Pepetela's proposal: desire and anarchy in The Return of the Water Spirit

Written by perhaps Angola's most celebrated writer of the post-independence period, The Return of the Water Spirit is Pepetela's attempt to articulate ‘the truths’ of the Angolan nation. In response to President Agostinho Neto's earlier call for Angolan writers to ‘analyse reality profoundly’, Pepetela writes of the political reality of the newly independent nation, charting the corrosive force of capitalism on the ideological principles of the socialist Marxist administration of the MPLA. However, it is the description of the people's steady withdrawal from the ambit of the state that marks the novel's importance. While Ana Martinho, David Brookshaw, Ngugi wa Thiong'o and others have explored the ways in which Pepetela's novels highlight and anticipate the difficulties associated with the nation-building project in Angola, none has written specifically on the people's collective decision to excise themselves from what Paul Zeleza calls the inherited ‘colonial leviathan’ of the post-colonial state. This article argues that in this novel Pepetela shows that the people's collective abandonment of the state is the only significant means by which they can take charge of the production of meaning. That is to say, in writing the truths of a nation, Pepetela shows that a truly revolutionary Angola – an Angola ‘yet-to-come’ – can only be born from the practices of a people who feel the necessity to invent themselves in the process of a new and urgent struggle against the post-colonial state. It is a process that begins with what Deleuze and Guattari think of as the liberation of desire from the state machine.