Travel representation in Ruy Duarte de Carvalho

Abstract

Ruy Duarte de Carvalho, a major reference in Portuguese-language literature who promoted local Angolan languages, spent his childhood in Moçâmedes, Angola, and returned to Santarém, Portugal, where he was born in 1955 and where he completed his degree in Agricultural Regent at the Escola Superior Agrária. With a literary production made up of poetry, fiction, essays, narratives, columns and films, we find in him a unique way “of manifesting, understanding, planning, making and representing the culture” of the territories he travelled through, namely in southern Angola and Brazil.

That approach is presented as an instrument of social differentiation capable of distinguishing between spaces understood as the result of their ability to project the imaginary, from where the social body, the mentioned space, and time itself are nominated.

Mobility predisposed him to events, to the exaltation of experience, and even to the search of similarities and differences. According to Marta Lança, “travelling was a programme, requiring preparation, plenty of prior reading on the contexts of the territories to be covered, a lot of observation and methodological writing of notes while travelling, so that he could fix what would then give him food for thought in his adventure of books” (Lança, 2001).