Chuva braba: o testemunho Claridoso de Manuel Lopes

The thesis aims to bring together the combined knowledge and research currently available relating to Manuel Lopes and his literary production, and seeks to provide further insight into the testimony of the author Manuel Lopes and his role and purpose within the Claridade movement. The study analyses the everyday reality of the Cape Verde Islands, its people and lands, and this is compared with the author's fictional representation, the characters, the principal themes, the author's main preoccupation with his fellow islanders, his style, and his purpose of supplanting the traditional literary theme of emigration with a radically new but simple one: the option of staying on the islands. The seven chapters of this study start with a theoretical discussion introducing the history of Cape Verde, the phenomenon of emigration as a constant of everyday existence on the islands, the four major waves of this constant exodus and their causes and consequences. This is followed by a brief biographical portrait of the author and then a discussion of how his own experiences brought him to explore the facts of life on the islands and insert them into his central literary themes. The literary portrayal of these realities, setting man's great love for the land against the ambiguous call of emigration, would thus lead him to lay down the bases for a new definition of Cabo-verdianidade. This leads into a general discussion of the new Claridade generation of writers, of which Lopes was a major exponent. Chapter six presents an analysis of the work Chuva Braba focusing on the characters who influence the protagonist Mané Quim either for or against leaving, thus revealing a clear pattern whereby the main theme of emigration becomes a debate between Partir and Ficar, between an abandonment of the islands and a new sense of loyalty towards the land of their birth