The methodological principle of the “Atlantic” has been regarded as a valid historical approach to studying the relations among several continents, thus proving useful for linking the literature of Cabo Verde, São Tomé, and Brazil. This chapter proposes to analyze images of the relationship with Europe interwoven in insular literatures produced throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Behind the antagonistic relationship with the colonizer Portugal—“the face of Europe” (Pessoa, F. (2015). Lisbon Poets (Bilingual Edition Portuguese and English). Translated into English by Austen Hyde and Martin D’Evelin. Lisbon: Lisbon Poets & Co.)—are contours of confrontation with the “Old Continent” as a political, cultural, epistemic power, in a process of identity building that poetry powerfully exemplifies. Through the lens of literature, and as a result of this intersection of perspectives, this chapter seeks to identify such images of European-African relations, based on the reflection of this “confrontation” by insular works of literature written in Portuguese. This inquiry will lead to questions regarding what Lourenço (1999) provocatively called the “unusual Portuguese exceptionalism” (or “Atlantic exceptionalism”), a concept tackled more recently by Vecchi and (Ribeiro, M. C. (2014). La fine dell’eccezione atlantica e la decolonizzazione dell’Europa. Confluenze vol. 6, no. 1, 2014, pp. 15–23, ISSN 2036–0967, Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture Moderne, Università di Bologna. Retrieved in June 2023, from:
https://www.academia.edu/63831469/La_fine_dell_eccezione_atlantica_e_la_decolonizzazione_dell_Europa). This approach will place us within the epistemic paradigm proposed by (Mignolo, W. (2011). Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial option: a manifesto. Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, volume 1, issue 2, 20,122. Retrieved in June 2023, from:
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/62j3w283), arising from the need for a “decolonial thought” to shift the paradigm of postcolonial studies away from Eurocentric conceptual patterns. Referencing (Mbembe, A. (2017). Critique of Black Reason. Duke University Press), we will explore and address aspects of some references and images of various presences of Europe in the works of some authors from São Tomé and Príncipe and Cabo Verde—Francisco Tenreiro, Alda do Espírito Santo, and Gabriel Mariano, all of whom born in the second decade of the twentieth century. In addition, we will analyze some features of two poets born in the second half of the twentieth century, Vera Duarte and Conceição Lima, thus perusing images of Europe arising in the colonial, post-independence, as well as the current contexts. The above-outlined investigation led us to an appealing outcome—that, due to the characteristics stemmed from their specific historical–geographical context, poets have been tracing paths of identity building and questioning, which translate into a balance between a determinant African matrix, and a rapport to Europe, once denounced in its intolerable cultural hegemonic modeling, but also creatively and dialogically incorporated as a challenging (cultural) factor within the process of identity assertion.
