Abstract
The Mozambican novel is a fertile ground for representing both the inner exile within the Portuguese language and the processes of cultural identification, stemming from the representation of the character of Imani, a Portuguese language translator at her local village. Based on the reading of The monolingualism of the other or the prosthesis of origin, by Jacques Derrida, this work aims at analysing the language of the coloniser as a scenario emerging from the interval of the play between presence and absence, problematising it as the outside, i.e. “the language that is not mine”, but coming from the other. As the language may not be entirely assimilated, it brings along a promise of overflowing. Following this line of reasoning, the impossibility of a full and complete identity is iterated as it shows a configuration of identities in continuous displacement.
Keywords
Monolingualism; Monoidentity; Exile; Inner Exile