{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.013583441138421734, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.366255144032922, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Celebrating the Absent Father in José Eduardo Agualusa's My Father's Wives

José Eduardo Agualusa's My Father's Wives celebrates a liberation of the strictures usually underpinning identity construction, by both affirming those notions and simultaneously undercutting their validity. The novel proposes a textual and cultural celebratory promiscuousness as way of reimagining a Creole identity that goes beyond the customary dual poles of Portugal and Angola to embrace most of Southern Africa as well as Asia. The contradictions spawned by this strategy open up a gap that is filled with signs of excess and slippage, the result of a parodic mimicry and the failure of the paternal function at the textual and personal levels. Structured around the search for Faustino Manso and his alleged seventeen children, the discovery of his infertility empties out his paternal function and puts into doubt the Lusotropical stereotype of Creoleness. This geo-cultural polyphony is replicated at the textual level with the presence of an unnamed narrator-figure whose metatextual narrative serves as authorial framing for the fictional text. However, the replication of the fictional narrative within the authorial text—with some seepage of the latter into the former—again points to both mimicry and excess. This paper will argue that by emptying the two vectors structuring the text of their narrative objectives, My Father's Wives constitutes the doubly absent paternities of a Luandan Creole stereotype typically projected over the rest of the nation.