Hybridity and Generosity in Ondjaki’s Poetry

Abstract

Ondjaki's poetry celebrates the hybrid in its various forms, such as the pluridiscursivity of the Portuguese language, the permeability between texts and authors, the breaking down of clear boundaries between the human and the natural and the contestation of the privileged position of reason. In doing so, Ondjaki inserts himself into what, in an essay on the poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade and William Carlos Williams (2005), I identified as a "poetics of generosity", at the same time humble and transgressive, which in the wake of thinkers such as Saint Paul, Saint Francis of Assisi, Martin Buber, Paulo Freire, and Leonardo Boff, among others, seeks to rethink the world through the optic of a dialogism that calls into question the origins of modernity in the rationalism and individualism of the Enlightenment. In the present article, my reflection on hybridity finds theoretical support in the recent work of historian Dominick LaCapra, especially in his book History and Its Limits. Human, animal, violence, published in 1999.