In search of the warrior mother
An unwanted and abandoned child, Vitória is always afraid of being a nuisance. Aware of her restlessness, instead of getting married she decides to go in search of those who generated her- Yara Nakahanda Monteiro
by Lara Ricci
An unwanted and abandoned child, Vitória is always afraid of being a nuisance, of taking her place in the world. Aware of her restlessness, instead of getting married she decides to leave Portugal and go in search of her mother.
He flees a few weeks before his wedding to the brother of his mistress.
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What is a classic literary place, the quête of one's origin, in My Mother's Hunger also takes the form of a journey through the consequences of colonisation and a 40-year war: the thirteen years of armed struggle that led Angola to independence from Lisbon, (from 1961 to 1974), was in fact followed by a long civil war that stretched from 1975 to 2002 (recounted in José Eduardo Agualusa's original novel, General Theory of Forgetting, transl. by Romana Petri, Neri Pozza, 2017).
Yara Nakahanda Monteiro, who like her protagonist was born in Angola and grew up in Portugal, invents a young woman who leaves her grandparents and aunts who raised her and - with the secret approval of all the women in the family - returns to the country of memory, the country where her family, like all exiles, continue an imaginary life. A new country for her, having left it when she was very young.
In Luanda, he is the guest of Romena, a rich and cunning friend of his aunt who has managed to carve out a life of relative ease in a chaotic, decaying and corrupt city, where differences in gender, class, skin colour and geographical origin determine people's fate.
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