A journey across boundaries

Writing has a similar effect, even more so, he said in the speech.

In 1989, Agualusa published his first book, A Conjura (The Conspiracy), a fictional documentary about a 1911 rebellion against Portuguese colonization, inspired by news stories written by Africans at the end of the 19th century.

"That led me to think about the anti-colonial war in Angola from 1961 to 1974," he told Wenhui Daily. After independence, a civil war broke out in 1975 and lasted until 2002.

"My country might have gone through the longest and cruelest civil war of the time. Why did that happen? My intuition told me that if I don't understand the past, I cannot understand the present," he said.

Writing the book allowed Agualusa to better understand the falsifications and terms colonizers and warlords devised to incite antagonism and suppress goodwill and understanding between people.

Through his writing, he manages to counter these sly verbal tricks, listen to the voices of others, step into their skins, feel their heartbeats, and shed their tears, even if they were supposedly "enemies".

"Writing strengthens the muscles of empathy," he said in the speech.

To provide readers the context to understand "the other", the main mission of a writer is to try to become "the other", Agualusa says, adding that "the beauty of writing lies right in this eternal attempt to become 'the other' — young or old, man or woman, individuals of human or other species".

For example, The Book of Chameleons is narrated in the voice of a lizard.

"As I grow older, and have experience of different places, I increasingly feel that 'the other' is us, and we are 'the other'. The boundary between the two is dynamic," he says, "and getting to know 'the other' is a process of self-discovery, and vice versa."

To become "the other", the first thing is to listen and talk to them, to try to understand them.

In A General Theory of Oblivion, he portrays a police officer who has tortured criminals.

"It's more difficult to understand a bad person, but one of my pursuits of writing is to find the humanity in bad people," he says.

Another boundary the writer has been trying to cross in writing is the one between fiction and reality.