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مذبحة ويريامو

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English, French (translation)

224 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1980

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Williams Sassine

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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
Profile Image for أحمد أبازيد Ahmad Abazeid.
351 reviews2,117 followers
September 8, 2012
أفريقيا ضمير الربّ المعذّب ...

هذا نداء الدم المسفوح , حتى لا تضيع الذاكرة ... و حتى لا نصدّق زيف التاريخ المكتوب بالحبر الأبيض ... و حتى لا تعلننا الجماجم المتبقّية من المذبحة !
Profile Image for Justin.
3 reviews1 follower
April 12, 2019
"He realized that at every moment of his life it was his duty to choose his death. An honorable death."

"Freedom is first and foremost in the ability to begin the process of one's own death. They want to make mine the consequence of fate. No..."

Sassine massages these images of death into his deep text again and again. In the characters of Kabalango the poet, and Condelo the albino, death has the revolutionary potential to be a second life. But only if the subject is able to choose it, or rather, will it. For Condelo, this second life is bound up in the death/life of his mother, who is waiting for him to join her, so they can reorder the world in antagonization to the "confusion of racialism." This revolutionary image get compounded in the figures of the FRELIMO guerillas, who make will themselves to expel the Portuguese from Mozambique, but knowing well that neocolonialism awaits after colonialism and must be properly dealt with. This revolutionary image gets contrasted in the figures of Robert, the fascist who helped the Nazis exterminate Jews before fleeing to Mozambique for war crimes, all the while stealing African masks with the intention of selling them to European art dealers. It is also of course, more largely in the colonial figure of Commandant d'Arriaga and the Portuguese colonizers, who deceive the villagers of Wirriyamu according to false histories of their compliance with law and order, before slaughtering them on a hunch that d'Arriaga's kidnapped son is in the village. Colonization, as V.Y. Mudimbe reminds us in The Invention of Africa, is that colonization or colonialism means, roughly, organization or arrangement. Specifically, the rearrangement of the so called savage world of Africa into the European fantasy/phantasy construct.

For Kabalango the poet, this second life seems to be in the eradication of the self, reminiscent of Huey Newton's 'Revolutionary Suicide.' When Condelo and Kabalango meet, a great change in Kabalango occurs, and the self involved kingdom that he wished to build for himself erodes away in favor of a love for his brother and the revolution. This is almost foretold by Condelo to Kabalango in a story, which for Condelo relates to his mother in that, the telling of stories is like the act of loving one's mother. One line reads: "If to all I do a bit of good / It is because I belong to nothing." By the end, Kabalango realizes the futility of poetry and words, relating that his best poems were the bullets of his gun that he shot at portuguese colonizers pillaging and raping the village of Wirriyamu. By the end, Kabalango almost merges with the village itself.

Obviously, there is much happening in this novel, but it is worth your careful and attentive read because how it relates the organizing factors of colonization with resistance of African thought and revolution is a profound gift.
Profile Image for Farah y. Abdu-alghani.
71 reviews
October 30, 2024
"أيها القائد لا أملك إلا أن أتكلم في الظلام فالصوت الإنساني في الظلام هو مثل شعاعٌ من الشمس"

-وليامز ساسين، مذبحة ويريامو، صفحة 33.

ذاكرة الشعوب مجددًا هذه السلسلة من التحف، النسخة من مكتبة والدي تعود لعام 1985، الطبعة الأولى.
Profile Image for Lamiaa Basyoni.
58 reviews39 followers
January 25, 2020
اللي يوجع فيها انها مش خيالية، وان مذابح زيها كتير ارتكبتها دول الاستعمار في افريقيا كلها
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews

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