, in the sociopolitical and cultural context of colonial and postcolonial Mozambique. Starting from the initial questioning of how the identity of the character Eva Lopo/Evita is processed in the Mozambican colonial space, we investigate how the historical referent of the Mozambican Colonial War is set in the novel - the fictional plan -, reflecting on the historical past of Portuguese colonialism by evoking the memory of periods that are part of the collective imagination of the Portuguese people. We also ask how the sociopolitical and cultural context in which the work was produced influenced the behavior of the female characters in Jorge's work. Lastly, we investigated which identity factors of Eva Lopo converged with the transition from the Mozambique colony to the independent Mozambique of Africa. In order to achieve these aims, we use as a theoretical contribution the studies of Arnaut (2002), Hutcheon (1991), Gobbi (2011), Hall (2003, 2015), Gagnebin (2009), Maxwell (2006), Barrento (2016), Silva (2000) and other theorists that are relevant to this research.