This exploration of class, feminism, and cultural identity (including issues of race, nation, colonialism, and economic imperialism) focuses on the work of four writers: the Mozambican Mia Couto, the Portuguese José Saramago, the Brazilian Clarice Lispector, and the South African J. M. Coetzee. In the first section, the author discusses the political aspects of Couto's collection of short stories Contos do nascer da terra (Stories of the Birth of the Land) and Saramago's novel O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis). The second section explores similar themes in Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K and Lispector's A hora da estrela (The Hour of the Star). Marques argues that these four writers are political in the sense that they bring to the forefront issues pertaining to the power of literature to represent, misrepresent, and debate matter related to different subaltern subjects: the postcolonial subject, the poor subject (the "poor other"), and the female subject. She also discusses the "ahuman other" in the context of the subjectivity of the natural world, the dead, and the unborn, and shows how these aspects are present in all the different societies addressed and point to the mystical dimension that permeates most societies. With regard to Couto's work, this "ahuman other" is approached mostly through a discussion of the holistic, animist values and epistemologies that inform and guide Mozambican traditional societies, while in further analyses the notion is approached via discussions on phenomenology, elementality, and divinity following the philosophies of Lévinas and Irigaray and mystical consciousness in Zen Buddhism and the psychology of Jung.
Irene Marques is a bilingual writer writing in English and Portuguese and an academic, holding a PhD in Comparative Literature and a Masters in both Comparative Literature and French Literature, all from the University of Toronto, as well as a Bachelor of Social Work from Ryerson University. She teaches in the African Studies Program at the University of Toronto and the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics at York University. In the past she has taught at the Ontario College of Art and Design University and Ryerson University and also worked at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. Marques is the author of three poetry collections in English--Wearing Glasses of Water, The Perfect Unravelling of the Spirit and The Circular Incantation: An Exercise in Loss and Findings--as well as the Portuguese language short story collection Habitando na Metáfora do Tempo: Crónicas Desejadas and the novel My House is a Mansion. Her academic publications include the manuscripts Transnational Discourses on Class, Gender and Cultural Identity and Critical Approaches: The Works of Chin Ce, Volume 1 (Editor) and numerous articles in international scholarly journals. Marques' creative writing explores issues of personal and collective identity, mystical and mythical understandings of self, world and universe, gender, race, empire, class, cultural syncretism, the Portuguese colonial wars in Africa and the Portuguese fascist regime. It is also characterized by a profound philosophical inquiry that sees the individual as an entity constantly yearning to be "whole" in a markedly socio-political world that divides, dissects, annihilates, humiliates, and dismisses multidimensional (non-rational) intelligences and their enlightened ways. Her narratives are complex, multifaceted, transcultural, transhistorical and transtemporal, and rely heavily on allegory, metaphor, lyricism, and magic-realism.
