In the name of the father: ventriloquism and subalternity in Até que as pedras se tornem mais leves que a água, by António Lobo Antunes.

Abstract

The war is a recurring theme in the work of António Lobo Antunes, especially in much of his early novels. With Até que as pedras se tornem mais leves que a água, his latest work, the author revisits Africa with the story of two war survivors (or two victims?). The misty narrative addresses, predominantly from two points of view, more than the war in Angola, the conflicts of a soldier and a boy plucked from Africa. Father and son construct a dissonant symbiosis which is loaded with opposite-built bonds. The narrative structure obeys a game of power and between voices, incorporations of other voices and the gagging of others, synthesizes a diegetic world in which this son, who has always echoed his father, ultimately intends to deny his patrimony and silence him. For the theoretical assumption, I use authors such as Gérard Genette, Brian Richardson, Gayatri Spivak, Roberto Vecchi, Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, among others.