Manuel Rui’s early prose fiction focused on relations in colonial Angolan society and, in part, functioned as a contestation of Portuguese politics and culture. Rui continues to explore the complexities of Angolan life in Yes, Comrade!
The stories in Yes, Comrade! communicate a sense of the atmosphere in a city occupied by rival nationalistic factions and a colonial power. The political center of consciousness is clearly the revolutionary MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola), which won the struggle in the political and military arena. Using immediate events as well as cultural and linguistic codes, Rui brilliantly explores the ramifications of political independence and nation-state formation.
Manuel Rui is one of the leading writers postcolonial Angolan fiction. He has published several works of fiction and poetry, including Regresso Adiado, Memoria de Mar, and Quem me dera ser onda. Yes, Comrade! (originally published as Sim Camarada!) is the first of his works available in English translation.
Ronald W. Sousa is professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of The Rediscoverers: Major Figures in the Portuguese Literature of National Regeneration and the translator of Clarice Lispector’s The Passion according to G.H. (Minnesota, 1988).
Gitahi Gititi is an assistant professor of English at the University of Rhode Island at Kingston. He has taught literature at Kenyatta University in Nairobi, Kenya, and at Yale University.
…and along all the roads of tears flowers raged, saying, with a smile: ‘Yes, comrade!’
Despite his stature as one of Angola’s most important contemporary writers. Manuel Rui’s prose has never before been translated into English. With the publication of Yes, Comrade!, the non-Portuguese reader will be introduced to this essential work of Angolan fiction that offers a stunning portrait of revolutionary Angola in the 1960s and 1970s. Fascinating and extremely intricate, Yes, Comrade! emerges as a telling fictional portrayal of an extremely complex political and cultural scenario.
