‘SEREPENDITY!’ AND OTHER STRANGE FRUIT CREATED BY ANA MARIA GONÇALVES IN UM DEFEITO DE COR

Abstract

This paper analyzes the novel Um defeito de cor by Ana Maria Gonçalves, taking into account the relationship between the languages used in its prologue – called ‘Serendipity!’ – and the historiographic meta-fiction that emerges after it. While the first one arises from the “escrevivência” of Gonçalves’s authorial self-character, the other employs the self-awareness of a historical textuality, considered here as decolonial histori-ographic metafiction, since it stems from the first-person narrative of a black slaved woman, Kehinde. The con-tiguity between those two languages generates a ‘strange fruit’, which seems to demand a hybridized method-ology between post-modern and decolonial approaches, given that a methodology that sees literature as a crys-tallized field would hardly cope with it. Thus, a method is proposed that examines literature as a post-autono-mous field in order to question its role in concrete reality and to investigate fictionality as a shade of reality.