A Feminist Dance of Love, Eroticism, and Life: Paulina Chiziane's Novelistic Recreation of Tradition and Language in Postcolonial Mozambique

This article analyses the form and content of Niketche: Uma História de Poligamia (Niketche: A Story of Polygamy), the most recent work by Paulina Chiziane, Mozambique’s first female novelist. A brief introduction offers some considerations of Chiziane’s latest work as an aesthetic object and a literary product, published in Lisbon and intended for readers from all seven of the countries, on three continents, whose official language is Portuguese. The article analyses relevant aspects of the novel’s imaginative portrayal and reformulation of traditional social and cultural institutions, especially polygamy, and how these practices continue to affect gender relationships in postcolonial Mozambique. With respect to how female and male characters inter-relate in the story that unfolds, the novel can legitimately be labelled “feminist.” Basically, the article seeks to reveal how this literary work, composed from a female perspective and infused with a storyteller’s “orature,” constitutes a linguistic and artistic achievement of international appeal in its African recreation of Portuguese expression and of traditional social and cultural themes.