Witness narratives in context: Analysing the political prison writings of Graciliano Ramos and José Luandino Vieira

Context in Literary and Cultural Studies COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND CULTURE Series Editors TIMOTHY MATHEWS AND FLORIAN MUSSGNUG Comparative Literature and Culture explores new creative and critical perspectives on literature, art and culture. Contributions offer a comparative, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary focus, showcasing exploratory research in literary and cultural theory and history, material and visual cultures, and reception studies. The series is also interested in language-based research, particularly the changing role of national and minority languages and cultures, and includes within its publications the annual proceedings of the ‘Hermes Consortium for Literary and Cultural Studies’. Timothy Mathews is Emeritus Professor of French and Comparative Criticism, UCL. Florian Mussgnug is Reader in Italian and Comparative Literature, UCL. Context in Literary and Cultural Studies Edited by Jakob Ladegaard and Jakob Gaardbo Nielsen First published in 2019 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.uclpress.co.uk Text © Contributors, 2019 Images © Contributors and copyright holders named in the captions, 2019 The authors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Ladegaard, J and Nielsen, J. (eds.). 2019. Context in Literary and Cultural Studies. London: UCL Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787356245 Further details about Creative Commons licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Any third-party material in this book is published under the book’s Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in the credit line to the material. If you would like to re-use any third-party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons license, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. ISBN: 978-1-78735-626-9 (Hbk.) ISBN: 978-1-78735-625-2 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978-1-78735-624-5 (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-78735-627-6 (epub) ISBN: 978-1-78735-628-3 (mobi) ISBN: 978-1-78735-629-0 (html) DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787356245 CoNtENts v Contents List of figures vii Editors ix Notes on contributors xi Acknowledgements xv Introduction: the question of context 1 Jakob Ladegaard and Jakob Gaardbo Nielsen Part I: Contexts of production 1 Cosmopolitanism and the historical/contextual paradigm 17 Bruce Robbins 2 Witness narratives in context: analysing the political prison writings of Graciliano Ramos and José Luandino Vieira 37 Elisa Scaraggi 3 Literature as testimony: textual strategies and contextual frameworks in Fatima Bhutto’s Songs of Blood and Sword 55 Ana Ashraf Part II: Interventions in context 4 Between the Audienzsaal and the bedroom: A feminist-narratological reading of female sovereignty in Caroline Auguste Fischer’s Der Günstling (1809) 77 Aude Defurne 5 Literary form and limited liability: it-narratives and the context of corporate law in the British public sphere, 1860–1880 96 Jakob Gaardbo Nielsen 6 Homeland(s) in comparison: contexts of reterritorialisation 115 Susana Araújo CONTEXT IN LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES vi Part III: New contexts 7 Swimming against the heteroand homonormative tide: a queer reading of Wolfgang Tillmans’ photo installation (2004–2009) in the Panorama Bar at Berlin’s Berghain 135 Oliver Klaassen 8 Performative contexts in contemporary theatre: towards the emancipation of the relational sphere 156 Belén Tortosa Pujante 9 I object to your position: hyperreal decontextualising of objects 172 Ana Calvete 10 From data to actual context 190 Mads Rosendahl Thomsen Index 210 witNEss NArrAtivEs iN CoNtExt 37 P B 2 Witness narratives in context: analysing the political prison writings of Graciliano Ramos and José Luandino Vieira Elisa scaraggi The smell of context In her controversial book Limits of Critique, Rita Felski dedicates a whole chapter explaining to her readers why ‘context stinks’ (Felski 2015, 151–85). According to this prominent scholar, ‘we are inculcated, in the name of history, into a remarkably static view of meaning, where texts are corralled amidst long-gone contexts and obsolete intertexts, incarcerated in the past, with no hope of parole’ (157). Felski declares her longing for a renewed, more intimate and immediate connection with literary texts, which is supposedly denied by the widespread academic devotion to a historical approach to literature. To prove her point, Felski reduces the historicist approach to literature to a barren ‘placement in the box’.1 Although her tones are certainly provocative and her aim is to open a debate, this is a clear oversimplification of a much more complex matter. Among other things, the argument leaves aside the problem of how we should consider texts that originate from historical experiences (diaries, memoirs, biographies and autobiographies, etc.). Additionally, when incarceration and parole are not simply catchy metaphors but constitute the material bases for the construction of a literary text, is it possible – or even ethical – to overtly disregard the context? When analysing literature produced in confinement or that concerns the experience of reclusion of a writer, context, inevitably, plays an essential role. Indeed, it would perhaps be more accurate to use the CONTEXT IN LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES 38 word context in the plural because, although incarceration is always marked by violence and by the fact that it places the prisoner in a state of exception, the experience of life in prison varies according to different historical, political and geographical contexts, not to mention the natural dissimilarities among prisoners. There is no single experience of life in prison but a multiplicity of experiences. There is no one literature of confinement as such, but a multiplicity of texts and contexts. To show how crucial context is in the textual and theoretical analysis of texts related to the experience of confinement, I would like to bring here some examples taken from Memórias do cárcere and Papéis da prisão, respectively the prison memoirs by Brazilian novelist Graciliano Ramos, and the philological edition of the notebooks kept by Angolan writer José Luandino Vieira during his imprisonment under the Portuguese colonial regime. I will examine these texts as examples of witness narratives, arguing that they should be read and interpreted considering their historical and political contexts and their material conditions of production. Before proceeding any further, I will briefly outline the contexts in which Ramos and Vieira’s incarceration took place and in which their writings were realised. Different (con)texts Graciliano Ramos was imprisoned for eleven months between 1936 and 1937, under Getúlio Vargas’ first presidency.2 Months before his arrest, a leftist uprising – deemed pejoratively as the Intentona Comunista (Communist uprising) – had broken out in Rio and other cities in the north-east of the country. Vargas took advantage of the uprising, which constituted no real threat to the stability of Brazil, to further concentrate power in his hands and reinforce the authoritarian tendencies of his government, among which was the systematic incarceration of political adversaries.3 At no point throughout his detention did the writer receive a trial, sentence or even a formal accusation. With astonishment, Ramos recalls in his memoirs how his prison life was marked from the beginning as being outside the parameters of any state of rights. The interrogation, the witnesses, the ordinary trial formalities did not arrive. Not a word of accusation […] Why did we not appear in any record, not even a fake one, a simulacre of justice? It would be a farce, for sure, but that would grant us a vague possibility of doing something […]. An immoral tribunal is still worth something […]. witNEss NArrAtivEs iN CoNtExt 45 Without claiming to own or possess the whole truth, Ramos consciously claims his right to expose his personal version of the facts. The account is partial because of the very limits of human experience, and not necessarily because the writer could not settle the experience into understanding. The writer discloses his contradictions and doubts, he even considers renouncing the task, but the reasons to write are stronger. Rather than the intelligibility of the experience, what prisoners do fail to settle into understanding is the violence of the state machine built to control and repress. However, what at first appears to them as mere irrationality, arbitrariness and excess, comes to make sense if it is interpreted as a strategic device used by the state to quash political adversaries. Putting the traumatic experience into an openly political frame of interpretation, the witness’s aim can switch from the attempt to understand to the desire to resist and counteract. Here it is important to consider the context of the incarceration and to acknowledge that different contexts require different tools of analysis. While in the case of the Nazi persecution of European Jews, people were deported, segregated and murdered without knowing or understanding the reason for their imprisonment,23 for political prisoners incarceration may have a totally different meaning. In fact, being incarcerated may not represent the end, but rather another phase of the struggle. For a political prisoner, this understanding is essential to facing the experience of the prison in such a way as to avoid being destroyed by it. Thus, when dealing with texts written by political prisoners, one of the issues to investigate is how the awareness of being part of a larger political struggle influences the individual experience of incarceration and therefore, the account that prisoners give of it. In the case of José Luandino Vieira, for example, writing can be considered a means to keep on participating in the struggle of independence of Angola, dodging the limits imposed by the incarceration. In fact, the notebooks that he succeeded in smuggling out of prison with the help of his wife constituted a useful source of information for the liberation movement acting in secrecy. Besides this, writing also allowed him to keep a close relationship with his wife, a relationship that he describes as ‘fundamental’24 and that was crucial for his mental well-being in prison. Autonomy is another issue at stake. Prison writings show how, even in inhumane conditions, prisoners tend to carve out some space for themselves, a space not controlled nor supervised by the authorities. Writing as such is a space of resistance and autonomy. Historical and sociological research (Buntman 2003, McEvoy 2015, Alexander 2011) CONTEXT IN LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES 46 has proved that political prisoners are likely to associate in groups and set up autonomous organisations, which is a powerful strategy to oppose and restrict the power that prisons exercise on individuals. Under certain circumstances, then, prisons can be seen ‘as places not just of repression […] but of practical and imaginative exercises in self-government and even of state-making’ (Alexander 2011, 552). Graciliano Ramos, for example, recalls the role of the Coletivo (collective) and of the Rádio Libertadora (freedom radio). The former was an autonomous organisation who took care of prisoners’ essential needs, while the latter was a human radio whose ‘broadcast’ would start as soon as prisoners were shut in their cells at night. Shouting from one cell to the others, prisoners would comment on news and criticise the government; they would read passages of books and sing communist songs and popular sambas. The Rádio Libertadora was also a means to keep in contact with the women who shared the same prison but lived separated from their male counterparts. Autonomous organisations show how prisoners did not renounce their agency or their creative power. Creativity, especially in the case of prisoners who are writers, also passes through the development of a language and a literary form suitable to describing the experience of detention. Yet, as I have already mentioned, language in witness narratives is a contentious issue. As words are considered inadequate to represent a context so violent and oppressive that it appears unrepresentable, witness narratives are usually identified with a breakdown of language. According to the dominant paradigm, the experience is uncommunicable25 because language becomes the embodiment of the traumatic experience. Of course, the paradigm acknowledges that most witnesses feel the urge to talk about their experience, but it also stresses the fact that there is always a discrepancy between reality and the words used to describe it. However, in spite of all this, large numbers of witnesses have written about their experience and many of them have produced narratives that, apart from accomplishing their task of bearing witness to history, also have an undoubtable artistic value. Therefore, instead of focusing on the hardships related to the process of witnessing, I propose to look at the results and achievements of the process. Instead of reading the discrepancy as a failure to convey the truth of the experience, it is possible to interpret it as a device that actually discloses part of that truth, bearing in mind that subverting the common use of language or revealing the mechanisms that lay behind the act of writing can lead to a more aware reading. Brazilian critic Jaime Ginzburg states: witNEss NArrAtivEs iN CoNtExt 47 Breaking with the trivial convention of language forces the reader’s perception into a different path of knowledge and formulation of ideas. Without this differentiating movement, literature would continue to use a trivial language, unable to provoke the reader to consider the singular, strange and terrible dimension of the experience (Ginzburg 2010, 272). Reflecting on how to represent the unrepresentable and finding the proper language to describe the horrors and the pettiness of daily life in prison are not only attempts to restore the primary articulation between language and body, but also a means to regain agency in a context that seeks to deny it. Furthermore, looking at the materiality of the texts I work with, the first consideration that I would make is that, instead of suffering from a breakdown of language or aphasia, the two writers accumulated words and more words.26 This craving for accumulation is particularly evident in Vieira’s Papéis da prisão. Not only are the notebooks full of drawings, notes written by other prisoners, newspaper scraps, excerpts of letters from family and friends, but the very form of the text alludes to accumulation. In fact, the text is composed of fragments that were not meant to create a narrative, but whose juxtaposition eventually gives the impression of the flowing of time and of a real, lived life. However, looking at the date of the first entry of the notebooks, 10 October 1962, one notices that Vieira began to write almost a year after his arrest.27 How should this year-long gap be interpreted? In the brief introduction that Luandino Vieira wrote for the Papéis da prisão, he affirms that he started to write as soon as the necessary conditions for the secret circulation of the notebooks were created (Vieira 2015, 9–10). From that point onwards, his resolution to write sometimes wavered – and this is not surprising given the circumstances – but, eventually, it was always renewed. As Vieira affirms in an interview, ‘writing was a good way of killing time, as well as working out the causes that had got me into that situation. Simply for having claimed a national consciousness, a national identity that translated into the nationalist activities that demanded independence, there I was’ (Ribeiro 2010, 30). Nonetheless, one can wonder whether the year that Vieira stayed in prison and did not write any of his notebooks28 was also functional for him to recover from the shock of the imprisonment, to process the experience and elaborate an adequate reaction to it, a reaction that was both political29 and personal. Writing in prison combines these two dimensions, as ‘one writes in prison to fill the void of time […], but on the CONTEXT IN LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES 48 other hand, one writes in prison to resist, to avoid forgetting, to survive’ (Ribeiro and Vecchi 2015, 25). Also Ramos’ Memórias do cárcere reveal that writing was a primary need for the imprisoned author. From the first moments of his incarceration, writing appeared to Ramos as a necessity imposed by the circumstances, a necessity that had to be satisfied: It was necessary to write, to tell the events I was entangled in. For sure, I could not develop them: I was lacking calm, everything looked senseless to me. Clearly, I was being senseless: it was absurd aiming to narrate indefinite things, the smoke and shadows that surrounded me. I did not think about this. I had imposed a task upon myself and I had to accomplish it no matter how. Or maybe it was not my imposition, after all: the circumstances determined it. It was essential to exhaust myself, discipline my rebellious thoughts, describe the oscillations of the hammocks, the human loads flopped in the corners, gasping with nausea, vomiting, my new friends’ features becoming clearer. […] I sat on a box and I began to write in the light coming from the hatch. I probably stayed there working for hours, disorderly (Ramos 2014, 130, my emphasis). As he was a very strict critic of himself and his own writing, Graciliano was aware that his prison notes were probably not good enough to become part of a literary narrative. However, in another passage, he remembers how, despite all this, he was nonetheless compelled to write, chaotically and desperately. I was on my own, a book in my hand, racking my brains in vain to understand it. I struggled on a page, I read it five, six times, then I abandoned the brochure, discouraged. Reading had become impossible; however, I endeavoured to write. If I should find those sheets, disconnected and hideous as they were, they would reveal my perturbation, the weakness of my spirit. But the long hours dragged on, and it was necessary to fill them (479–80). Beyond healing Reading these excerpts, one tends to agree with Ann Kaplan, an influential scholar in trauma studies, when she says that the project of working through motivates the project of the memoir (Kaplan 2005, 44). The urge witNEss NArrAtivEs iN CoNtExt 49 to write seems to be part of the process of gaining awareness about one’s own condition and putting thoughts and feelings in order. Still, in the case of Ramos and Vieira, writing not only has a therapeutic function but is also part of a larger project. Take, for example, the writings of another famous political prisoner, the Italian Antonio Gramsci. Arrested by Mussolini’s fascist regime, Gramsci was sentenced to 20 years and he eventually died because of the complications related to the poor living conditions he endured in prison. One of the judges of the Special Tribunal who tried him justified the harsh sentence saying that they had to ‘prevent that brain from working for twenty years’ (Gerratana 1977, LXIII). Nonetheless, during the whole time he spent in prison, Gramsci dedicated himself to studying and writing. In 1927, in a letter to his sister-in-law, he wrote: I am obsessed (this is a phenomenon typical of people in jail, I think) by this idea: that I should do something für ewig […]. In short, in keeping with a preestablished program, I would like to concentrate intensely and systematically on some subject that would absorb and provide a center to my inner life (Gramsci 1994, 83). The project of doing something für ewig (literally, forever) would materialise in the pages of the Prison Notebooks,30 a series of essays that Gramsci wrote during his time in prison and that, in spite of its fragmentary and unfinished nature, remains one of the most original contributions to critical thinking in the twentieth century. It is worth noting that, from his arrest onwards, reading and writing had already appeared to Gramsci as vital needs; however, in the letter mentioned above he is saying that now they should respond to a higher purpose and seek a result for their own sake, rather than being a mere instrumental means of survival (Gerratana 1977, XVI). It is interesting that, trying to explain the expression für ewig to his sister-in-law, Gramsci translates it as ‘disinterested’, which in this case does not indicate a work disconnected from reality, or art done for art’s sake. On the contrary, ‘disinterested’ refers to Gramsci’s personal condition as a prisoner: the project he has in mind is to trespass the restrictions imposed by the circumstances, the limits of the cell, the degradation of his body. As Rosengarten states: ‘In prison, deprived of any immediate opportunity to influence the course of human affairs, Gramsci’s sense of time became, paradoxically, both more intimate and subjective, yet at the same time more oriented to distant horizons’ (Rosengarten 2014, 119). CONTEXT IN LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES 50 Although their distant horizons differed from Gramsci’s, in prison José Luandino Vieira and Graciliano Ramos cultivated their writing, and they used prison time to collect material that would eventually become part of the literature they would write outside prison: the experience of the confinement became a source of characters, stories and themes. Writing also became a form of resistance because it represented the refusal to give up a constructive dimension. It exceeded the logic of the therapeutic function of writing thus reinforcing the idea that, when analysing prison writings, we should look for a contextual paradigm of interpretation, one that takes into consideration both the political and the aesthetic intentions of prisoners who write. This work was supported by FCT – Fundação Ciência e Tecnologia PD/ BD/113727/2015. Notes 1 ‘History […] consists of a vertical pile of neatly stacked boxes – what we call periods – each of which surrounds, sustains, and subsumes a microculture. Understanding a text means clarifying the details of its placement in the box, highlighting the correlations and causalities between text-as-object and context-as-container’ (Felski 2015, 156). 2 ‘Vargas became interim president in 1930 and then ruled the country until 1945. In 1937, he created the Estado Novo [New State], an authoritarian regime that relied on nationalism to garner support and legitimacy. Ousted from power in 1945, Vargas returned through a democratic election in 1950 with a populist program that relied on working-class and urban middle-class support…’. See: https://library.brown.edu/create/ brazilundervargas/. 3 On Vargas’ methods of repression of dissent, see Cancelli ‘Ação E Repressão Policial’ (1999) and ‘O mundo da violência’ (1994); Cardoso dos Santos Ribeiro (2008); Pedroso (2003). 4 All translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated. 5 Acronym for Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola), one of the three nationalist movements that fought for independence from Portugal. 6 Viera and Jacinto were released for good conduct almost two years before the end of their sentence. Nonetheless, they were not allowed to return to Angola, and had to live in Lisbon and report regularly to the police (Vieira 2015, 1033). 7 On incarceration in colonial societies, see Alexander and Anderson (2008); Bernault et al. (2003); Dikötteret al. (2007); Messiant (2006). 8 1961 is remembered as the year in which the armed struggle started in Angola. The episodes that prompted it were the attack on the gaols of Luanda on 4 February and the massacres of white settlers and their black and mulatto workers in the coffee plantations in the North of the country in March, respectively promoted by the MPLA and the UPA (Union of the Populations of Angola). (See Wheeler and Pellisier (2009); Marcum (1969).) 9 All Vieira’s literary works written in confinement appeared between 1963 and 1981, while Papéis da prisão was published only in 2015. 10 See, for example, Silviano Santiago’s novel Em Liberdade (1981), a fictional account of Graciliano Ramos’ first impressions of freedom once released from prison. 11 On literatures in Portuguese as single literary system (or ‘macrosystem’), see Abdala Júnior (2000, 2003). witNEss NArrAtivEs iN CoNtExt 51 12 See, for example, Candido (2006); Miranda (1992); Ginzburg (2010). 13 After all the works he had written in prison had been published, Vieira did not publish anything new until 2006, when the novel De rios velhos e guerrilheiros appeared. The only exception to this protracted silence was the publication of two short-stories in 1998. 14 There are still very few critical analyses of Papéis da prisão, which was published in November 2015. The most important is Papéis críticos avulsos (Sundry critical papers) by Margarida Calafate Ribeiro and Roberto Vecchi, which works as foreword to Vieira’s book, only two articles have been published up to the beginning of 2018. 15 In his article ‘Towards a prison poetics’, Larson (2010) works with writings by both political and common-law prisoners. 16 Among them, I remember Felman and Laub (1992); Agamben (1998); Caruth et al. (1995); Kaplan (2005). In the Brazilian context, the works by Márcio Seligmann-Silva have been particularly influential. Among them, see: ‘Literatura e Trauma: um Novo Paradigma’ (2002); ‘Testemunho e a Política da Memória’ (2005); ‘Narrar o Trauma’ (2008); ‘Testemunho da Shoah e Literatura’ (2009); ‘O Local do Testemunho’ (2010); ‘Novos escritos dos cárceres’ (2006). This last work focuses specifically on reading Mendes’ prison writings through the lens of trauma theory. See also Kolleritz (2004). 17 For example, Lollini adapts the paradigm to Letters from Prison by Antonio Gramsci, one of the most famous political prisoners of the twentieth century and one that devoted his entire life to a political cause. The critic in fact refers to LaCapra’s Representing the Holocaust as the best approach to analyse Gramsci’s subjectivity (Lollini 1996, 523). According to Lollini Letters embodies ‘the trauma and the paradox of the testimony, which lie precisely in this gap between the need of a consistent subject and the flow of time and of traumatic events that contradict this consistency and coherence. In this gap the subject experiences a crisis of identity’ (522). It is possible to recognise the mark of trauma-informed discourse also in Gould’s analysis of accounts by Iranian prisoners, when she affirms that ‘their piecing together of the fragments of experience through language is part of a process of overcoming the trauma of confinement’ (Gould 2017, 19). Ramos’ Memórias have also been analysed through this paradigm, such as in Marco (2004); Silva de Abreu (2008); Oliveira (2011); Birman (2012). 18 One should also wonder which cultures Caruth refers to, considering that trauma theory has been concerned mainly with western culture. In recent times, the category of trauma has been widely used to refer to 9/11 (Kaplan 2005), and once again the focus has been on Western trauma. As Susana Araújo notes, ‘experts have shown that trauma studies have seldom been applied to other historical realities’ (Araújo 2015, 3). Along the same lines, Andermahr affirms that ‘trauma theory has not fulfilled its promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement. Rather than forging relationships of empathy and solidarity with non-Western others, a narrowly Western canon of trauma literature has in effect emerged, one which privileges the suffering of white Europeans’ (Andermahr 2015, 500). There is, however, an ongoing effort to ‘decolonise’ trauma studies. In this regard, see Andermahr et al. (2015); Balaev et al. (2014); Rizzuto (2015); Rothberg (2009). 19 Araújo affirms that ‘in Freudian terms, trauma is not a straightforward process […]. It is the inner working of an event, not the immediate, direct, or simple response to a painful event’ (Araújo 2015, 2). Quoting psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, Araújo also states that ‘many people never experience a trauma following a shock’ (2). 20 The interview is still unpublished. 21 In her analysis of accounts by Romanian political prisoners, Dumitrescu reports how ‘in their dexterous attempts to evade the censor […] writers protected their lives by pushing their craft to ever-greater levels of allusive sophistication’ (Dumitrescu 2016, 17). In an interview granted to me and still unpublished, Vieira recalls how, one day, one of his fellow prisoners was arbitrarily and severely punished in the prisoners’ canteen at Tarrafal. As he could not talk explicitly about the event, this is what he wrote in a letter to his wife: ‘Today, in the canteen, at lunch, something interesting happened. I forgot to eat my soup because I was looking at the sun coming in through the bars and depicting the bars CONTEXT IN LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES 52 on our table. The others did not care much and kept on eating, but I could not eat the soup with the bars mirroring in it.’ 22 Jurgenson (2016) suggests that replacing historical sources where they are not available may justify the prisoners’ wish to leave a written testimony: ‘it is the awareness of being the only ones able to leave a trace […] that induces some prisoners, still in the camps, to investigate, to collect other detainees’ stories’ (269–70). 23 Not only did Jews not know nor understand why they were being incarcerated and exterminated, but as Laub reports, they were made to believe that they deserved it (Felman and Laub 1992, 79). 24 In the interview that closes his Papéis da prisão, José Luandino Vieira affirms: ‘if it wasn’t for Linda I would have most possibly drowned … Two decisions were very important: one, the issue of writing; the other, my relationship. Without this relationship, none of us would be the same person; this is what I call a fundamental relationship’ (Vieira 2015, 1072). 25 Even authors considered canonical in trauma studies, such as Primo Levi, do not always fit in the grid of the dominant paradigm. For example, Michaela Wolf states that Levi ‘rejects the notion of the ‘incomunicabilità’, the incommunicability, of the lager experience […], thus arguing against the thesis that sees the Holocaust as a unique experience, which would imply that the experience is bound to remain buried with the death of its victims’ (Wolf 2016, 14–15). 26 Both texts are quite voluminous: Ramos’ Memórias are divided in four parts, which in the original project should have been four different volumes. On the other hand, the first edition of Vieira’s Papéis da prisão has 1102 pages, while the original notebooks comprised ‘approximately 2000 fragile handwritten sheets of paper’ (Ribeiro and Vecchi 2015, 17). 27 José Luandino Vieira was arrested in Lisbon on 20 November 1961. The first entry in the first notebook dates 10 October 1962 (Vieira 2015, 41). 28 Although he did not write any notebooks during his first year in prison, Vieira wrote the short stories that were later collected and published with the title Nosso Musseque. For more information, see the chronology at the end of Papéis da prisão. 29 As long as Vieira stayed in Luanda, the notebooks had an immediate political purpose: passing information to the nationalist movement working in the underground. His transfer to Cape Vert would prevent this kind of communication. However, the notebooks still had a political drive, although not an immediate one: one of the intentions behind the notebooks was to collect material on Angolan culture to prove that ‘the political independence [of Angola] has a cultural base because we [Angolans] have a different culture that justifies political independence’ (Vieira 2015, 1053). 30 For a detailed analysis of the genesis of the Prison Notebooks, see the preface by Valentino Gerratana (1977, XXX–XLII). Works cited Abdala Júnior, Benjamin. 2000. ‘Terra Morta e Outras Terras: Sistemas Literários Nacionais e o Macrossistema Literário da Língua Portuguesa’. Veredas. Revista da Associação Internacional de Lusitanistas 3.2: 523–36. – 2003. De Vôos e Ilhas: Literatura e Comunitarismos. São Paulo: Ateliê. Agamben, Giorgio. 2002. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books. Alexander, Jocelyn. 2011. ‘Nationalism and Self-Government in Rhodesian Detention: Gonakudzingwa, 1964–1974’. 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