Contar a nação: a literatura infantojuvenil moçambicana como território de memória e (re)existência

Abstract

Focusing on narratives addressed to childhood and seeking within them traces of memory, tradition, and resistance, this study examines contemporary Mozambican children’s and young adult literature as a space for the symbolic elaboration of the nation in the post- independence context. The research analyzes six works that, through the articulation of text and image, reinscribe forms of knowledge rooted in oral tradition and African cosmologies, proposing alternative ways of knowing the world and imagining the future. Grounded in a qualitative approach to literary and visual analysis, the study engages with the epistemologies of the South, as formulated by Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Maria Paula Meneses, and with the epistemology of ancestry proposed by Eduardo Oliveira, recognizing orality, collective memory, and non-Western knowledge regimes as legitimate forms of knowledge production. The analytical trajectory demonstrates that these narratives are not limited to “telling stories” to children, but actively participate in the dispute over meanings related to identity, belonging, and nation. Although written in Portuguese, the works incorporate Bantu-derived terms, narrative structures of orality, and local symbolic references, transforming the language of the colonizer into a vehicle for cultural appropriation and epistemic resistance. The young reader thus emerges not as an incomplete subject, but as a knower and agent of memory, connected to ancestral continuity. By mobilizing themes such as communal solidarity, female protagonism, and ethical reconstruction, the analyzed works reconfigure the legacy of colonialism and post- independence struggles, not by erasing their effects, but by elaborating them through literary imagination. From this traversal of memory, myth, and imagination emerges a literature that not only addresses Mozambican childhood, but conceives it as an active force in the construction of plural national imaginaries. In doing so, contemporary Mozambican children’s and young adult literature affirms itself as a territory of re- existence and as a fertile field for decolonial pedagogical practices, offering significant contributions to the Brazilian educational debate.