The Colonial Wars in Contemporary Portuguese Fiction (Monografías A)

Colección Támesis SERIE A: MONOGRAFÍAS, 252

The Colonial Wars in Contemporary Portuguese Fiction The colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau in the 1960s and 1970s were Portugal’s Vietnam. The novels discussed in this study, written by António Lobo Antunes, Lídia Jorge and Manuel Alegre among others, aroused passionate responses from the reading public and initiated a national debate, otherwise lacking in the contemporary press, with their systematic deconstruction of the rhetoric of patriotism and colonialism of António Salazar’s regime. The author’s approach is of necessity grounded in postcolonial thought, as these works represent the awakening of a post-imperial conscience in Portuguese literature and society. Isabel Moutinho╇ is a Lecturer in Spanish and Portuguese at La Trobe University, Australia.

Tamesis Founding Editor J. E. Varey General Editor Stephen M. Hart Editorial Board Alan Deyermond Julian Weiss Charles Davis

Isabel Moutinho

The Colonial Wars in Contemporary Portuguese Fiction

TAMESIS

©â•‡ Isabel Moutinho 2008 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Isabel Moutinho to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2008 by Tamesis, Woodbridge ISBN╇ 978–1–85566–158–5

Tamesis is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn

CONTENTS Abbreviations

ix

Introduction

1

The Traumatic Memory 1 António Lobo Antunes, Os Cus de Judas

15

2 Álamo Oliveira, Até Hoje (Memórias de Cão)

36

The Personal Memory 3 Wanda Ramos, Percursos

55

4 Lídia Jorge, A Costa dos Murmúrios

75

The Collective Memory 5 João de Melo, Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas

99

6 Manuel Alegre, Jornada de África

122

Conclusion

148

Bibliography

155

Index

171

For Alan À memória do meu pai

Abbreviations CPLP Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa (Commonwealth of Portuguese-Language Countries) CPG Convenção Política de Goa (Political Convention of Goa) EEC European Economic Community FRELIMO Frente para a Libertação de Moçambique (Mozambican Liberation Front) MPLA Movimento Popular para a Libertação de Angola (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organisation NCO non-commissioned officer (‘Alferes miliciano’ in the Portuguese army) PAIGC Partido Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) PALOP Países Africanos de Língua Oficial Portuguesa (African Countries whose Official Language is Portuguese) PIDE Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado (International Police for the Defence of the State (the Estado Novo’s secret police)) PTSD Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

This publication has been supported by La Trobe University http://www.latrobe.edu.au

INTRODUCTION Os escritores têm duas atitudes face à memória do futuro: a preocupação pela sua vida póstuma ou a tarefa de legar à posteridade as suas reflexões. Joana Ruas (A Guerra Colonial e a Memória do Futuro).

Recent studies of post-revolutionary Portuguese literature have highlighted how it conveys the country’s gathering sense of a new identity from the mid-1970s onwards. Deprived of an imperial dimension, which for centuries informed its imagination, and recently rescued from its long isolation by its acceptance into the European forum, Portuguese society now grapples with a need to redefine itself in its new, postcolonial situation. Convincingly scrutinising Portuguese mythology, Eduardo Lourenço (2000: 35–6) has repeatedly pointed out that it was Os Lusíadas that first erected the Portuguese maritime venture into the founding myth of the nation’s identity. And given that it was Portuguese literature that first shaped, indeed created, the sense of an imperial identity which prevailed until 1974, it should come as no surprise that the ongoing reappraisal of the country’s self-image should likewise be ‘perceived and constructed’ by contemporary literature. Surveying Portuguese essay writing for an Anglo-American public,  [Writers have two attitudes regarding the memory of the future: the preoccupation with their posthumous life or the task of leaving their reflections to posterity.]  Well documented in Onésimo Teotónio Almeida’s survey in ‘A Questão da Identidade Nacional na Escrita Portuguesa Contemporânea’ (1991), this search for identity is accurately explored, from a literary perspective, by Isabel Allegro de Magalhães, who focuses on the interaction between a Portuguese sense of self and a sense of alterity deriving from the country’s previous imperial circumstance, in her important articles of 1995, 2000 and 2002. Ellen Sapega gives an attractive account of the Portuguese search for a new identity, through an analysis of expressions of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation attempts in the country’s literature, in ‘No Longer Alone and Proud’ (1997). The theme of the search for identity also runs through Margarida Calafate Ribeiro’s paradigm-shifting study of Portuguese literature dealing with the empire in her Uma História de Regressos: Império, Guerra Colonial e Pós-colonialismo (2004).  I borrow Magalhães’s expression (2000: 393), which deftly conveys the complex interaction between literature and society.

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Onésimo Teotónio Almeida identifies ‘Portugal and the path of Portuguese cultural history vis-à-vis Central and Northern Europe’ as ‘almost an obsession in Iberian essay writing for the last two centuries’ (1997: 131). The same obsession with Portugal’s role in the European Union and in the European Parliament, and with Lisbon’s and Oporto’s mandates as cultural capitals of Europe, in 1994 and 2001 respectively, is everywhere obvious to visitors to Portugal, in the country’s newspapers and news bulletins as in its political slogans and billboards. Nevertheless, although clearly present in Portugal’s official discourse, this preoccupation with defining a new European identity is much less palpable in Portuguese literature. Post-revolutionary Portuguese novelists have paid attention to many subjects not previously common in Portuguese fiction, but they have not generated many novels with a European theme or setting. This is especially revealing in a culture in which ‘fictional narrative’ has always played a crucial role ‘as the privileged, if not exclusive, instrument for anamnesis’ (Medeiros, 2000: 203). Instead, much of the Portuguese fiction published after the historic break of April 1974 refers not to Europe, but to Africa, especially to the now independent countries of Angola and Mozambique. In such narratives, Africa is not necessarily the main setting or focus, but it is there in the background or as part of a character’s personal history. In stark contrast to the preoccupation with Europe in Portugal’s official discourse, this recurrent presence of Africa in Portuguese contemporary fiction indicates the profound influence of what was for centuries the African ‘colonial empire’ (even if little more than in name) of a tiny European nation: it conferred pride and the basis for an identity which, after five centuries, had to be relinquished. Looking back now on the speed of the decolonisation process (starting immediately after the revolution and culminating with the independence of the Portuguese-speaking African countries in 1975), it would appear that the post-revolutionary Portuguese government proceeded without regard to the country’s imperial past. It is worth quoting at length Eduardo Lourenço’s perspicacious analysis of the near nonchalance of the Portuguese with respect to the loss of the old colonies: Quinhentos anos de existência imperial … tinham fatalmente de contaminar e mesmo de transformar radicalmente a imagem dos Portugueses não só no espelho do mundo mas no nosso próprio espelho. Pelo império devimos outros, mas de tão singular maneira que na hora em que fomos amputados à força (mas nós vivemos a amputação como ‘voluntária’) dessa compo The most notable exceptions are Olga Gonçalves’s novels of the 1970s focusing on the lives of Portuguese migrants in Europe, some of Margarida Utne’s thrillers and José Saramago’s meditation on the destinies of the Iberian Peninsula in Jangada de Pedra.



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nente imperial da nossa imagem, tudo pareceu passar-se como se jamais tivéssemos tido essa famigerada existência ‘imperial’ e em nada nos afectasse o regresso aos estreitos e morenos muros da ‘pequena casa lusitana.’ … É possível que a profundidades hoje ainda não perceptíveis supure uma ferida que à simples vista ninguém apercebeu.╇ (Lourenço, 1982: 41, 45)

These comments were written in 1978, just one year before the publication of the first of the novels included in the present study. The progressive appearance of the narratives of the colonial war has indeed come to confirm Lourenço’s inkling, revealing the extent of the wound and trauma caused by the loss of the empire, even if they seemed to be simply brushed aside by the Portuguese press and official discourse. Chronologically, António Lobo Antunes’s Os Cus de Judas (1979) was not the first novel of the colonial wars, but it was by far the most successful, reaching in a few years many more editions than expected in a country renowned for having a small reading public. Less than ten years later, João de Melo’s anthology Os Anos da Guerra (1988) included an extensive preface already putting forward criteria for the definition of a ‘literary generation’ of the colonial wars. And a steady flow of narratives on the same theme has never stopped since, now accompanied by essays and journalistic writings, which often illuminate the literary texts. At the same time, there is a growing body of critical literature analysing this thematic sub-genre within contemporary Portuguese narrative fiction. The profusion of fictional (and ‘factional’) works dealing with a conflict that ended over thirty years ago testifies to the validity of Eduardo Lourenço’s earlier suspicion. Generating a profound rupture in the Portuguese sense of self, the dissolution of Portugal’s colonial empire must have been much more traumatic than it appeared at first, leading Portuguese writers, consciously or not, to focus on the war that abolished the country’s imperial dimension. For Paulo de Medeiros, the profusion of narratives dealing with the colonial war is a deliberate, fully conscious response by Portuguese writers to the official,  [Five hundred years of imperial existence … inevitably had to contaminate and even transform radically the image of the Portuguese, not only in the eyes of the world but in our own eyes. Through the empire we became others, but in such a singular manner that when the time came for us to be amputated by force (but we experienced the amputation as if it were ‘voluntary’) of that imperial component of our image, everything seemed to happen as if we had never had that celebrated ‘imperial’ existence, as if it had never in the least affected our return to the narrow, olive-coloured walls of the ‘small Lusitanian house.’ … It is possible that at depths today not yet perceptible a wound is suppurating which has not yet become visible to the naked eye.] (Emphasis in the original.)  Lourenço’s early intuition of an invisible wound inflicted on the Portuguese psyche by the loss of the empire is actually uncharacteristic of his view of an almost indestructible Portuguese ‘hyperidentity’, to which many Portuguese scholars do not subscribe.  For extensive lists see Melo, 1988: 21–2, 25–9, and Ribeiro, 2004b: 246–7.

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wilful erasure of the memory of the war in 1980s Portugal: the country celebrated its army for overthrowing the authoritarian regime, but made no mention of the war, fought by the same army, which was perceived as ‘a source of shame’ (Medeiros, 2000: 206). Literature always bears witness, directly or indirectly, to the social and historical contexts of the society in which it is produced, and its insights go beyond what history, journalism or even philosophy can contribute to a society’s understanding of its identity and its relationship with reality. Taking as my point of departure the notion that literature is an index of the society in which it is written, I argue that the trauma brought to the Portuguese collective psyche by the colonial wars has been widely underestimated. Contemporary Portuguese fiction dealing with the wars in Africa from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s serves, on the one hand, as a powerful exorcism for the country’s traumatic memory of the conflict and, on the other, paradoxically, as a way of in fact ensuring that traumatic memory remains vivid in the long reaches of Portuguese cultural memory. In this respect, Joana Ruas’s recent linking of the colonial wars to an oxymoronic ‘memory of the future’ is particularly felicitous. The memory of the war is so distressing for these writers that they need to exorcise it through writing – almost as one recalls a suppressed traumatic past through psychoanalysis. But simultaneously they also experience a profound need to preserve that memory for the future, partly to ensure that those who experienced the war less directly can have available the materials to understand the senselessness of the reality they encountered in Africa, which so utterly convulsed their lives; but partly also perhaps because they sense that the country cannot find a new identity until it has finally come to terms with the loss of its empire. The memory expressed in their books thus functions not only as an exorcism of the past but also as a memento for future generations. The first study on the topic published in Portugal is João de Melo’s extensive preface to the above-mentioned Os Anos da Guerra, a two-volume anthology illustrated by photographic material. In it, the author attempts to define ‘literature of the colonial war’ within the field of war literature. This tentative definition does not go as far as considering colonial war literature a new genre, but presents it as thematic literature (Melo, 1988: 17–19). What makes this introduction particularly interesting is the author’s inclusion of works both by Portuguese authors and by writers from Portuguese-speaking Africa. Fundamental, too, are his definitions of a literary generation of the colonial wars and his identification of the innovative features of this literature  Medeiros’s argument (2000: 208) that ‘Portuguese soldiers never really faced public condemnation for their actions in war, and were celebrated instead as the heroes’ of the revolution is particularly stimulating.



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in Portuguese: a new mode of telling, the breaking of previously imposed narrative codes, a new imaginary, a more open, innovative language (including the use of slang) and a noticeable desire to reach out to the reader. This is a seminal introduction, raising many questions that other authors have come to address. A slim volume edited by Manuel Simões and Roberto Vecchi, Dalle armi ai garofani (1995), gathers six textual studies (one on poetry) by different critics, dealing variously with the confessional quality of colonial war literature, its relations with autobiographical and diary writing, its metaphorical implications and its transgressive use of language. Vecchi’s important introduction addresses the question of the difficulty of classifying the literature of the colonial wars according to genre. He agrees with João de Melo that this literature is ‘â•›“almost” a new genre’ made up of a ‘plurality of genres’ which amount to ‘a differential type of literature’ (Vecchi, 1995a: 13, 18, my translation). Recognising also that this is essentially a ‘literature of memory’ (‘letteratura mnesica’, 18), Vecchi finally identifies as the principal (admittedly extratextual) structuring link in such a disparate corpus the collective melancholy derived from the loss not of the colonial empire itself, but of the identity it forged. Rui de Azevedo Teixeira’s 1998 A Guerra Colonial e o Romance Português: Agonia e Catarse has a major introduction on the political and military aspects of the colonial wars. Having served in Africa in a commando unit, the author provides valuable technical information on armament and guerrilla tactics. However, his proximity to the events depicted in the eight novels he examines precludes a sufficiently distanced reading of the texts, in which he detects a disconcerting generalised feeling of anti-heroism and lack of patriotism. Uncomfortable as these elements may be to the military, they are in fact essential elements in the fabric of these novels: without them, Portuguese colonial war literature would lose one of its most striking characteristics. Nevertheless, Teixeira’s book proposes competent readings of the novels from a structural and narratological perspective. His general thesis is that the colonial war narratives express at the textual level the death-throes of the empire, and function at the sub-textual level as a personal cathartic exercise for their authors.10  My own work is indebted to Melo’s passing reference to the fact that this literature serves both as memory and as anti-memory of the war (‘tanto de memória como de antimemória,’ 18). 10 Teixeira has also edited A Guerra Colonial: Realidade e Ficção. Livro de Actas do I Congresso Internacional (2001). The book is divided into two main parts, the first dealing with the ‘Reality’ of the war (military presence, strategy, administration, war-related physical and psychological illnesses, cultural anthropology), and the second, entitled ‘Fiction’, comprising three sub-sections, on literature, journalism and cinema. It is a volume of very heterogeneous components, reflecting the format of the congress’s discussion panels.

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The most recent major study of colonial war literature is Margarida Calafate Ribeiro’s 2004 Uma História de Regressos: Império, Guerra Colonial e Pós-colonialismo, an outstanding cultural history of Portugal throughout its ‘three imperial cycles’ (Ribeiro, 2002: 134).11 Ribeiro constructs her theoretical framework on Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s sociological concept of Portugal’s semi-peripheral position both within Europe and in the hierarchy of nineteenth-century empires. Her book culminates in her excellent close readings of four colonial war novels as an epitaph to empire, based on her thesis that Portugal’s imperial imaginary was used as a compensatory strategy for loss and for imagining the country not as peripheral, but as the centre. My study concentrates on six novels of the colonial wars, four of which are included in the above-mentioned books, but it takes a very different approach, much closer in fact to questions raised by João de Melo, Roberto Vecchi and Paulo de Medeiros, as well as (in a different context) by Eduardo Lourenço. My aim is to investigate how the memory of the colonial wars is expressed in literary terms.12 Despite addressing the question of memory, I do not offer a psychological or psychoanalytical reading of the novels (any more than Eduardo Lourenço’s O Labirinto da Saudade makes any technical use of the psychoanalysis mentioned in its subtitle). Mine is an examination of literary techniques used to convey two contradictory drives strongly expressed in these works: one to remember the colonial wars, combined with a noticeable intent to remind others; and the other to come to terms with the memory of the same wars, and even to forget it or suppress it. Ribeiro also notes this underlying need to remember/remind, pointing out that the principal novels of the colonial wars appeared in the 1980s, a decade ‘during which Portugal “forgot” the discourse of anti-colonialism and revolution, and integration into the EEC became the great national objective’ (2002: 176). Inasmuch as my study also engages with the paraliterary dimension of the literature of the colonial wars, by recalling the historical circumstances and the discourse strategies of Salazar’s regime, it does so with the aim of contextualising the ways in which these texts undermine, challenge and finally demolish the official encomium of Portuguese colonialism. The novels selected are grouped in three different categories, according to the mode of perception used by the narrative voice. They all deal with the The sub-section on literature includes several papers of particular interest, in that they analyse works by some of the less well-known authors of colonial war literature. Eduardo Mayone Dias’s contribution establishes a stimulating parallel between two lost wars: the Portuguese one in Africa and the American one in Vietnam. 11 Ribeiro’s 2002 ‘Empire, Colonial Wars and Post-Colonialism in the Portuguese Contemporary Imagination’ is an embryonic version in English of her much wider ranging volume in Portuguese. 12 Also more focused on a literary analysis of colonial war narratives are Ribeiro’s articles of 1998a and 1999.



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memory of the colonial wars (with its dichotomy: to remember/to forget) but present it as directly traumatic memory, as personal memory or as collective memory. This does not imply that such memory is not also traumatic for the narrators of the novels grouped under the heading personal or collective memory. The heading traumatic memory, however, suits best the novels whose narrators experience total inability to readjust to the social and family life they left behind before going to war, so that these are novels both of the colonial wars and of the failure or impossibility of the return. Each of the three chapters focuses on two novels; and the choice of the corpus attempts to cover the literary expression of the war experience in its three main settings: Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. However, given that the Portuguese colonial and military presence was always strongest in Angola, inevitably the majority of the novels chosen focus on that country. Only one is set in Guinea-Bissau and another in Mozambique. My selection of the corpus was of necessity thematic, but it primarily favoured literary quality. As this criterion remains, despite all attempts at exactitude, inescapably subjective, I took another two factors as indicative of quality: first, the novels selected had to be by authors who had written at least two fictional works, to exclude testimonial value only, as is often the case with narratives written by individuals involved in the war but who did not really develop a literary career afterwards. Secondly, I finally narrowed the field to these six novels because each had a radically transgressive element: alcoholism in Os Cus de Judas, together with a literary style which was, to say the least, shocking when the book first appeared; homosexuality in Álamo Oliveira’s Até Hoje, still not a subject comfortably associated with the army; a feminist awakening in the conformist Portugal of the 1960s in Wanda Ramos’s Percursos; the denouncing of war atrocities in Lídia Jorge’s A Costa dos Murmúrios, a subject to a large extent still taboo (though this particular novel could never have been left out on the grounds of literary quality alone); the radical double narrative approach, Portuguese and Angolan in parallel, in João de Melo’s Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas; and the questioning of the whole of Portuguese imperial mythology in Manuel Alegre’s Jornada de África. The first chapter analyses two novels whose homodiegetic narrators take part in the colonial wars:13 one sees active service in a military medical capacity in Angola (Os Cus de Judas), the other as a common soldier in Guinea-Bissau (Até Hoje). One is now back in Portugal, the other is still at the front, but both are eager to recount their traumatic war experiences, using the faculty of memory to exorcise private demons, and struggling with painful, sometimes shameful recollections of moments of horror, fear or undignified selfishness. Both novels make extensive use of flashbacks, juxtaposing past and present 13

On diegesis, see Genette, 1972: 254ff.

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moments, but in opposite directions: Lobo Antunes’s narrator recollects the past in an angst-ridden present existence back in Lisbon, while Oliveira’s protagonist, still at the front, attempts to escape from the senselessness of the war by remembering a happier past. In both narratives, flashbacks are also used to recall the ideological rhetoric of the regime which shaped the characters’ lives before they went to war. The narrators of the novels studied in the second section are also homodiegetic, and they too create a fiction of autobiographical writing (although neither novel is consistently told in the first person). These novels differ from the previous two in that their narrators are one step removed from the war: for family reasons they are in close contact with the conflict but they are not military participants. Their protagonists are two women temporarily living in the colonies, in Angola (Percursos) or in Mozambique (A Costa dos Murmúrios), as wives of Portuguese army officers. Percursos is a fragmentary narrative, also constructed upon a series of flashbacks, presented in chronological disarray. This novel alone establishes a striking contrast between pre-war and war-torn Angola, the narrator’s memory turning now to the colonial war, now to the colonial condition in the last years of Portuguese colonialism. As for A Costa dos Murmúrios, its very structure outlines the tricks that memory plays on the human mind, highlighting how we choose either to remember or to forget, and how deceitful selective human memory can be. More disturbingly, it raises persistent questions about the intersection of involuntary and deliberate forgetting, one due to unconscious repression and the other to a desire to comply with the politically acceptable at any given point in time. The final chapter deals with two novels whose narrators are partially heterodiegetic. They do not purport to constitute individual testimonies. Instead, they aim at prodding a wider social memory and stirring the collective consciousness of a country prone to forget too quickly its involvement in a historical conflict of its own making. Their attempt to interpret and reevaluate the whole episode of the colonial wars and subsequent loss of the African colonies grants them an epic dimension, which will help Portuguese readers (and, to a lesser extent, potential African readers) to make sense of the trauma this historical moment entailed for the whole country. Thus, the heroes (or non-heroes) of these narratives are presented as collective (in Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas) or almost mythical (in Jornada de África). The narrative construction of Autópsia allows us to see the book’s protagonists not only as a collective entity, but also as two separate national groupings – a bold exception in Portuguese literature of the colonial wars. On the other hand, the (anti-?) hero in Jornada, together with his adjuvants (Greimas, 1966: 178–9), reproduces the actions of the protagonist of a homonymous seventeenth-century chronicle relating to the Portuguese expedition to Alcácer-Quibir, thus bringing the cycle of Portuguese imperialism



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to its closure (from its birth with the first attempts to conquer territories in North Africa to its death with the independence struggles of Portugal’s subSaharan colonies). Both novels engage in extensive intertextual dialogue with other works of Portuguese literature, using this device to question the rhetoric of empire. My critical approach is deliberately eclectic, as seems appropriate to the reading of novels written by different authors in very different styles. In any case, the choice of various methodologies has also been determined by my intuitive distrust of any critical dogma. A postmodernist reading is justified in the case of at least two novels. Nevertheless, my general approach is rather influenced by postcolonial thought, due not only to personal sympathies but also to the fact that all six novels are the product of an increased anti-colonial conscience in Portuguese literature and society. None of these novels (all focused on the colonial war, but all written after its end) could have been written, or at least published, before the 1974 democratic revolution abolished censorship. More to the point, they could not have been written before the outcomes of the conflict were available for analysis and reflection. Be that as it may, the internal logic of some of the narratives reveals their authors as already sensitive, in varying degrees, to the different possibilities of a postimperial reality, which really only began to touch Portuguese society in the 1980s. Postcolonial theory has become a huge field of enquiry in its almost thirty years of development, and it has often not hesitated to extend postcolonial ‘as an umbrella term’ (Boehmer, 2005: 4) to the literatures of once colonising nations.14 To my mind, postcolonial thought often blurs a vital difference between the literatures stemming from formerly colonised societies and those from countries that once asserted imperial authority over subjugated territories, namely the inequality of the experience of people on either side of the colonial barrier, whom Memmi forcefully portrayed as linked primarily by racism (not to mention slavery). This is not to say that postcolonialism should apply only to the literatures and living conditions of once colonised peoples. I do not doubt that there were enough mutual influences in the colonial ‘contact zones’ (Pratt, 1992: 4, 6) to allow us to see both the former colonised and the former coloniser as two sides of a coin. But even though protracted colonial cohabitation entailed reciprocal influences, I believe that there are more fundamental differences, which Pratt summarises when

14 Simon During distinguishes between the postcolonising and the postcolonised forms of postcolonialism: ‘The former fits those communities and individuals who profit from … the work of the colonizing. The latter fits those who have been dispossessed by their work’ (1985: 369–70). But both categories apply within postcolonised societies, not within formerly colonising nations.

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she stresses ‘the radically asymmetrical relations of power’ (1992: 7) in the contact zone.15 In the Portuguese context, recognising that (Anglo-Saxon) ‘postcolonialism ended up homogenizing the colonial relation’ (Santos, 2002: 16), Boaventura de Sousa Santos develops the notion of Portugal’s ‘situated postcolonialism’, identifying three main differences between Portuguese and other European colonialisms: hybridity between coloniser and colonised was ‘a necessity of the Portuguese colonial relation’ (16) due to the insignificant numbers of white women in the Portuguese colonies; widespread miscegenation in the Portuguese colonies did not mean absence of racism, but simply ‘a different kind of racism’ (17); finally, ‘the identity of the Portuguese colonizer … includes as well the identity of the colonizer as in turn himself colonized’ (17) by the paternalism of Salazar’s regime and the conditions obtaining in the colonies. The Portuguese coloniser was therefore sometimes Prospero, sometimes Caliban. Furthermore, it is this indeterminacy of Portuguese colonialism, together with the ‘inter-identity’ (26) arising from the exceptional rate of miscegenation in Portuguese colonies, that explains the obvious differences in Portugal’s ‘situated postcolonialism’ (20) – namely, the fact that the moment of decolonisation brings ‘a shared sense of liberation, both for the colonizer and the colonized’ (34). Given that a unique phenomenon of ‘internal colonialism’ (36) prevailed in Portugal’s former colonies, a space of ‘great continuity’ (36) emerged, which should not be seen as the result of yet another theoretical homogenisation. Instead it corresponds to a fundamentally different colonial experience, which led also to a distinct postcoloniality – Portugal’s ‘situated postcolonialism’. Sousa Santos concludes that ‘postcolonialism in the Portuguese space is very little postand very much anticolonialism’ (37).16 There is no doubt that the narratives that constitute the focus of this study are overtly and profoundly anti-colonial. One of their most striking features is their generally anti-colonial and specifically anti-imperialist sentiment, expressed in the constant challenging of the old imperial rhetoric, which they explicitly expose and dissect. And postcolonial theory has put forward piercing analytical tools extremely useful for the reading of Portuguese colonial war fiction. Postcolonial theory is, after all, ‘a disciplinary project devoted to the academic task of revisiting, remembering, and, crucially, interrogating the colonial past’ (Gandhi, 1998: 4). As such, postcolonial thought, especially with the clarifications as to a Portuguese ‘situated postcolonialism’ explored 15 These relations imply ‘domination and subordination’, ranging from slavery to ‘coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict’ (Pratt, 1992: 6). 16 On postcolonialism as essentially anti-colonial, see also Hutcheon, 1995: 8–10. Elsewhere (Moutinho, 2000a), I have examined the coincidences between a colonial malaise and postcolonialism as anti-colonial sentiment in some of these works of fiction.



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by Sousa Santos, justifiably pervades and informs, rather than directs in any strict sense, my general reading of these novels. Nevertheless, and although critics whose work I very much admire have considered them postcolonial, I prefer to call them post-imperial, for several reasons. First of all, I subscribe to Boehmer’s very clear view of postcoloniality as ‘that condition in which colonized peoples seek to take their place, forcibly or otherwise, as historical agents in an increasingly globalized world’ (2005:€3). These are not, by and large, the characters that speak and act in the novels I examine here, who have been sent to the colonies precisely to keep uprising colonised people ‘in their place’. There is of course some commonality of experience (for example, feelings of displacement and of being silenced); but I am mindful of the danger of overemphasising such continuities, especially between colonised people on one side and imperial army on the other. Indeed, particularly in the Anglophone context and in the wake of Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin’s widely read The Empire Writes Back, postcolonial criticism has tended to downplay the violence of the colonial fact,17 which is at its highest during a colonial liberation war. Secondly, even in a strictly temporal sense, Edward Said’s influential Orientalism, which triggered the emergence of postcolonialism as an academic discipline, was not published until 1978, and it was certainly not extensively known in Portugal for several years after that date. The much earlier works of négritude writers (of the 1940s and ’50s) and, in Portuguese language, those by Amílcar Cabral and Agostinho Neto (of the 1960s and ’70s) are more likely to have been read by small sections of the Portuguese public, contributing to the development of an anti-colonial consciousness.18 Thirdly, while the narrator of one of these novels, Oliveira’s Até Hoje, is a perfect example of what Sousa Santos calls Portugal’s ‘internal colonialism’ (2002: 36), these narratives deal with the presence of an imperial army in the colonies. The fact that these wars are commonly known in Portuguese as ‘the colonial war’19 does not mean that the interests of the white settlers coincided with those of the army, as Os Cus de Judas, Percursos, A Costa dos Murmúrios and Autópsia disclose. Of the six novels I examine, Percursos alone is truly postcolonial, written from the perspective of someone who grew up in a colonial family in Angola. Appropriately, Percursos certainly displays the ‘shared sense of liberation’ that the end of colonialism meant 17 See Shohat, 1992: 99, on the ‘potentially depoliticizing implications’ of postcolonial theory. 18 The reference to ‘os famintos da terra’ [the famished of the earth] in João de Melo’s Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas (1992: 73) sounds very much like an echo of Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre. This is simply to argue that whatever anti-colonial consciousness João de Melo may have had as he wrote this novel, it is much more likely to have derived from personal inclination than from any familiarity with postcolonial theory. 19 On the African side, they are known as liberation wars.

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‘both for the colonizer and the colonized’ (Santos, 2002: 34), which Sousa Santos highlights as one of the salient features in Portugal’s ‘situated postcolonialism’. The army’s presence in the African colonies did not serve a colonising purpose. While the feeling of displacement the narrators of these novels reveal may approximate expressions of similar feelings we know from postcolonial literatures, the mission of the Portuguese military in Africa was temporary and intended to defend Portugal’s empire and imperialist conviction.20 As such, the narrators of these novels repeatedly refer to the Estado Novo’s radically imperialist rhetoric of defending ‘a Fé e o Império’ [Faith and the Empire], which supposedly guides their task – undermining it, revealing its falsity and gradually dismantling it. The predominant desire these narrators express is to demolish the regime’s imperial discourse and imperial imaginary, the ‘cherished imperialist myths’ (Medeiros, 2000: 216) of the Salazar/Caetano regime. Finally, these novels are full of an all-pervasive pessimism, and this is the principal, intrinsic reason why I prefer to consider them post-imperial. Postcolonialism is, as we know, most often euphoric and ebullient in its consciousness of the dawning of an era and the construction of a new nation. Instead, these are gloomy narratives of the end of empire.

20 Wesseling (1986: 8) points out that the Portuguese and the Dutch ‘colonial empires’ were ‘empires without imperialism … until the twentieth century’, when their imperialism acquired new strength.

THE TRAUMATIC MEMORY

1

António Lobo Antunes, Os Cus de Judas António Lobo Antunes’s 1979 novel Os Cus de Judas was not the first colonial war novel to appear after Portugal’s 1974 democratic revolution abolished censorship, allowing for the publication of such narratives. But its striking literary quality drew attention to those war novels as a recognisable sub-genre within contemporary Portuguese fiction, which the appearance of later works has consolidated. Os Cus de Judas is set in 1979, but extensive flashbacks return us to the war in eastern and northern Angola in 1971–72. The narrator, a conscripted surgeon attending to young soldiers, observes the suffering and the havoc war has inflicted on African society. For him, the war proves a definitive event, for on his return to Lisbon all his old perceptions of and beliefs in his society have been utterly subverted. Although he has returned physically unharmed (a fortune not shared by many of the soldiers initially in his medical care), his new understanding of politics and life has completely destroyed his capacity for social reintegration. After twenty-seven months on the war front, he now leads an alcoholic, maladjusted, isolated life, having divorced soon after his return from Angola and lost old friends, who now find him too morose for company. The whole novel is a monologue delivered first in a bar, then at the narrator’s flat, addressed to a silent woman who first shares drinks with him and then his bed. The main reason for the narrator’s failure to readjust to social and family life is the brutal and absurd experience of war. For the military surgeon serving not only his battalion but also other units dispersed in a vast circumference of enemy territory, the experience of death and mutilation becomes endlessly multiplied; and his professional eye recognises the signs of deep disturbances even in the lucky survivors of the surrounding carnage. Set in Lisbon, the narrator’s residence before and after his war service, the novel constantly contrasts different moments in his memory: his childhood  António Lobo Antunes, 1986 [1979], Os Cus de Judas, 14th edn (Lisboa: Dom Quixote). All quotations are taken from this edition and are indicated by page reference in the text. Most translations are taken from the English version: South of Nowhere (1983), although occasionally I give my own translations without inverted commas. Isolated changes to the printed version are given in square brackets.

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and youth in the old, familiar milieu of the Lisbon of the 1950s and ’60s; the shock of his immediately abhorrent encounter with the city of Luanda; and the trauma of his later posts in the war-torn Angolan interior. A childhood recollection of a favourite spot opens the novel: ‘Do que eu gostava mais no Jardim Zoológico era do rinque de patinagem sob as árvores e do professor preto muito direito a deslizar para trás no cimento em elipses vagarosas’ (9). The first of many perambulations of the narrator’s memory, this opening image sets the tone and the distinctive style of the novel: as the main thread of the novel, memory, too, glides backwards in slow-moving ellipses, as the flashbacks that constitute its principal device might aptly be described. A further recollection of the skating rink reinforces the analogy between the ellipsis and the functioning of his memory, as he juxtaposes an analepsis (‘Por essa época, eu alimentava a esperança …’) with a brief prolepsis (‘Talvez quando eu for velho …’) (14). On the other hand, although not providing any clear internal dating, this recollection does place the city of its setting in a definite historical context, unobtrusively conveying to the reader important information about the makeup of the society in which the narrator grew up: the skating instructor, a black man, may have come from one of Portugal’s African colonies. Thus, the first image recalled by a memory ostensibly ‘gliding backwards’ towards childhood also simultaneously sets in motion the narrator’s recurrent obsession: his participation in the colonial war in Africa. In its circular, or ‘elliptic’, workings, memory leads the narrative voice from the anonymous, black skating instructor in Lisbon to Portugal’s colonial presence in Angola. Recalling a zoo in the opening scene cannot be accidental in a novel whose protagonists are pushed by the cruelty of war to behave like animals. Also, as David Robertson points out, the zoo itself, with its collection of mainly African animals, is a symbol of Portugal’s domination over vast regions of Africa (1990: 241), which again explains the ease with which the narrator’s memory moves backwards and forwards between Lisbon and Angola. Africa does not become a physical reality for the narrator until he is conscripted to serve in the war, but it was already part of the imaginative make-up of a boy born in a city filled with signs of its colonial empire. Interrupting the recollection of his favourite childhood spot, the narrator addresses his interlocutor directly, thus bringing the reader briefly into the  [‘What I liked most about the zoo was the roller-skating rink shaded by trees, and the erect black [instructor] gliding backwards, effortlessly tracing lazy ellipses’, 5]  [‘Back then I used to nurture the foolish hope … Maybe years from now, when I am [old]€…’, 8]  ‘um símbolo do domínio de Portugal sobre vastas regiões de África; os animais são os troféus vivos expostos no museu dos mitos coloniais’ (Robertson, 1990: 241, my translation).



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narrative present (‘a senhora e eu, em lugar de conversarmos um com o outro neste ângulo de bar’, 11), but he immediately turns his mind again to incidents his memory links with zoo animals. Curiously, rather than merely verbalising his recollections in the present, the narrator shows the elliptic functioning of his memory by attempting to make his female interlocutor also a part of his past. After mentioning various zoo animals, he suggests a joint animal impersonation: ‘Se fôssemos, por exemplo, papa-formigas, a senhora e eu’ (11). Later, as if in a narrative somersault, he asks her about a particular detail at the zoo entrance, to include her (and the reader) more engagingly in the past he recalls, making her (and us) participate in the meanderings of his memory. The first chapter is essential for the definition of the social background of the narrator’s family, perceived as the determining factor for the shock he experiences later, on his arrival in Angola. We find out first that the boy used to go to the zoo on Sundays with his father because they lived nearby (12). A reader acquainted with the social spread of the city of Lisbon realises that the family lived in a middle-class, old-established part of town but also owned a summer house at Praia das Maçãs, a seaside resort not far from Lisbon; and the boy’s grandfather’s house has a garden decorated with statues. The detailed description of various aunts’ apartments provides further sketching of the family’s social status. The humorous generalisation, ‘Em cada edifício da Rua Barata Salgueiro … habitava uma parente idosa’ (15), would imply the existence of numerous elderly relatives. More importantly, their apartments, again in one of Lisbon’s respectable streets, were full of ‘jarrões chineses e … contadores de embutidos’, which denote relatively affluent owners and again remind us of the pervasiveness of signs of empire in Portuguese society. The aunts’ apartments contained precious objects from remote overseas locations and also an oratory (‘o oratório das tias’, 14), a clear indication of fervent Catholicism. The portraits in these apartments (‘fotografias de generais furibundos’, 16, and even more tellingly, ‘[o] cardeal Cerejeira, emoldurado’, 17) are not surprising in such characteristically oldfashioned Portuguese families. Accordingly, the aunts’ apartments function

 [‘you and I, instead of a man and a woman talking to each other in this corner of the bar’, 6]  [‘If we were, say, ant-eaters, you and I’, 6]  [‘In every building on the Rua Barata Salgueiro … lived an old relative’, 8]  [Chinese vases and inlaid cabinets]. The Chinese vases could well have come from Macau, just as the inlaid timberwork could be of Indian and Mozambican origin.  [‘photographs of furious generals’, 9; ‘The framed picture of Cardinal Cerejeira’, 10]

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as a metonymy for a larger entity, the Catholic Portugal of the Estado Novo,10 imbued with militaristic rhetoric and relics of past imperial expansion.11 Every detail places this family in the old Portuguese bourgeoisie, particularly when religious fervour joins forces with belief in the military glory of Portugal’s past, especially of its colonial empire, a combination typical of the social strata whose sympathies were with Salazar. Because of the paucity of references, it is impossible to determine whether the boy’s parents maintain this social pattern, but the aunts certainly belong to the conservative tradition proud to supply children to the Church and army. A calendar on the wall (‘um calendário das Missões com muitos pretinhos na parede’, 15)12 completes the portrait of these devout old ladies: the condescending diminutive (‘pretinhos’) removes any racist tint from the language of a social class who believed in the ‘civilising mission’ which Salazar’s Portugal took upon itself, that of converting the Africans under its colonial power to the militant Catholic faith of Salazar’s ally, Lisbon’s Cardinal Cerejeira. In describing his various aunts’ apartments the narrator uses striking reminiscences of Proust’s style to recover the memory of things past. There is a plethora of details involving the five senses: what can be seen (Chinese vases, oratory, portraits on the walls, semi-darkness), smelled (camphor; mouldy, musty smells), tasted (insipid broth, steamed rice), felt (the aunts poking the boy’s ribs with the tip of a walking stick), or heard (especially the absence of sound, adding to the rarefied atmosphere, damask-covered pianos, old maids muttering prayers, even grandfather clocks striking muffled hours) (15–16). Indeed the narrator thinks that, in these hushed apartments, ‘o cadáver de Proust flutuava ainda’ (16).13 But this adverbial temporal marker does more than acknowledge Proust as a model: it reverses the flow of such influence. The adverb ainda dissociates this narrative from Proust’s (successful) attempt to recover the memory of an agreeable past; instead, it associates this atmosphere of semi-darkness and silence with a state of sterile stillness in time and with death. Unlike Proust’s narrator, the protagonist of Os Cus de Judas has few happy childhood memories. Suffice to say that his only mention of biscuits is associated with influenza, without a trace of the delightful connotations of Proust’s madeleines. He acknowledges and simultaneously parodies 10 This was Portugal’s dictatorial regime, created and institutionalised by António de Oliveira Salazar, from 1933 (following the 1926 coup d’état that overthrew the democratically elected First Republic) to 1974. Salazar was replaced, in 1968, by his chosen successor, Marcello Caetano, who adhered to the same authoritarian, corporative, staunchly Catholic ideology. 11 Robertson rightly notes: ‘A casa das tias é, aliás, um símbolo de Portugal como entidade’ (1990: 243). 12 [‘with Mission calendars on the walls showing lots of little black children’, 8] 13 [‘Proust’s corpse still floated’, 9]. Emphasis added.



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Proust’s influence when he pretends to forget the old maids’ names, calling them Albertina (15), playing on ‘the [A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs] protagonist’s inability to distinguish Albertine from the rest of the group of young girls’ (Brady, 1977: 53). Nevertheless, when feeling anguished for the first time on board the ship to Angola, he remembers Gija, vividly and warmly, who used to scratch his back with great tenderness when he was a boy. As he scarcely mentions his parents, his warmest memory of childhood bliss is associated with the maid Gija. His other childhood memories are linked to old aunts, old maids and old uncles – the latter threatening even from beyond death, ensconced in their painted portraits. Os Cus de Judas does not attempt to recall childhood as a period of mythical happiness and innocence. Rather, the narrator’s strongest memories concern the family’s old guard, whose folly he now realises deceived him as a young man. The boy somehow fitted in this world, though he found it musty (‘Cheirava a fechado’, 15). His uncles’ ‘solenidade pomposa’ (17)14 fascinated him, but that was at a time when he ‘still did not understand’ (‘quando eu não entendia ainda’, 17).15 This is the world in which Proust’s shade still hovered, and the boy still did not know better. He is well aware of the cultural burden he inherited, which still shapes, often against his own better judgement, his adult mind. Believing in the moral benefits of military service, that old guard (‘a tribo’, 17)16 produced a prophecy regarding the narrator’s future: ‘a tropa há-de torná-lo um homem’ (16).17 But he portrays them as relics of an anachronistic world order. Salazar’s ambiguous neutrality during the Second World War kept Portugal largely untouched by that profound convulsion which changed social outlooks and mores in all the belligerent European countries. Instead, Portugal remained in a state of timeless levitation, exemplified by the soporific existence of the uncles and aunts portrayed in the novel. During the family’s Sunday visits to the young conscript, the narrator describes his own military boots as ‘botas gigantescas cobertas da lama histórica de Verdun’ (20).18 While the Second World War passed them by, his general uncles may well have been sent to fight in France on the side of Portugal’s old British ally in the First World War. And so it is through their eyes that the narrator views his uniform, as if he had internalised their concept of military glory. But such a concept should have perished with the First World War, the moment

14 15 16

[‘pompous solemnity’, 9] Emphasis added. An echo of Manuel Alegre’s early poetry, 1974 [1967]: ‘Porque a Tribo me disse:/ tu guardarás o fogo’ (‘O Canto e as Armas’, 9, lines 8–9). 17 [‘the army will make a man of him’, 9] 18 [‘my boots covered with the historic mud of Verdun’, 11]

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of collective loss of European innocence in twentieth-century history.19 Their prophecy, however, matters to the narrative process: it is ironically given the lie by what the novel eventually reveals about the maladjusted man he becomes. Adult bitterness, not innocence, taints the narrator’s recollection of the world in which he grew up, a world which had remained static (hence aptly described in Proustian style) and impervious to the twentieth-century winds of change, anachronistic in every detail, as if it no longer belonged to the present era or could not possibly have been the social reality of the narrator’s younger self. Hence, by inference, the rhetoric of the elderly relatives, too, is anachronistic, although faithfully reproduced, as if the narrator shared it, at least in his youth: ‘O espectro de Salazar … salvando-nos da ideia tenebrosa e deletéria do socialismo. A PIDE prosseguia corajosamente a sua valorosa cruzada contra a noção sinistra de democracia’ (17).20 But the sarcastic tone (‘sobre as calvas pias labaredazinhas de Espírito Santo corporativo’)21 reveals a new understanding of politics when the narrator, as a young doctor, is conscripted to defend in Angola the old values for which his family stands. Curiously, the first memories of Angola the narrator relates to his interlocutor are not directly connected to the horror of the war, nor indeed are such recollections frequent in the novel. This adds to the verisimilitude of the portrayal: a war surgeon does not participate in the fighting; he is on stand-by for emergency treatment. The first extended recollection of the narrator’s gory work comes in chapter F, and almost casually. In the bar where the two characters are drinking, with alcohol and the late hour, the narrator has become more morose and contemplates death, his own, imagined in the future (a recurrent motif in the novel), and that of literary figures he admires. Tellingly, the thought of death brings back the memory of his childhood house, which he associates with death and stillness in time, and leads him to reveal his literary ambitions: while playing soccer, like most Portuguese children, he hoped to become ‘o Águas da literatura’ (55).22 Big dreams endure, but instead of flying off to Stockholm (presumably for the Nobel Prize ceremony), he finds himself in a helicopter on the way to evacuate wounded soldiers. From civilian aeroplane to military helicopter, his memory’s ellipses provide the narrative transition. What follows is one of the novel’s major outbursts against the senseless killing of war, although the tone is of professional detachment. Two visual 19 See, for example, Paul Fussell, particularly the section ‘Never such innocence again’ (1975: 18–27). 20 [‘The specter of Salazar ... protecting us from the gloomy and suspect idea of socialism. The PIDE, the Portuguese secret police, carried on courageously with its valiant crusade against the sinister notion of democracy’, 9–10] 21 [above the bald heads hovered pious little flames of a corporate Holy Spirit] 22 [‘literature’s Pelé’, 34]



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details which break the narrator’s listing of gory details make the description poignant: first, ‘dobrado como um canivete’ (56),23 the quartermaster nurse throws up at the sight of blood. Secondly, the narrator has a sudden vision of his family in Portugal observing the crumbling of their expectations for his future as a brilliant doctor: imaginava a satisfação da família se lhe fosse dado observar, em conjunto e de chapéu de aba larga como na Lição de Anatomia de Rembrandt, o médico competente e responsável que desejavam que eu fosse, consertando a linha e agulha os heróicos defensores do Império.╇ (56)24

A ‘paradigm of ironic action’ heightens the pathos of a moment in war which might otherwise lose significance but ‘becomes memorable’ through the use of irony (Fussell, 1975: 30, 31). The irony of an unavailing pocketknife points out the very limited usefulness of either a medic or even a surgeon in the immense killing of war. And the ironic glimpse of the narrator’s family in Rembrandt-style attire fleshes out ‘the constant ironic gap between what was expected of him and what he could perform’.25 Underlining the discrepancy between family expectations and ugly reality, the narrator discredits the political views embodied by a class that had become socially and politically defunct. He uses a technique of mise en abîme (reduplication of staggered memories) to great effect: the traumatic experience of the war surgeon (memory C) cuts short the child’s dreams of literary fame (memory A) before being amplified by the family’s hopes for his medical career (memory B). Surprisingly, though, reminiscences of the physical horror of the war are not the most common in Os Cus de Judas. The most harrowing memories are of moments of emotional distress: feelings of betrayal by his family and country, and critical observation of the suffering of others, both Portuguese soldiers and African civilians, revealing some capacity for empathy with the Other. 23 24

[‘doubled over like a pocketknife’, 34] [‘I … imagined the satisfaction of my family, standing in a group and wearing widebrimmed hats such as the one in Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson, watching the responsible and competent doctor they had wanted me to become mending with needle and thread the fearful and ignorant heroes of the Empire’, 34–5] The narrator seems to confuse two paintings by Rembrandt, the Anatomy Lesson, in which only Dr Nicolaes Tulp wears a broad-brimmed hat, and the so-called Night Watch, in which the members of the militia company all wear various kinds of hat. Nevertheless, accepting that the meaning of the painting is ‘that man’s body serves as an example of God’s wisdom and providence, and that doctors are chosen to gain insight into that wisdom and thus heal the sick’ (Gerson, 1968: 50), the memory is tragically ironic, as it is associated with a situation in which the narrator feels powerless to heal the wounded soldier. 25 Fussell, 1975: 30, writing about Henry Williamson.

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From the start, the narrator loathes Luanda, the Angolan capital and his first port of call, and the ugliness of its inhabitants: Negros desfocados no excesso de claridade trémula acocoravam-se em pequenos grupos … putas cansadas por todos os homens sem ternura de Lisboa … à maneira de baleias agonizantes ancoradas numa praia final … uma angústia indecifrável.╇ (25–6)26

Both groups are static, the blacks crouching indifferently and the prostitutes worn out like beached whales. It is important to emphasise here that the prostitutes’ weariness is specifically attributed to the Portuguese. Others are not static, but their activities are not positively evaluated either. A repellent or pathetic human fauna fills the cafés: ‘soldados, entre cujos joelhos circulavam de cócoras engraxadores miseráveis, ... ou indivíduos sem pernas ... Sujeitos brancos sebentos ... num vagar sabido de agiotas’ (31–2).27 The shoeshines’ crawling under the tables suggests the humiliating servility of their work, confirmed by the presence of the legless street vendors; and the whites are sleazy usurers. The prostitutes’ work and the others’ menial jobs are required or encouraged by the Portuguese presence. Thus, what makes the Luanda population repellent is the colonial presence, even though the narrator does not yet articulate the thought. First he recalls his feeling of dejection: ‘principiaram a acordar em mim um sentimento esquisito de absurdo, cujo desconforto persistente vinha sentindo desde a partida de Lisboa’ (28).28 This, however, he links with his removal from Lisbon rather than with any incipient questioning of Portuguese colonialism. Gago Coutinho, an outpost near the Zambian border, offers an even more gruesome spectacle: the procession of African lepers coming for medical treatment, compared to ‘larvas informes’ out of a Bosch painting (45). The Portuguese settlers are singled out for descriptions with anal connotations, emphasising the narrator’s revulsion: the café owner’s face twists in ‘caretas de defecação’ because of a speech impediment, and his wife’s nose resembles ‘a inchaço incómodo de hemorróida’ (47).29 Here he practises whatever palliative medicine he can, impotent to alleviate the misery and the hunger of the black 26 [‘Blacks squatted in small groups that were hard to bring into focus in the tremulous clarity. … whores, [worn out by] all the men from Lisbon ... like dying whales stranded on a beach … indecipherable anguish’, 15] 27 [cafés ‘full of soldiers, while miserable shoeshine boys were furiously slapping boots, and men without legs … Fat white men … exchanged … money … with the measured pace of [loan-sharks] (not seagulls), 19] 28 [‘all this awoke in me a strange sensation of the absurd, a discomfort I had been feeling since leaving Lisbon’, 17] 29 [‘the grimaces of someone straining to shit’, ‘looked like a painful haemorrhoid’, 28]



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population, with nothing more than ‘um sorriso de desculpa e vergonha’ (48). This ‘shameful apologetic smile’ can to a large extent summarise the tone of the novel, which unfolds as an extended, half ashamed, half remorseful account of the narrator’s involvement in the war. He reveals some measure of empathy with the suffering of the Africans – albeit only the civilians – he remembers. It goes without saying that in the regime’s official rhetoric the civilian populations of Angola were not the enemy. But as the surgeon never encounters any guerrilla fighters, we cannot judge if such empathy would extend also to the military adversary. He does, however, come into very close contact with one Angolan woman. The story of their encounter is withheld until late in the novel, a delay undoubtedly relating to the depth of the trauma it entails for the narrator. But there are other reasons for delaying the telling of his involvement with Sofia, the character that Seixo (2002: 61) very perceptively considers the novel’s most suppressed component, with whom he falls in love and in whose company he finds refuge from the abhorrence of war. The most obvious explanation is that he saves it till chapter S to match Sofia’s name.30 But the main reason for the delaying must be that Sofia’s story gains force by being told only after the narrator has started relating the atrocities committed by the PIDE in Angola. Sofia disappears one day; the narrator goes looking for her at the police headquarters, only to be told that she was an activist and commissioner for the MPLA and has just been ‘dispatched to Luanda’ (a euphemism for killed) after being raped by all the ‘boys’ (192). It becomes clear that the narrator had a deep affection for Sofia.31 He found comfort in her laughter (‘o teu misterioso e quente e forte riso de mulher ... na sua cascata alegre de vitória’, 180),32 so defiant and courageous in the midst of war. She appeared irrepressibly alive (‘A tua casa, Sofia, cheirava a vivo, a coisa viva e alegre como o teu riso repentino’, 189),33 a real antidote for the overwhelming presence of death all around them. However, 30 The novel’s chapters are ‘lettered’ from A to Z, with chapter A focusing on childhood recollections of the Zoo to which his memory often returns as the beginning and somehow the end of the narrative of this, his life as an ‘avestruz despaisado’ (149) [displaced or uprooted ostrich]. The point is lost in the English translation, which changes the ‘lettering’ of the chapters, so that Sofia appears in chapter U. 31 Peres (1997: 196) believes that his ‘reinvention of Sofia is the stuff upon which colonial masculine dreams are made’. While I agree that the terms in which their first sexual encounter is narrated correspond to old colonial stereotypes, the febrile rhythm of this chapter, with the anguished repetition of Sofia’s name, reveals a deep attachment, and also a deep feeling of guilt, which cannot be explained by tropes of colonised women as rape receptacles alone. 32 [‘your [warm] mysterious [womanly] laughter’ (119) in its cheerful, victorious cascading] 33 [‘Your house, Sofia, smelled alive, [alive] and healthy’ (124) like your sudden laughter]

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perhaps even more traumatic than her actual loss seems to be his memory of his inability to react to the news of her punishment, or at least to register a protest. He insists on his feelings of fear (‘a estremecer de medo e nojo’, 192) and shame for his lack of response to the news of her punishment: ‘saí do quartel da PIDE ... sem a coragem de um grito de indignação ou de revolta’ (192).34 Understanding that he betrayed Sofia with his cowardly silence, as an acquiescence in the PIDE’s crime, he seems to mourn mostly for himself, for the inner death that his failure to rise against the rule of silence imposed by the PIDE represents: ‘a indignação que a minha cobardia provocava em mim, a minha submissa aceitação da violência e da guerra que os senhores de Lisboa me impuseram’ (188).35 In his tortured recollection of his Angolan war experience, his cowardice ‘becomes a symbol of the narrator’s impotence in relation to the regime’ (Medeiros, 2000: 212). Betrayal is a complex theme in this novel, announced already in its title. Os Cus de Judas, which the published English version translates coyly as South of Nowhere, is a strong formulation in Portuguese. Lobo Antunes could have called it ‘Terras do Fim do Mundo’ [Lands at the End of the Earth], which appears both in chapter S and elsewhere in the novel, or the innocuous ‘cascos de rolha’ (back of beyond, or ‘south of nowhere’). But ‘os cus de Judas’ (closer to ‘the arsehole of the universe’, an expression used passim in the English text) has been preferred for its shock value, which must not be underestimated.36 The novel’s title heralds that literariness is about to change, as the vernacular was excluded from Portuguese literary language before 1974.37 Most of all, though, it conjures up a negative idea of neglected, forsaken, faraway places, and – more subtly – the notion of betrayal associated with Judas, the archetypal traitor. Such is the complex mix of geographical remoteness, abandonment and betrayal looming in the Portuguese title, a perfect choice for this novel, in which the narrator cannot forgive himself for having betrayed Sofia by his silence, nor the generals and ‘gentlemen’ who betrayed a whole generation of young men by sending them to a war in ‘the arsehole of the universe’ and by perpetuating a false image of the colonial world. Having arrived in Angola armed with a rosy mental picture of the beneficial effects of Portuguese colonialism, the narrator is shattered by the brutal confrontation with the miserable existence he sees instead. This is the 34 [‘trembling with fear and disgust’, ‘I left the Pide barracks … without the courage to shout [my] indignation or to revolt’, 126] 35 [‘the indignation that my cowardice provoked in me, my submissive acceptance of the violence and the war that the gentlemen in Lisbon had imposed on me’, 124] 36 See Peres (1997: 193) for a discussion of the title as capturing the post-imperial mood of the novel, with Lobo Antunes engaging in ‘imaginings of end of empire’. However, Peres sees the novel as ‘postcolonial epic deconstruction of empire’ (194). 37 See Seixo (2002: 58) on Lobo Antunes’s use of obscenities as postcolonial abrogation of linguistic patterns of communication.



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memory he retains most strongly. In explaining the horror of the war to his interlocutor, he refrains from focusing on the physical violence he witnessed while attending to the wounded and maimed. The memory of feelings and images of dejection haunts him most vividly, stemming from a constant fear of being killed in the war, which glides into the narrative present as a recurrent anticipation of the moment of dying. More interestingly, such feelings derive also from a profound sense of displacement recurrent throughout the novel.

Belonging and displacement Displacement is not immediately internalised. Remembering the voyage to Angola, the narrator claims that ‘Lisboa principiou a afastar-se de mim’ (22),38 as if the city were being pulled away from him, not he from the city. And the feeling keeps increasing: ‘a sentir no progressivo suor do colaÂ�rinho a implacável metamorfose do Inverno de Lisboa no Verão gelatinoso do Equador, mole e quente como as mãos do senhor Melo, barbeiro do avô, no meu pescoço’ (24).39 Memory thus becomes the leading thread in the novel, with two different moments being juxtaposed in the narrative present. Cultural memory is at work here too, in the hint that the Portuguese are perhaps not as suited to the tropical world as Gilberto Freyre would have us believe.40 The equatorial heat generates the first impression of alienation and maladaptation to the African environment, which intensifies in Luanda, where the excessive light and heat seem to distort his sight, preventing him from focusing properly. Periodically the narrator forces himself back into familiar territory. Luanda’s pier covered with ‘trash and slime’ reminds him of the Cruz 38 39

[Lisbon began to recede from me] [‘feeling in the progressive sweat under my collar the implacable metamorphosis of the Lisbon winter into the gelatinous summer of the equator, limp and hot like the hands of my [grand]father’s barber Mr Melo on my [neck]’, 14] 40 I refer to Gilberto Freyre’s theory of Luso-tropicalism, the belief in a special Portuguese ability to adapt to the tropics and to mix with the colonised (Brazilian) people, which Salazar’s regime appropriated for the purpose of political propaganda. Much discredited for its associations with the Estado Novo, Freyre’s theory is now being reconsidered more objectively. Santos (2002), Ribeiro (2004b) and Almeida (2004), among others, accept some degree of ‘singularity’, ‘uniqueness’ or ‘exceptionality’ in the Portuguese way of relating to the people they colonised. Almeida (2004: 45–64) offers a detailed and lucid re-evaluation of the historical development of Luso-tropicalism and the contemporary debates surrounding the concept. Elsewhere in the novel, the narrator sarcastically refers specifically to Freyre’s 1940 title, O Mundo que o Português Criou, pointing out its perceived inaccuracy when he claims: ‘o mundo-que-o-português criou são estes luchazes côncavos de fome’ (152) [the world-the-Portuguese-created are these Luchazis concave with hunger].

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Quebrada pier, near Lisbon. This jolts his memory back into the present, but it also triggers what we might call his historical memory. Both the Angolan and the Portuguese piers share accumulated rubbish, but the tirade against the Portuguese having littered the world and covered it with their scornful spit is set off by the conjunction of the name Cruz Quebrada (Broken Cross) and the ‘padrões manuelinos’ (Manueline pillars surmounted by stone crosses). Erected to mark the sites of Portuguese landings during their exploration of the African coasts, these appropriately phallic symbols signal the fifteenthcentury beginnings of Portuguese imperialism. Already linked with the cross in the early days of maritime expansion, they symbolise the Church’s blessing on the State’s enterprise. Involuntarily, then, by a mechanism of memory that associates two words, the narrator embarks on an indictment against the Portuguese empire, reduced to ‘presença aventureira através de padrões manuelinos e de latas de conserva vazias’ (26).41 In an attempt to mitigate his sense of dislocation, he relates aspects of the strange city to familiar elements in his native country. Luanda becomes ‘aquela Cruz Quebrada africana’ (31), that African Broken Cross. But more than a mere strategy for familiarisation and reterritorialisation, this leads to a progressively outspoken criticism of Portuguese imperialism. Later on, after eleven months at the front the narrator is allowed a month’s leave in Portugal. Returning to Luanda to fly back to Lisbon, the sight of the colonial capital confirms his sense of alienation. His repulsion for the city is still so intense that he vehemently expresses the recollection of a moment many years before in the present tense of a direct apostrophe: cidade colonial pretensiosa e suja de que nunca gostei, gordura de humidade e calor, detesto ... o mau gosto estridente do teu luxo. Não te pertenço nem me pertences, recuso que seja este o meu país, … a minha terra são 89 000 quilómetros quadrados com centro em Benfica … os pianos das tias …╇ (96–7)42

This powerful rejection of the colonial city involves as collateral damage the ironic acceptance of even the aunts’ apartments, previously considered stifling. The narrator now adds to the already mentioned climatic (physical) discomforts a psychological loathing of nouveau riche bad taste that contrasts glaringly with his family’s old-style sophistication. At a more complex level, his 41 [‘Everywhere in the world where we drop anchor, we announce our adventurous presence with Manueline standards and empty preserve cans’, 15] 42 [‘pretentious and dirty colonial city I never liked. The gross humidity and heat, I hate … the strident bad taste of your luxuries. I don’t belong to you and you don’t belong to me, everything about you repels me, I refuse to consider you as part of me … My country is 89,000 square kilometres with its center in Benfica … it is my aunts’ pianos …’, 62–3]



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emphatic refusal to consider Angola his country (‘recuso que este seja o meu país’) expresses a twofold political rejection. Firstly, his statement directly contradicts the slogan of Angolan white settlers claiming possession of the territory: ‘Angola é nossa’ [Angola is ours]. Secondly, in the regime’s official language Angola was not a country but a Portuguese ‘overseas province’, the term introduced in colonial legislative nomenclature in 1951 to replace ‘colony’, when Salazar’s Estado Novo recognised the need to make some concessions to growing international pressure, stemming from the strong pro-decolonisation campaign of the recently formed United Nations.43 In any case, this emotional outburst unequivocally involves feelings of displacement, generally associated with literature of exile, here intensified in the chiastic expression: ‘I do not belong to you, you do not belong to me’. Elsewhere in the novel, the narrator recalls the dilemma of the colonial war generation: ‘a guerra ou Paris’ (76), to be drafted into the war in Africa or to desert to Paris. Either option meant displacement. But Angola is not Luanda alone. The city the narrator sees in transit to or from Portugal and the countryside he discovers in his various postings in the colony stir very different reactions. His abomination of the capital differs substantially from his response to the Angolan open spaces, as when, back from leave, he contemplates a night sky: Lá fora, um céu de estrelas desconhecidas surpreendia-me: assaltava-me por vezes a impressão de que haviam sobreposto um universo falso ao meu universo habitual.╇ (31)44

The bewildering discovery of different stars reinforces a crumbling sense of security deriving from physical dislocation. Strangely, his ‘habitual world’ is not paralleled by an ‘unusual’ or ‘unfamiliar’ one, but by the ‘false world’ of Angola. Can a place be false? Yes, if one feels completely displaced in it. Or does the colony inherit the falsity that he now perceives in the imperial rhetoric? This would explain his disgust at the sight of Luanda, the embodiment of Portuguese colonialism. Elsewhere the new stars generate a disturbing presentiment that his life is about to change, not only because of the war but also simply because of dislocation. In any case, his suspicion regarding the regime’s official discourse compounds his feeling of finding himself in a false world, a world contaminated by deceptive rhetoric. Here, then, the narrator begins to reveal the concern with ‘inauthenticity of experience’ (Griffiths, 1990: 154) we have come to associate with postcolonial discourse. 43 For a discussion of nomenclature changes to the Colonial Act, see Castelo, 1999: 49–56. 44 [‘Outside, unfamiliar constellations surprised me; occasionally I would be struck by the impression that a false universe had been superimposed on [my usual] one’, 19]

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Elsewhere, powerful images of Africa overwhelm the narrator with their sheer newness. The apparent endlessness of the Angolan landscape gives him a sensation of vertigo, of tripping in the air: circulando numa paisagem inimaginável, onde tudo flutua, as cores, as árvores, os gigantescos contornos das coisas, o céu abrindo e fechando escadarias de nuvens em que a vista tropeça até cair de costas como um grande pássaro extasiado.╇ (38)45

Everything is perceived as if through the eyes of someone in an exalted state of consciousness: the sheer beauty of the lush environment is wondrously ‘unimaginable’. The vast dimensions of Angola exacerbate the painful feeling of displacement. Only the familiar is reassuring. Suddenly removed from Portugal’s familiar exiguity (‘um país estreito e velho … uma cidade afogada de casas … num acanhado universo’, 37; ‘pequenez do bibelot … esse mundo em diminutivo’, 38; ‘os nossos pequeninos sentimentos’, 140; ‘Portugal dos Pequeninos’, 150; ‘as suas vidas miniaturais’, 151),46 the narrator is overcome by Angola’s disturbingly foreign spaciousness (‘inacreditáveis horizontes sem limites’, 37; ‘numa planície sem princípio nem termo’, 41; ‘ilimitadas searas de girassol e algodão’, 160; ‘majestosa infinidade de estrelas’, 164; ‘a incrível extensão azul do Cassanje’, 176; ‘a grande paz de Angola no cacimbo’, 221).47 But the smallness in question refers also to the limits of the Portuguese psyche: ‘proibiram-me o canto nono de Os Lusíadas … Policiaram-me o espírito, em suma, reduziram-me a geografia’ (38).48 Having grown up in a narrow and narrow-minded country, the narrator feels physically and culturally displaced. Boundaries, constraints and old support structures have disintegrated in the huge new continent, values taken for granted now beginning to crumble in the presence of the vigorous freedom he detects in the Angolan landscape. The indestructible nature of the capimgrass (‘O capim engolia os tractores avariados … devorava as casas, pulava 45 [‘traveling through an unimaginable landscape where everything fluctuates, the colors, [the trees,] the gigantic shapes and sizes of things, and even the sky is so vast and ever-changing that you can contemplate it until you fall over backward like a great bird in ecstasy’, 23] 46 [‘from a narrow old country, from a stifling city’, [suffocated by houses] ‘pressed in by two wedges of land … a dwarfed crochet universe … the smallness of bibelots’, 22; ‘petty feelings’, 93; [Portugal for Small Children]; ‘petty lives’, 100]. Emphasis added. 47 [‘incredibly limitless horizons’, 22; ‘on a plain without beginning or end’, 25; ‘unlimited fields of sunflowers and cotton’, 105; ‘a majestic infinity of stars’, 108; ‘the incredible blue extension of the Cassanje’, 116; ‘the [great] peace of Angola in the mist’, 142]. Emphasis added. 48 [‘This universe forbade me the eroticism of the ninth canto of the Lusiads … It policed my spirit, in sum, and reduced [my geography]’, 22]



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as vedações, destruía as cruzes anónimas das campas’, 175)49 represents an anarchy that compounds the feelings of estrangement and vertigo of a narrator who comes from a background of ‘rigidez vitoriana’ (41).50 A sense of utter displacement permeates the novel, and it is twofold. For the Angolans, enforced displacement adds to the suffering under the colonial yoke. The guerrilla fighters remain practically invisible to the narrator, so that he recalls most the passivity and apathy of the civilians he sees. Their submissiveness appears to be the result of the geographic displacement imposed by the colonial authorities, which destroys tribal, political and cultural pride. Having been rounded up to live within the Portuguese-influence zone, the Luchazi people, whom the narrator often recalls, flee to the forest because they are prevented from living according to tradition (48). The further east the narrator travels, the more opportunity he has to observe the degradation colonialism has visited upon the Angolans, enforced displacement being used as a weapon to weaken the colonised: A seguir ao início da guerra haviam morto ou expulso para o Congo os Mô-Holos e os Bundi-Bângalas que habitavam primitivamente a Baixa do Cassanje, e substituído as suas aldeias por Gingas da área de Luanda, mais obedientes e acomodatícios.╇ (163)51

But the Portuguese army, too, is the victim of enforced displacement: ‘Foda-se, também vim para aqui porque me expulsaram do meu país a bordo de um navio cheio de tropas ... e me aprisionaram em três voltas de arame’ (177).52 This feeling of exile largely explains the disgust that Luanda and Angola arouse in him. Surely, exiles may sometimes feel welcome in their new country, where they often encounter political and personal sympathy. Not so for the Portuguese military stationed in Angola to defend the colonial regime. Unidentified Angolan voices shout at the narrator from the dark: ‘Vai na tua terra, português’ (178),53 adding insult to injury and compounding his sentiments of ‘sacrilege and intrusion’ (Robertson, 1992: 106)54 in the colonial 49 [‘The wild grass swallowed damaged tractors, devoured houses, jumped fences, buried anonymous crosses on tombstones’, 115]. The capim (together with Sofia’s smile) is one of the few victorious elements in the novel. 50 [‘Victorian intransigence’, 25] 51 [‘After the war began they had killed or exiled to the Congo the Mô-Holos, and the Bundi-Bângalas, who were the primitive inhabitants of the Baixa do Cassanje, and they repopulated their villages with Gingas from the area around Luanda, more obedient and accommodating’, 107] 52 [‘Fuck you, I also came here because they expelled me from my country on a boat full of troops … and they imprisoned me here behind three barbed-wire fences’, 116] 53 [‘Portuguese go home’, 117] 54 This comment refers to other colonial war novels by Modesto Navarro, Carlos Vale Ferraz and João de Melo.

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territory, where he is doubly rejected and displaced. His most haunting memory of colonial Angola is that of feeling as displaced and victimised as the colonised Angolans.55 To make it worse, he recalls rejection on all sides: by the Angolan independence fighters; by the civilian populations, who half-heartedly accept his medical palliatives and the soldiers’ food scraps (178); by the Portuguese settlers they are supposed to defend but who think that tougher crackdowns would repress the guerrilla war much faster (139); and, in the narrative present, by his family for, ruining their ‘prophecy’ (244), the army has failed to make a man of him. This is a novel in which memory plays the major role. Literary studies often read the meanderings of memory as disruptions to a narrative’s temporal order, with analepses inserting a time past in the narrative present and prolepses anticipating future events. In Os Cus de Judas, feeling heavily burdened by his historical past, the narrator has a view of the world constantly put into a temporal perspective. Salazar’s regime took advantage of Portugal’s long history and past imperial glories to justify the colonial enterprise,56 a trap the narrator perceives clearly. He feels his ‘longo cansaço de europeu com oito séculos de infantas de pedra às costas’ (180),57 and recognises the arrogance of using the weight of history to validate colonial occupation, for the Angolans too have their long history, widely ignored in Europe. He sees the ‘hatred for the occupying forces’ on the faces of the old African men: Eram os velhos do Nengo, do Lusse, do Luate, os velhos de Cessa e de Mussuma, … os velhos e orgulhosos luchazes, senhores das Terras do Fim do Mundo, vindos há muitos séculos da Etiópia em migrações sucessivas, que tinham expulso os hotentotes, os Kamessekeles … Velhos livres tornados reles escravos do arame … pelo rancor do Estado colonial. (182)58

The blacks lack the West’s consciousness of historical superiority to glorify their own centuries-old history. Morally aware of the wrongs of colonialism and willing to see the point of view of the African, the narrator is able to grant African history a validity commonly denied by the European colonialist. But 55 The situation for the hated Portuguese army is even harder than for ‘the colonizer as himself a colonized other’, identified by Santos (2002: 17). 56 See Ribeiro, 2004b: 118–26. 57 [the long weariness of a European with eight centuries of stone princesses on his back]. Elizabeth Howe’s translation reduces the image’s temporal (eight centuries) and visual burden (stone princesses/ statues on his back) to ‘his European weariness’ (119). 58 [‘They were the old men of Nengo, of Lusse, of Luate, … the proud old Luchazis, lords of the Lands at the End of the Earth, come many centuries ago from Ethiopia in successive migrations, people who had expelled the Hottentots, the Kamessekeles … Free old men were turned into ragged slaves … by … the colonial state’, 120–1]



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a further reason makes him feel empathy with these old men: they too have come from faraway places, first in migration from other parts of Africa, then in forcible displacement in colonial times.59 However, if we take the image of the roller-skater ‘gliding backwards in slow-moving ellipses’ as emblematic of the workings of memory in Os Cus de Judas, the simile obviously does not refer to time alone. Rather, it merges notions of space and time: memory moves backwards and forwards in time, and it performs ellipses in space. This tension between a feeling of belonging, derived from a sense of time, and a feeling of not belonging (i.e. alienation), derived from a constant sense of displacement, emerges early in the novel when, trying to explain where he belongs, the narrator gets entangled in a web of time and location: Pertenço sem dúvida a outro sítio, não sei bem qual, aliás, mas tão recuado no tempo e no espaço que jamais o recuperarei, talvez que ao Jardim Zoológico de dantes e ao professor preto a deslizar para trás no rinque de patinagem.╇ (36)60

The narrator cannot be referring to the mythical time of childhood alone, often recovered in the European literary tradition, nor to a time like Proust’s ‘temps retrouvé’, because his own memory refuses to tease it out like a mere temporal segment. It is his attempt to establish a relationship with place that further complicates things: he now remembers the Lisbon of his childhood as a place where he never truly belonged, though it was reassuringly familiar. His journeying through Angola, which made him feel acutely displaced, also turned him into someone forever incapable of belonging anywhere, because it revealed that the city where he thought he belonged was not only a place but a set of values and a time already condemned by history. These coincide with some of the difficulties in ‘transmuting time into space’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, 1989: 35) we now identify as characteristic of postcolonial literature. Elsewhere in the novel, the narrator struggles to feel at home ever again (and anywhere again), revealing how alienation is linked with displacement both in time and in place, in a process of ‘permanent non-coincidence of 59 While Magalhães (2002: 187–95) finds almost no signs of empathy with the African in the colonial war novels, Melo (1988: 22) does detect in them a common desire to acknowledge the dignity and identity of the Other. See also Vargo’s subtle identification of expressions of admiration for the Angolans in this novel, due to the ‘doctor’s great empathy with the collusions, transgressions, and silences of the Africans’ (2004: 40). 60 [‘No doubt I belong somewhere else, I don’t know exactly where, but I suppose that it is a place so distant in time and space that I will never find it again …; perhaps it’s the old zoo and the black [instructor] gliding backwards in the skating rink’, 21]. Emphasis added.

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self with present time and place’ (Magalhães, 2002: 171): ‘O medo de voltar ao meu país comprime-me o esófago, porque … deixei de ter lugar fosse onde fosse, estive longe demais, tempo demais para tornar a pertencer aqui’ (226).61 But in the end it is clearly to physical displacement – not to the length of his war service – that he attributes his feelings of estrangement from country, family and friends: ‘Flutuo entre dois continentes que me repelem, nu de raízes, em busca de um espaço branco onde ancorar’ (226).62 Curiously, to explain how he feels a stranger everywhere, even in his own apartment, he uses a simile (‘como um avestruz despaisado’, 149, like a displaced ostrich), which still links him to a bird native to the Africa that haunts his memory. Margaret Anne Clarke emphasises the parallels between Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time and the narrative technique of ‘disjointed reminiscences’ in Os Cus de Judas. In her view, ‘the notion of time has tended to become spatialized, or fused with that of space’ (Clarke, 1995: 200). This critic also arrives at the conclusion that ‘space, not time, plays the dominant role in the novel’s organization’ (Clarke, 1995: 202), but she does not underline the importance of this privileging of space over time in terms of the postcolonial malaise this novel reveals. While the experience of war unquestionably sparks off the narrator’s existential upheaval, it is the recollection of his recurrent feelings of dislocation that explains the difficulties of his homecoming. Journeying so many thousands of kilometres away from his country provides him with the distance necessary for a reassessment of values and beliefs. Geographical distance, the trauma of cultural dislocation and the sheer ‘shock of the new’ undo this man, as much as the war itself. A ‘major feature of the post-colonial literatures is the concern with place and displacement’ because the ‘post-colonial crisis of identity’, as Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin explain, has to do ‘with the development or recovery of an effective identifying relationship between self and place’ (1989: 8). Naturally, we ascribe such feelings of displacement more readily to the slave, the transported convict or the colonised labourer forcibly removed to suit the coloniser’s needs. Most striking in Os Cus de Judas is that the cruelty of the colonial war leads a man supposedly deeply imbued with his country’s (and his family’s) imperialist rhetoric to come to share some of the feelings of the colonised, even though ironically he was sent to Angola to participate in the military action aiming to quash anti-colonialist uprisings. And it is the privileging of feelings of displacement over historical (i.e. temporal) validation 61 [The fear of returning to my country oppresses me because … I no longer belong anywhere at all, I was too far away for too long ever to be able to belong here again]. Emphasis added. 62 [‘I am caught between two continents that repel me, rootless’, 144, searching for a white space where I might drop anchor]. Emphasis added.



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that gives this novel its special tension: a pervasive malaise and a ‘crisis of identity’, with the surgeon of the Portuguese army serving in the colony feeling as disempowered as the colonised.63 This arresting tension, which I have elsewhere read as very close to postcolonial sentiment,64 allows Seixo (2002: 505) to consider the novel masterly in its engaging with postcolonial themes.

A case of post-traumatic stress syndrome? Much of the gloom and maladjustment the narrator of Os Cus de Judas displays seems symptomatic of certain disturbances linked with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as could be expected in a fictional returned soldier.65 His service in the colonial war involved moments of desperate fear, helplessness and horror, which he repeatedly recalls, often mentioning his (and his fellow soldiers’) constant dread of being killed or maimed. And he cannot stop reliving those traumatic events because his painful, recurrent memories of war keep intruding in his present life, particularly in the form of flashbacks, but also hallucinations (215). He shows no interest in re-establishing significant social relations (other than filling in time with an interlocutor who is practically a stranger) and clearly feels alienated or estranged from others. The affection he once felt for Sofia has now given way to a manifest inability to love, making him settle for a casual sexual encounter with no future and no depth. The narrator offers no explanation as to the reasons why the woman he has engaged in conversation in the Lisbon bar follows him to his apartment, which reinforces a sense of lack of intimacy in their one-night encounter. He mentions his divorce without much detail, giving to understand that he has similar difficulties relating to people in other domains of his existence: he cannot make or keep friends, and he is viewed with professional suspicion by his medical colleagues (156), as he recalls at various points. The memories that torment the narrator of Os Cus de Judas are so vivid that they seem related to recent events. Not so: he returned from Angola eight years ago. But the devastating memory of his traumatic participation in the war is so haunting that it keeps incapacitating him. Many years later, he still dichotomises the world around him into those who were in the war and those who were not – whether the dichotomy applies to the despised generals who sent the soldiers to war but never risked their own skin; or to the draft-dodgers who live safely in Paris or London; or, even more dramatically, 63 64 65

See Santos, 2002: 19. Moutinho, 2000a. This section is indebted to the summary of criteria for the diagnosis of PTSD presented by Luís Quintais, 1998: 55–72.

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to the very woman who listens to him all night, first vaguely accused of not understanding him because she did not go there, but later strangely included among those who were there, for having attentively listened to his monologue.66 It is as if time had stood still since his return from Angola. Eight years later his only positive memory of his war service is the wondrous relationship he developed with the immense African space and the ‘luxuriant’ Angolan nature and landscape, which he can never forget and which thus becomes such a central feature of this novel.67 In any case, this is not the narrative of a character who tries to avoid thoughts or emotions associated with the trauma of the war in which he participated. Quite the opposite: this is the work of a narrator compelled to relive his traumatic memories of war, to remember them for himself and to remind others, prepared to listen to him, of a reality he accuses them of preferring to forget. The narrator mentions more than once that there is a conspiracy of silence surrounding the colonial war: ‘Porque camandro é que não se fala nisto? Começo a pensar que o milhão e quinhentos mil homens que passaram por África não existiram nunca’ (81).68 The colonial war is a topic that became uncomfortable in post-Salazar Portugal. Although the narrator of Os Cus de Judas would prefer not to allow it to be forgotten, he does not have the emotional energy to take upon himself the role of official conscience of his country. Nevertheless, the memory of the young men he saw dying in Angola will never let him rest easy (‘os mortos de África, de boca cheia de terra, não podem protestar’, 73),69 even if he does not feel sufficiently alive to take up their cause. As a consequence, he fears that his painful remembrance of the war will remain private, unheard except by his solitary, odd interlocutor. While his distressing memories continue to convulse his existence, he seems incapable of or uninterested in playing a more active role in reversing ‘the silencing effect of imperialistic discourse’ (Griffiths, 1990: 153). The process seems so pervasive that his only listener is a silent woman – or, as Seixo (2002: 40) deftly points out, a woman silenced by the narrator’s verbosity, in a process that reflects or repeats colonial practice. 66 Magalhães points out the ‘initiatory value’ that the ‘time there’ has for returned soldiers (2002: 204, my translation). 67 Quintais’s clinical observations of specific cases of PTSD in Portuguese men who participated in the colonial wars in Africa lead him to conclude that they tend to share ‘a relatively similar life story after the war – marked above all by the lack of understanding on the part of others, those who had not been “there” – not without a series of symbolical referents and cognitive “maps” … in which there was very clearly a mythical relation with the African space, with the exoticism of the small towns, and with the immense, luxuriant dimension of nature and the landscape’ (1998: 62–3, my translation). 68 [‘Why the hell won’t they talk about it? I’m beginning to think that the million and a half Portuguese who passed through Africa never existed’, 51] 69 [those who died in Africa, their mouths full of dirt, cannot protest]



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Finally, this conspiracy of silence that seems to engulf anybody who would attempt vehemently to recall the experience of the colonial war in post-revolutionary Portugal contrasts vividly with the narrator’s memory of another silence filled with very different nuances of tacit understanding and tenderness: the silence that characterised his relationship with Sofia. The narrator points out that he and Sofia never exchanged any words (‘nunca houve entre nós quaisquer palavras’, 188), which could be interpreted as a sign of contempt for the black woman in whose body he would have sought nothing more than sexual pleasure. But his memory of Sofia is powerfully connected with his most treasured, soothing childhood recollection, that of the maid Gija gently scratching his back. And the conjunction of these two memories leads to an important revelation about the nature of silence in this novel. In the chapter in which he constantly addresses Sofia, in a clearly distressed tone (explained perhaps by the fact that he is about to ‘betray’ her again, this time not politically but with the silent woman from the bar), he finally reveals his anxiety about writing: a ânsia de escrever e o torturante pânico de não ser capaz, de não lograr traduzir em palavras o que me apetecia berrar aos ouvidos dos outros e que era Estou aqui, Reparem em mim que estou aqui, Oiçam-me até no meu silêncio.╇ (189)70

In the end, the silence about the colonial war that the narrator perceives around him corresponds to the fear of not being able to break the silence that he associates with his first steps as a writer. Through his cowardly silence in Angola, he betrayed Sofia. Through his (feared or imagined) inability to make himself heard as a writer, he feels powerless to play a more active role in reversing his country’s historical amnesia about the colonial war. Such are the mysterious, elliptic ways in which human memory operates.

70 [‘my anxiety about writing, my fear that I wasn’t good enough, that I wasn’t able to translate into words what I felt like screaming into people’s ears, I am here, notice me because I’m here, listen to me even in my silence’, 124]

2

Álamo Oliveira, Até Hoje (Memórias de Cão) Álamo Oliveira’s Até Hoje (Memórias de Cão) [Until Today (Memoirs of a Dog)] is best described as a Bildungsroman, a novel that examines the spiritual, social and human development of a young man, in a process that eventually leads him to a fundamental change of direction in life. By the prominence of cognitive verbs such as saber and conhecer and their antonyms ignorar/ desconhecer – ‘João sabe da pátria o q.b. ... Desconhecia Lisboa’ (10); ‘essa vontade perdida de o ser e saber’ (20), (to quote only two examples) – the novel’s opening pages show that the protagonist seeks to achieve a better understanding of himself and his actions. His quest for knowledge focuses on two points: above all himself, for he used to see himself as following in the footsteps of Camões, the poet of the Portuguese national epic, a design already abandoned when the book begins; and his positioning vis-à-vis ‘a pátria’, the fatherland, a loaded term of the Estado Novo’s official language which he adopts, rather than the more neutral ‘país’, homeland. The novel’s plot deals with the colonial war experience of the protagonist, João, a conscript from the Azores archipelago, drafted to serve in Portuguese Guinea in 1967, when the pro-independence war has been raging for at least four years. What distinguishes João’s experience from the more usual types of war recollection in literature is that little or no significant military action ever occurs in the novel, and the protagonist’s most traumatic memory of participation in the Guinean conflict is that of anxious wait and endless tedium. Images of his two-year tour of duty in Guinea (briefly in Bissau and Bissalanca, then in the Binta barracks) alternate with memories of his childhood and adolescence on ‘the island’ (Graciosa). Of the three colonies where the Portuguese army fought against proindependence uprisings, Guinea was the most feared posting, because this equatorial territory had the highest number of military fatalities, the most widespread guerrilla insurrection and the most elevated incidence of tropical  Álamo Oliveira, 1988, Até Hoje (Memórias de Cão) (Angra do Heroísmo: Signo). All quotations are taken from this edition, and all translations are mine.  [About his country João knows quantum satis. … He did not know Lisbon; that lost desire to be him [Camões] and to know]  The PAIGC’s activities in Guinea began in 1957; the war itself, in 1963.



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illnesses. Nevertheless, João is told that he should consider himself lucky because he has been drafted as ‘rendição individual’ (23) for a dead or wounded soldier, for which, it is superstitiously believed, the odds imply a lesser degree of danger. Before examining the characteristics that demarcate this novel as a Bildungsroman, it is important to establish its narrative present. At times the narration is internally focused on the protagonist, as in the opening paragraph, allowing the reader to know only what goes on inside the protagonist’s mind as he departs from Lisbon to the war in Guinea. At other times statements appear which imply sudden shifts to an omniscient focalisation or at least an internal focalisation already altered by the protagonist’s maturing. For example, when the narrative voice affirms that ‘a guerra altera todos os horizontes, todas as perspectivas’ (22), the reader puzzles over the prescience of such a young character. But the truth is that, despite the predominantly internal focalisation and a vague attempt to narrate events in chronological progression, this is a retrospective or ‘ulterior narrative’ (Reis and Lopes, 1998: 256), a narrative unmistakably after the event. The alternation of strictly internally focused passages with others that imply a much more mature view of the world also reveals that it is a narrative from memory. Both the island scenes recalled in Guinea and the events at Binta, which seem to be imparted as in the narrative present, are in fact memories. But the fiction of diegetic progression is kept until the very last words of the novel: ‘Até hoje’, which confirm that the narrative voice speaks from an unspecified present (‘today’), corresponding to the protagonist’s new life after the apprenticeship here recaptured. His decision to follow a new path (by emigrating from his island) constitutes proof that he has completed a successful apprenticeship, as Bildungsromane normally end at the threshold of a different life. Thus, Até Hoje is a Bildungsroman from memory. From the start, João is marked out for a war experience different from the common soldier’s: posted as individual replacement, he misses out on the bonding camaraderie ordinarily associated with military life. At the narrative level, the singularity of an individual military posting further accentuates the reserve and the exacerbated sensibility of the loner the protagonist already tended to be, as revealed by his first memories of life on the island. At the discursive level, such individuality contributes to making this a personal  

[individual replacement] ‘Internal focalisation’ privileges the perspective of one particular character, resulting in the restriction of the information conveyed. Reis and Lopes (1998: 164–77) survey the various terms used by different critics to express this notion, explaining the reasons why they prefer ‘focalisation’, first proposed by Genette, to others more common in English (‘point of view’ or ‘perspective’).  [war alters all horizons, all perspectives]

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novel with a loose, episodic structure, corresponding to the fragmentary character of the events that shape the maturing process of the protagonist. By definition the protagonist of a Bildungsroman is a young man (João has just turned twenty-one) who stays within his social milieu and develops selfawareness while engaging with his habitual surrounds (Jost, 1969: 99–103). In contrast, João’s maturing process through the colonial war takes place not in his usual environment but in two different locations. His apprenticeship begins when the young islander from a poor agricultural background sees Lisbon for the first time, and very briefly, from aboard the military ship bound for Guinea: as a motionless postcard (‘postal quieto’, 9). Lisbon is also where his apprenticeship is completed, at the end of the novel, when he finally consummates the homosexual affair with Fernando, which he has refused to allow throughout the time they were stationed in the Binta barracks, in northern Guinea. But the main location of his apprenticeship is indeed his native Azorean island, his familiar terrain, though he is physically removed from it: this he achieves by vividly recalling life on the island, by lovingly reconstructing every detail of its landscape, its population, its social and religious mores – in his memory and by his memory alone – as an antidote to the insidious poisoning Guinea inflicts on him, with the unrelentingly anxious wait for an enemy attack. This makes Até Hoje a Bildungsroman with a difference: here memory is the main instrument of the apprenticeship, an indispensable tool for the recreation of the island environment that allows João to embark upon the spiritual journey of his maturing. Otherwise, immobilised as he is in the heart of Guinea, that indispensable condition for a successful apprenticeship, ‘experience of the world’ (Jost, 1969: 99), would have been all but non-existent. Actually, the protagonist uses his memory, and his is especially eidetic, very deliberately and selectively to escape from the traumatic reality of war, even in this, its most unwarlike mode. Whenever his wretchedness in the Guinean barracks overpowers him (with dangers imagined becoming much more terrifying than real ones), the protagonist takes refuge in his recollections of the island. Moreover, João’s ability to recall his previous existence, his childhood surroundings and the island characters who first shaped his vision of the world, becomes the key to the very process of his apprenticeship: only by confronting them, in the only available way (in the realm of his memory), can he achieve knowledge of himself and of his identity as an islander. While  For the defining characteristics of the Bildungsroman, see François Jost, 1969: 97–115, whose analysis remains the clearest.  Unlike Americans, who were drafted into the Vietnam War in their late teens, Portuguese men were normally drafted when they turned 21 (university students could get a deferment). Late conscription is important here because it means that many soldiers are already married, some even with children (as in Fernando’s case), which contrasts with João’s sexual inexperience.



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in theory any young person may need to confront his or her milieu, this need appears more urgent perhaps for an islander trapped in a web of insularity and obscurantism, which makes it impossible to question parental and institutional authority. The island becomes a paradise lost which João’s memory recreates in the present hell of war in Guinea. Thus, in Até Hoje memory constructs location; memory recreates place: the memory of a time past allows João to visualise the island as a separate location vividly present in Guinea. It is not surprising then that the process of remembering the island should turn it gradually into a mythical ‘utopian place of reference’ (Villar, 2004: 165) preserved in static innocence.

Memory as an escape route Memory functions as a defence mechanism that allows the protagonist to survive the war. Although this war turns out to be surprisingly non-lifethreatening (but those involved can only know this after demobilisation), it is profoundly sanity-threatening. João’s traumatic experience differs considerably from that of the narrator of Os Cus de Judas. He sees no active service, no soldiers killed in action or by anti-personnel mines. The only attack on the Binta barracks happens one night, when the soldiers have almost been lulled into believing there is no war on (‘A Guiné não existe. Binta não existe. A merda da guerra também não existe’, 90). Suddenly an invisible enemy opens fire for five minutes only; no explanation ever becomes apparent, no followup is undertaken. With tragic irony, the only victim dies simply because he was too drunk to head for cover.10 This attack is narrated after six chapters dealing with the endless, anxious wait for something to happen, and this is the closest the novel gets to a war situation. But the trauma of this unwarlike war should not be underestimated. The combination of tedium and fear during two years’ waiting for an attack and expecting it imminently – particularly as they know that enemy attacks are constant and fatal everywhere else in Guinea (pp. 75, 128, 139, etc.) – is traumatic enough for conscripts confined within the perimeter of the barracks’ protected zone. In effect, they are prisoners in their own barracks, where they have nothing to do except drink, smoke, masturbate or engage in homosexual intercourse. João has no doubt as to the psychological violence

 10

[Guinea does not exist. Binta does not exist. This shitty war does not exist either.] Another soldier commits suicide some months after the killing of this man, his former lover in the loneliness of Binta, where even married men enter into homosexual relations to help release the unbearable tension.

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involved in this war (‘à violência do seu estar na guerra’, 101), although loss of life is minimal. To escape the infinite weariness and erosion of this uneventful war, to while away the time and the incessant fear, and above all to keep his sanity, the protagonist sets out deliberately to recall the tranquillity of his island. Often such memories are triggered by a word in a letter from home. At other times he conjures up the memories, closing his eyes to the oppressive surrounds and evoking – by a voluntary act of memory – images of his life on the island, as a refuge from the present. He does this while still at BissaÂ� lanca: preferia aquele lugar, rodeado de arame farpado, onde aprendia o ritmo do coração de África. Dali, partia sempre para a sua ilha, embalado de garças e búzios, perfume de faias e laranjeiras;╇ (56)11

and again repeatedly at Binta, where he garrisons for almost two years: Deitou-se, os olhos fixos em cenários de lava, búzios, marés e hortênsias azuis, tudo naquele buraco escavado no chão.╇ (69)12

This ability to activate his memory voluntarily whenever ‘the psychological pressure borders on the unbearable’ (Conrado, 1989a: 122, my translation) provides the relief valve to maintain his sanity. It also sets the scene (physically, though in the realm of memory) for the re-examination of circumstances previously taken for granted, which now allows his apprenticeship to begin. The island whose memory he conjures up at will to escape the psychological burden of his presence in Guinea is viewed almost always in idyllic terms: a locus amoenus in the Theocritean tradition, with the islanders’ agricultural and fishing way of life recalled and depicted not without realism, but with a nostalgia that progressively grants it a mythical dimension. By contrast, the Binta barracks develop as a locus horrendus, where nature – particularly the feared ‘mata do Ohio’, the surrounding jungle – becomes the location of unspecified dangers poised to wreak calamitous devastation.13 11 [he preferred that spot, surrounded by barbed wire, where he could learn the rhythm of Africa’s heartbeat. From there he would depart for his island, lulled by herons and conchs, the perfume of beeches and orange trees] 12 [He lay down, fixing his eyes on lava landscapes, conchs, tides, blue hydrangeas, everything within that hole dug in the ground.] 13 The drunken soldier is killed when he is facing the Ohio forest (‘voltado para a mata do Ohio’, 91), just as the soldier who later commits suicide mutters to himself ‘voltado para a mata do Ohio’ (104). Fear is at its highest among the soldiers when it is decided to chase the guerrillas in the ‘mata do Ohio’ (145). Eventually the operation is



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João constantly associates ‘o espectro da mata do Ohio’14 with the enemy’s invisible headquarters and with impending disaster, harking back to the old European ‘forest phobia’ (Harrison, 1992: 146), which sees the forest (in this case, the jungle) as a site of danger and lawlessness.15 The cultivated (hence ordered) Azorean landscape, remembered as locus amoenus, contrasts sharply with the impenetrable (hence impossible to order and militarily impossible to control) ‘mata’ as locus horrendus. A brief summary of the aspects of island life that João chooses to recall reveals the values and prejudices that make up his identity. The first three chapters contain extensive memories of daily life: smells (cows, pigs, local flora, local food), poverty, cleanliness, dairy farming, childhood games, family relationships, the girlfriend Isabel, religiosity (festivities, midnight mass, the Santo Antão procession, sermons, catechism), social mores (women’s modesty, men’s reserve, young people’s sexual innocence), rituals (yearly killing of the pig, excitement before the blood and its smell), scarcity of education (based on learning by heart the history and geography of the Portuguese Empire), and the protagonist’s fine reading ability (encouraged by exceptional grandparents), which distinguished him from other children. Despite the undisguised difficulty of the islanders’ life, so far all the memories are euphoric. Sharply disrupting the narrative rhythm, chapter 4 never recalls the island. This is the moment when João meets Fernando and temporarily forgets both the war and even the books he always carries. As a novel’s structure shapes and determines its meaning, this is a sure sign that the protagonist’s apprenticeship too is put on hold, the encounter bringing a new direction to his search for self-knowledge. Chapter 5 begins with the interesting comment that the time has come to turn over a new leaf and to put things in writing: ‘Há que virar a página … e dizer escrevendo’ (67). At this point the reader realises that the novel corresponds to a diary which the protagonist has just decided to start writing. While significant memories of the island appear again (particularly the weight of religion and superstition on the islanders, the night of collecting alms for souls in torment and childish fear of ghosts), there is also the first hint of a less than Edenic side to life on the island with the revelation that the protagonist’s grandfather, believed to have emigrated, was in fact forced into self-imposed exile for a bold political gesture against the Estado Novo. Folklore and traditional activities recalled in chapter 6 again add a mythical dimension to the memory of the island: the Christmas manger in the cancelled (148), frustrating even the heightened fear, as every other expectation is frustrated in this novel. 14 [the spectre of the Ohio forest] 15 Obviously, the ‘mata do Ohio’ is not only an imagined, but a real site of danger.

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streets; typical carnival celebrations with a specific theme for each year’s ‘dança’; women’s group activities such as wool spinning, carding and trousseau embroidering. Curiously, when a letter from his parents informs him that electricity has just been introduced to the island, João reveals his awareness that he is trying to preserve a memory of Graciosa that is already doomed to disappear: ‘João sentiu que os serões de fiar nunca mais seriam os mesmos. … João desejava … agarrar o passado’.16 And he declares without any explanation that his relationship with his girlfriend is over. From then on, João’s memories of the island change dramatically, revealing a much less idyllic reality than that which he has so far intentionally evoked. They represent his decision no longer to use his memories to escape the reality of war, but rather to engage critically with his past in order to learn from it.

Memory as the vehicle for apprenticeship While in the novel’s first chapters João emphasises the influence of religion on the islanders, his apprenticeship begins in earnest with a memory equally relating to his religiosity, but of a traumatic nature. This memory also differs in that nothing in the text indicates that it is a voluntary memory, conjured up to provide relief, as most of the previous ones had been. Proust’s concept of voluntary and involuntary memory proves extremely useful for understanding this distinction.17 Both types of memory are of an emotional or affective order, but only involuntary memory allows the person remembering to experience a sense of ‘concrete identity between two moments of [his/her] psychological life’ (Bonnet, 1987: 40), with the past moment being relived as a real moment in the present, rather than reappearing simply as a recalled moment. Involuntary memory affects the person experiencing it much more powerfully than voluntary (conscious) memory, because it conserves and restores the intrinsic quality of past moments. The involuntary memory in question occurs soon after the surprise attack on the barracks. The protagonist repeatedly mentions his and his fellow soldiers’

16 [João felt that the spinning evenings would never be the same again. … João wished ... to hold on to the past] 17 Marcel Proust, interviewed by E.-J. Bois in 1913: ‘my work is dominated by the distinction between involuntary and voluntary memory, a distinction which not only does not figure in the philosophy of M. Bergson but is even contradicted by it’ (quoted in Bonnet, 1987: 39). The Proustian categories of voluntary and involuntary memory differ substantially from Bergson’s concepts of habit-memory and individual or pure memory, which are perhaps more sophisticated but less illuminating for my purposes.



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fear: fear of a repeat attack, fear of being killed, ‘o medo na cabeça’.18 Then he expresses his revolt against God, in uncharacteristic mode: na fúria de insultar Deus e a sua beatitude infinita, pela existência das guerras e por os seus bispos abençoarem os batalhões de Zé Domingos que depois morreriam de intestinos à mostra, sem saberem porquê nem para quê.╇ (94)19

Clearly his concern with knowing, with understanding the reasons and purpose of human behaviour, has not diminished. His quest is still that of self-knowledge, as one individual in a whole of uncomprehending soldiers. But he now implicates the Catholic Church in the war process, for giving its blessing to the regime’s conflict. Furthermore, the all-pervasive fear ‘in his head’, no doubt as a euphemism for his guts, suddenly leads to the memory of another fear, which creeps into his mind: his apparently inexplicable fear of Fridays, as a child, turns out to be fear, indeed horror, of Lent Friday, after he had been told that Christ died to redeem him of his sins. This is his first dysphoric memory of his island childhood. The attention the children were required to pay to Christ’s Passion generated in João a tortured religiosity, which now makes him associate the horror of the soldier’s death with the horror of religion and his particular horror of redemption. Here is a man who scorns redemption – in other words, a man whose thirst for selfknowledge includes assuming responsibility for his own sins. The eruption of this hitherto suppressed childhood memory sets him ‘on the way towards recognition of himself ’ (quoted in Suleiman, 1983: 64). Horror of Lent in childhood and horror of death at war link the two traumatic moments. As Proust explains, ‘if the context of sensations’ – here the fear – ‘in which [memories] are preserved is recaptured, they acquire in turn the same power of installing alone in us the self that originally lived them’ (quoted in Bonnet, 1987: 40). João’s involuntary memory makes him relive a previous paralysing fear, which to some extent helps him overcome the crippling terror he later experiences at Binta. João’s apprenticeship thus starts with the loss of faith (‘Assim quebrava o último fio da fé que o atava à religiosidade que, desde sempre, lhe fora dada [a] beber’, 97),20 with the realisation that no God will help him in this war. However, memory proves more powerful than a rational decision to shed faith: 18 19

[fear in his head] [in his fury to insult God and his infinite beatitude, for the existence of wars, and for the fact that his bishops bless the battalions of Zé Domingos who then die disembowelled, not knowing why or what for] 20 [Thus he broke the last thread of faith which tied him to a religiosity which he had always been made to drink up]

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João keeps thinking, if not of God, of the angels of his preternatural childhood religiosity, as providing some sort of solace.21 Angels at least furnish him with the comfort of poetic embellishment, as if that aspect of a more naive religiosity did not have to perish in the process of loss of faith. Rather than a general loss of faith, it is faith in redemption that he loses, which actually helps the progress of his apprenticeship. Without the possibility of redemption, human beings must assume complete responsibility for their actions; they are left without any avenue of appeal to some transcendental authority that might provide relief. All the more reason for João to scrutinise his motives and ponder his actions, that is, to strive for self-knowledge ever more earnestly. João’s apprenticeship begins with identifying the Church as the accomplice of Salazar’s regime in the enterprise of the colonial war. It continues with his attempt further to define his relation to the fatherland, by means of a progressive dismantling of the rhetoric of empire promoted by the regime. This dismantling can already be detected at various points earlier in the novel, though it becomes more constant from now on. It is important to point out again that this is not a diegetic narrative: it is a story of apprenticeship based on memory, memory of the island remembered at Binta, as much as memory of his time in Binta itself, both recovered in the unspecified present that follows the conclusion of his apprenticeship. And memory does not happen chronologically. Voluntary memory may follow chronology, when someone selects and orders episodes to be recalled. Involuntary memory, however, is intrusive; it can occur in the most unexpected situation. If the structure of a Bildungsroman always appears episodic because it highlights significant moments in the protagonist’s development, a Bildungsroman based on memory must appear even more so because of the non-chronological way in which memory functions. This is what explains the inclusion of comments revealing puzzling prescience on the part of the young protagonist on the eve of his departure for war: because that moment too is part of a memory recorded in writing much later, after the protagonist’s apprenticeship has been completed. From the start, we recall, João aims both at self-knowledge and at understanding the fatherland. Remembering his departure for war the narrative voice says that ‘João sabe da pátria o q.b.’ (10).22 He learns substantially more throughout his apprenticeship, but this acquired knowledge already infuses the questioning tone of some comments in the first chapter: ‘Dar a vida pela

21 Angels appear as a symbolic leitmotiv at strategic points in the novel, with much the same function as the little medicine bag that provides guidance to Wilhelm Meister in Goethe’s novel. 22 [João knows quantum satis [enough] of his country]



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pátria, se necessário for. … E adivinhava-a como um falso grande edifício que começava a desabar de contradições e podridão’ (23).23 There are many instances of a systematic attempt by the protagonist to dismantle the ideological discourse of the Estado Novo, often by quoting directly from the regime’s rhetoric and reversing the quotation by contrasting it with the reality revealed by personal experience. A simple example of this technique is the treatment of the opening line of the national anthem.24 The protagonist recalls how in primary school he used to sing: ‘â•›“Heróis do mar …nação valente” de pobreza e sífilis “imortal”â•›’ (49).25 The notion of Portuguese valour in the anthem’s first line is overturned by inserting two nouns which correspond to subsequent moments in the protagonist’s experience: poverty, of which he was aware on the island; and syphilis, commonly transmitted amongst soldiers in Africa, of which he would probably have learned in Guinea, even if it was also present on the island.26 Sometimes the reversal of meaning is implemented over various chapters, as the process of apprenticeship progresses. A good example here is that of well-worn phrases or slogans from the official language of the Estado Novo presented as literal quotations: ‘O silêncio é a força da virtude, a ignorância o progresso dos povos’ (20).27 Far from being directly denied or even questioned, they become themes running through the novel. For example, when João realises that he is not very politicised, he exclaims: ‘Ninguém tem culpa de vires de uma ilha de mudos’ (55).28 Silence is now dysphorically associated with obscurantism, one of the characteristics associated with the concept of ‘internal colonialism’ that Sousa Santos (2002: 19, 36) highlights ‘in the time-space’ (16) of Portuguese colonialism. Later, João recalls the gatherings of male islanders at the barber’s and the broken segments of conversation he could follow as an adolescent: ‘Tá calado c’as paredes tem oividos. … Eras preso p’ó resto da vida que nem o senhô padre te salvava’ (108).29 The silence that the regime imposes on its soldiers regarding the facts of war, through censorship of their letters home, is the same that governs the backward island of Graciosa, in the protagonist’s view – although he is perhaps less aware that the same silence is imposed all over Portugal. And he encounters a similar 23 [To give his life for his fatherland, if necessary. … And he suspected that the fatherland was a huge false building which was beginning to crumble from its contradictions and rottenness] 24 ‘A Portuguesa’ did not originate in the Estado Novo but it appeals to the rhetoric of patriotism, imperialism and heroism that the regime promoted. The First Republic adopted it as national anthem in 1910. See Oliveira Marques, 1976, vol. 2: 244. 25 [‘Heroes of the sea … valiant nation’ of poverty and ‘immortal’ syphilis] 26 See Jorge Ribeiro, 1999: 45–55. 27 [Silence is the strength of virtue, ignorance is the progress of peoples] 28 [It’s nobody’s fault that you come from an island of mutes] 29 [Shut up ’cause the walls have ears. … You’d be put in jail for the rest of your life, not even the priest could save you]

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silence in Africa. Imperialistic discourse in general has a silencing effect on the colonised, but the discourse of the Estado Novo silenced the supposed agents of colonisation too, as well as the soldiers sent to the war in Africa. A remarkable example of deconstruction of the regime’s ideological discourse in Até Hoje is the reporting of Capitão Gandra’s speech of welcome to the soldiers newly arrived in Guinea. The newcomers know nothing (‘Desceram com as malas a tremer de ignorância’); the captain knows everything (‘O cabeça da pátria … sabe tudo’, 43).30 He will explain what the ignorant soldiers need to know. His speech is supposed to be enlightening and uplifting, and to exhort the newcomers into patriotic, heroic action. The reader learns that Capitão Gandra is a war veteran, on his third colonial war mission, and a rousing orator. The introduction is promising: ‘O discurso do capitão Gandra ficou, será famoso’ (45).31 Nevertheless, the narrative technique employed to report his speech is the very instrument that undercuts its rhetoric: the speech is not at all reproduced, but simply reported or, more precisely, mentioned in indirect speech. In other words, after an enormous build-up of expectation we know absolutely nothing of the speech’s contents. This is particularly striking in a novel that constantly privileges showing over telling.32 Generally, the narrative voice of Até Hoje shows what is happening: the procedure implies more detailed rendering of events and minimal intervention by the narrator. Here, by contrast, the narrative voice refuses to dramatise Capitão Gandra’s speech as it is delivered, reducing it to indirect telling. Telling instead of showing allows for greater freedom in manipulating the information conveyed, which is the most effective way to deflate the patriotic rhetoric, at the same time as it purports to repeat it. Capitão Gandra’s speech is appropriately reported in Ciceronian tricolons (‘Original, invulgar, directo’ – ‘os seus esquemas, os seus dogmas, os seus sacerdotes’ – ‘impulsivo, inspirado, sincero’) but the contents of the speech, that is, the rhetoric of the regime, is completely omitted. By refusing to record the supposed eloquence of the representative of the regime, the narrative voice reveals its sheer vacuity. This deflating technique imposes on the military spokesman of the Estado Novo the silence the latter has imposed on the protagonist and his civilian society. Finally, the narrative voice dismantles the regime’s imperial rhetoric by a complex process of denunciation, acceptance and rejection of state and 30 [They got off with their suitcases, trembling in their ignorance; The head of the fatherland … knows everything] 31 [Captain Gandra’s speech instantly became and will remain famous] 32 I use Lubbock’s terminology introduced in The Craft of Fiction [1921]: ‘the art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be shown, to be exhibited in such a way that it will tell itself ’ (1965: 62). Genette’s innovations in Figures III add precision, but his terms are less transparent (1972: 184ff.)



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personal lies. It often reveals how the regime has usurped Camões’s verses, by distorting their meaning or removing them from context. Such is the case with Camões’s famous lines: ‘dilatando/ a Fé e o Império’ (Os Lusíadas, I.2, 2–3).33 A meditation on the inevitable outcome of the war closes chapter 2, hardly disguising the intervention of an omniscient narrator under the veil of João’s limited perspective. This includes a quotation from a cardinal’s exhortation, ‘a guerra é justa e a causa é santa’ (36),34 proclaiming that this is not a war of liberation by the colonised Africans, but ‘a war of national defense – in other words, a holy war’ (Suleiman, 1983: 104–5), undertaken by Portugal to defend the integrity of its overseas provinces. While the voice of the Church lends its authority to this holy war, the memory of Camões’s line occurs to João and undermines the notion of this holy alliance of faith and empire: ‘Só que, para João, bem estranha era a forma de dilatar a fé e o império’ (37).35 The motif recurs much later in the novel to illustrate the progressive loss of innocence and acquisition of knowledge: ‘Tinham vindo para a Guiné defender a fé e o império das garras vermelhas de outros interesses. Depressa viram que não havia fé nem império a defender’ (111).36 This echo from the national epic extends the apprenticeship from the protagonist to all the soldiers, widening the process beyond the individual, further dismantling the imperial rhetoric and exhibiting its fallacy. Now perceived as deceitful, the regime’s official language is constantly deconstructed by juxtaposing the memory of the ideological discourse previously read or heard with the revelations of lived experience. Yet the longestablished habit of deceit lingers in personal life. The more João exposes the lies of the regime, the more he feels the need to lie in his letters. He conceals the reality of Binta from his parents, feeding them white lies about its pretty setting instead (101–2). Paul Fussell identifies a similar ‘reticence’ in letters by First World War soldiers, ‘which originated in the writers’ sympathy for the feelings of their addressees’ (1975: 183). But such reticence involves more in Até Hoje. Here it entails a manifold process of deceit: the government lies publicly, claiming that the situation is under control and that they are hardly at war. The protagonist knows of the devastating extent of guerrilla warfare. However, ironically he garrisons in the only military position in Guinea where war actually seems not to be happening, and the truth not only appears to be a lie, but if told it will actually confirm as truth the lies of the regime. The only believable truth is another white lie. Hence João fills his letters with the lies his parents have 33 34 35

[to spread (our) faith and empire] [the war is just, and the cause is holy] [The only problem was that, for João, this way of expanding faith and empire seemed quite strange] 36 [They had come to Guinea to defend faith and the empire from the red clutches of other interests. Soon they realised there was no faith and no empire to defend]

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always heard on the national news, sadly contemplating the beauty of his ‘truthful lies’ (‘como eram lindas as suas mentiras verdadeiras’, 103). There is no room for authenticity in a country ruled by deceitful rhetoric. Where State and Church present the ‘civilising mission’ of the imperial enterprise ‘as moral justification for the Western conquest of Africa’ (Harrison, 1992: 137), morality and authenticity become impossible. This reappraisal of the fatherland’s rhetoric constitutes an essential part of the protagonist’s apprenticeship, because his quest for self-knowledge must include a social dimension. In the end he recognises himself as an islander, rather than generally Portuguese. For the islanders have always been in a subaltern position in relation to the mainland, as João’s fellow soldiers instinctively acknowledge by referring to the Azores as ‘a áfrica branca’ (134).37 They are even further removed from any substantial authority than the metropolitan Portuguese under the Estado Novo. And authority is, as David Spurr points out, ‘in some sense conferred by those who obey it’ (1993: 11). Essentially, it is only when the protagonist achieves self-definition as an islander that he can recognise his ambivalence towards that identity and finally reject it too. It is only when he withdraws his accustomed compliance by questioning the authority imposed by rhetoric that he can emancipate himself. With this realisation the protagonist’s notion of fatherland, and his until then always unquestioned willingness to fulfil his duty to it, changes radically. Having explored his identity as an islander and reappraised his relationship to the fatherland, João faces a third important step: the clarification of his ambiguous sexuality. In this he is less successful. Despite various references to Isabel, his platonic girlfriend, his initial recollections include details that already point to latent homosexuality when he is still on the island. He mentions his odd (feminine?) sensibility (‘sensibilidades estranhas’) and a shameful secret (‘o segredo que não revelaria nunca’, 14).38 This is no doubt another area of silence that he needs to break. His first encounter with Fernando, a fellow soldier at the Binta barracks, seems to awaken his homosexual disposition: struck by Fernando’s beauty, João realises that ‘há um pássaro maldito que desperta, que esvoaça reprimido’.39 There is also a rather misogynistic statement about war and misery being evil females: ‘a guerra e a miséria, fêmeas do mal’ (98). Late in the novel, as João’s recollections of life on the island start uncovering unpleasant events hitherto suppressed, the reader learns that as a child he was the victim of an attempt at homosexual abuse. This revelation comes once again via a sudden involuntary memory. João is upset because he has seen Fernando kiss another man, but he refuses to acknowledge jealousy. The 37 38 39

[white africa] [strange sensibilities; the secret he would never reveal] [there is an accursed bird which now awakens and flutters, though repressed]



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crucial memory is triggered when a soldier claims that he would have had sex with an attractive man in Bissau if only the price had been right. There is no hint of moral condemnation of homosexuality in this environment, where it seems to be common practice. Only the price is at stake.40 Then João recalls a hot, dry summer on the island when everybody had to queue for water. The episode he now remembers and relives took place behind the public fountain: a young man made advances to him; he managed to escape but ‘sabendo que fugia do seu próprio desejo’ (138),41 so that even at that early stage his sexuality is ambiguous.42 Once again, the involuntary memory seems to play in a context of fear: ‘um medo fascinante também’ (138), the fear of his own homosexual desire. Moreover, it is linked with the complex symbolism of water – as source of life, representation of love and sex, agent of death and oblivion. The episode occurs when the island has had a drought (deprivation of life-giving water), and the islanders must queue at the public fountain slowly to fill their containers. The dripping water recalled by João has obvious sexual overtones, prefiguring what is about to happen behind the fountain: ‘a água que escorria da bica delgada e mansa como um fio de lã’ (137).43 As he recalls the incident and his consequent ‘fascinating fear’ (which the ‘meekness’ of the water cannot dispel), João immediately lets go of the uncomfortable memory. And memory, as Mary Jacobus emphasises, can represent ‘a contradictory desire – not the wish to remember, but the wish to forget’ (1987: 119). So João shakes off the disturbing recollection and shelters in the stories of the soldier returning from Bissau, whose jocularity vanishes as he tells of the drowning of forty-three Portuguese soldiers while withdrawing from a notoriously dangerous position. The river Geba becomes their burial site, with its waters soon bringing oblivion: ‘Nada sobre as águas fala já desse naufrágio’ (139).44 The fear inspired by such drowning (though unmentioned), in textual proximity with that of homosexual desire (dread of dissolution, of loss of control), and the fear of death at war are at least subliminally connected. This may explain João’s refusal to consummate a potentially attractive relationship with Fernando during their time in Binta, without ever volunteering an explanation – although he explicitly denies fear. He only accepts it after demobilisation, back in Lisbon, where his journey to war and loss of inno40 In a compelling article, Luís Madureira (1995) sees sodomy as the figuration of Portuguese colonialism in Africa. 41 [knowing that he was running away from his own desire] 42 Villar raises the interesting possibility that ‘the homosexuality of the soldiers could be seen as a symbol of the colonial war and Portugal’s relationship with her African colonies’ (2004: 166). However, João’s homosexual inclination in adolescence leads me not to subscribe to her view in this detail. 43 [the water that ran slowly from the spout, thin and meek as a woollen thread] 44 [Nothing on those waters now speaks of that shipwreck]

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cence began: ultimate completion of his apprenticeship, final proof that a new self has emerged. One would expect that, in a war situation, the protagonist could test himself in many other traditional trials. The dreaded military operation in the ‘mata do Ohio’ would suit: ‘Aguentaria ainda a operação à mata do Ohio?’ (145).45 But its cancellation robs the protagonist of the opportunity to prove himself, confirming that his real apprenticeship cannot take place within the theatre of a war which appears to be a non-war. One major trial remains: to withstand homosexual temptation, before finally giving in to it, as a rite of passage, when João knows that his apprenticeship is just about completed. He has never wished to prove himself as a war hero, only ‘to withstand’, to test himself. Circularly, this confirms that his journey of apprenticeship, although triggered by his participation in the conflict, has taken place outside the circumstance of war: the final test relates to a different self, suppressed during adolescent sexual awakening. It is only now when he has freed himself from the limitations of the island culture that he is capable of accepting his previously suppressed identity, the memory of which returns involuntarily. His whole apprenticeship has thus proceeded within the confines of his memory, deliberately or involuntarily, by contrasting his received value system with the reality at the Binta barracks. Suleiman’s syntagmatic definition of an apprenticeship story as ‘two parallel transformations undergone by the protagonist … first, a transformation from ignorance (of self) to knowledge (of self); second, a transformation from passivity to action’ (1983: 65) provides the framework for my conclusion.46 Greimas’s actantial model must confirm it at the paradigmatic level:47 the categories of subject, object, and receiver of the object (destinataire) are syncretized in a single actor, who is the hero of the novel. The hero goes forth in order to find knowledge of himself (object), and it is he who will benefit from that knowledge (receiver). (quoted in Suleiman, 1983: 65)

This all applies to the protagonist of Até Hoje, who sets out to acquire a knowledge of himself which is inextricably tied up with an understanding (and consequent dismantling) of the ideological discourse of the fatherland, as well as the patriarchal, gendered discourse of his island culture. He is the 45 46

here.

[Would he still withstand the operation in the Ohio forest?] Suleiman’s chapter on ‘The Structure of Apprenticeship’ is particularly useful

47 Greimas’s model (1966: 172–91) deals with the network of relations between six fundamental actants, sujet (subject), objet (object), destinateur (sender), destinataire (receiver), adjuvant (helper), opposant (opponent), which provide structure and meaning to any narrative.



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subject of the quest and the receiver who benefits from the learning process. And at the end of the novel, armed with his recently acquired knowledge, he makes the hitherto unannounced decision to emigrate from his island, to which he has just returned, signalling the beginning of a new life, the choice of a new direction. Suleiman does not consider the possibility of a Bildungsroman built upon memory. In Até Hoje João achieves self-knowledge in remote Guinea by recalling scenes of his previous life on the island, and by confronting himself with those recollections, with the beliefs he held then and the fundamental changes that the experience of war has forced on his view of the world. At the end of his time in Guinea, his fellow soldiers acknowledge that his apprenticeship is well advanced: ‘Habituaram-se a respeitar o seu comportamento ... o seu falar de homem cultivado – não pelos livros mas pela vida’ (106).48 A true apprenticeship must come from experience of the world. Confined to the Binta barracks, the only experience of the world João could acquire resulted from the febrile activity of his memory, both voluntary and involuntary. But the final trial happens as a rite of passage when the war has been truly left behind. Finally, is this a novel about war or about apprenticeship? It is both. It is a novel about the fear of finding oneself beyond all inherited rhetoric and cultural definitions, as much as about the constant fear experienced at war (even when there is no war action). João claims repeatedly that he wants to forget the conflict.49 But the diary he keeps in Binta undermines such claims: ‘Gastava noites a escrever’ (143) – although curiously even the diary perpetuates the vacillation between conflicting desires to forget and to remember the war. In the same breath the protagonist explains the feverish pace of his night-time writing (‘Não queria perder nada’) so as not to forget anything, and his determination to forget (‘Tenho que esquecer o grito que África me quer deixar nos ouvidos’, 144).50 In his newly acquired worldliness, the protagonist knows that time dampens all memory: ‘O tempo há-de fazer esquecer a Guiné e a sua guerra’ (158), though the tone is more of half-hearted wish than certitude. But, aware of 48 [They learned to respect his behaviour … his way of speaking as an educated man – not by books, but by life] 49 ‘Da Guiné não diria uma palavra. Não diria uma palavra que fosse verdade’ (47); ‘a tropa e a guerra eram coisas de passar e esquecer’ (66); ‘Bissau e Binta eram para esquecer’ (101); ‘uma decisão de rei: Binta, a guerra, a Guiné, os companheiros seriam apagados do peito’ (116). [About Guinea he would not say a word, not a word that would be true; military service and the war were things to endure and to forget; Bissau and Binta were to forget; a royal decision: Binta, the war, Guinea, the fellow-soldiers would all be erased from his chest] 50 [He spent his nights writing; he did not want to miss/forget anything; I have to forget the scream Africa wants to leave in my ears]

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the regime’s strategy to forget – better: to silence – this war (‘Parece que ninguém pensa nisto’), he develops a feeling of revolt, a wish to become ‘a voz dos estropiados, dos loucos e dos mortos’ (160).51 Finally, the need to forget prevails: in ‘a ritual of cleansing’ (Villar, 2004: 161), João tosses his war diary into the fire. The fact remains that the novel has been written and stands as a permanent reminder of the plight of those who took part in the colonial war. The written word becomes, in Horace’s famous line, a monument of a kind that time cannot so easily erase, an everlasting memory.52 Writing breaks the silence and signals the achievement of the apprenticeship: from passivity to action. João refuses to be a hero and aims at dismantling the rhetoric of patriotic heroism, which makes Paul Fussell’s words on a different kind of heroism particularly apposite: ‘the apotheosis of the soldier turned literary rememberer, whose survival – not to mention his ability to order his unbelievable, mad materials into proportion and serial coherence – constitutes his “victory”, and thus his heroism’ (1975: 130).

51 [Time will make us forget Guinea and its war; It seems that nobody thinks about this; the voice of those maimed, gone crazy, or killed] 52 Horace, Odes III. xxx, 1: ‘Exegi monumentum aere perennius’ [I have raised a monument more lasting than bronze].

THE PERSONAL MEMORY

3

Wanda Ramos, Percursos While the Bildungsroman traditionally focuses on the self-education of a young male hero, feminist critics have been revising and expanding the definition of the genre since the 1970s, establishing the separate category of novels having a female protagonist. The female Bildungsroman is now recognised in its own right, although often under different names. While Esther Labovitz (1988) maintains the classical term, Abel, Hirsch and Langland prefer ‘fictions of female development’ (1983) and Susan Rosowski opts for ‘novel of awakening’ (1983). Wanda Ramos’s Percursos (do Luachimo ao Luena) [Travels (from the Luachimo to the Luena)] defies straightforward genre classification. Thematically the book is certainly a ‘fiction of female development’. It is also undoubtedly a retrospective narrative, with the ‘travels’ of the female protagonist being told from memory, more than twenty years after the childhood recaptured and about ten years after the last memories of adulthood recalled in the text. But Percursos could also be considered an autobiographical novel with a zero degree of authorial identification or an (unsigned) autobiography in the third person. The ambiguity derives from the text itself, from the narrator’s choice of intertextual weavings. The title, Percursos (routes, journeys, travels, trajectories, distances covered), and the specific geographical subtitle (the Luachimo river running north–south and the Luena flowing east–west in eastern Angola) appear to label the book as travel writing. In the end, the two rivers mark physical space as much as time periods: ‘the Luachimo is the river that flows through Dundo, the time-space of the [protagonist’s] childhood, the Luena is the river at Luso, the time-space of [her] adulthood’ (Morão, 1993: 171, my translation). These  Wanda Ramos, 1980, Percursos (do Luachimo ao Luena) (Lisboa: Presença). The novel won the 1980 Fiction Prize of the Portuguese Writers’ Association. All quotations are taken from this edition and are indicated by page reference in the text. All translations are mine.  I follow Philippe Lejeune’s terminology, ‘autobiographie à la troisième personne’, first presented in Le Pacte autobiographique (1975: 15–19) and later developped in Je est un autre. L’Autobiographie, de la littérature aux médias (c.1980). In English, his On Autobiography (c.1988) contains a selection of chapters from several of his studies on autobiography.

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are also the only geographical boundaries the protagonist of Percursos claims to have internalised by touching them (‘palpá-los’), their waters still soaking her memory (‘Rios estes de áfrica que ainda lhe ensopam a memória’, 68). More importantly, the journey takes the protagonist from inner well-being as a child in Lunda to existential malaise as a young adult, a spiritual journey of ‘awakening’ that also includes Portugal. As the Bildungsroman, too, explores the journey motif (psychologically, from innocence to self-knowledge, but also physically, as each new environment adds to the educational process), the ambiguity of the ‘travels’ is already in the title, further complicating the question of genre classification. Abel, Hirsch and Langland highlight two fundamental differences when the concept Bildungsroman is applied to fictions of female development. Society applies different constraints to men and women, so that while ‘male protagonists struggle to find a hospitable context in which to realize their aspirations, female protagonists must frequently struggle to voice any aspirations whatsoever’ (1983: 6–7). Secondly, the actions of female heroines are more determined by the mother–daughter bond than those of male protagonists by any parental relation. The young woman protagonist of Percursos aspires to become an artist, but her parents refuse to let her study either painting or drawing (‘pintura nem pensar … e para mais desenhar mulheres e homens nus?’ 19), a refusal couched in terms that reveal their firm beliefs about acceptable or unacceptable careers on the basis of gender as well as an ill-disguised repression of sexuality. So, the protagonist must find an alternative path, continuing to draw throughout her life though without any formal training and seeking expression instead through the craft of writing. Percursos starts with recollections of the protagonist’s childhood in the 1950s, in the eastern Angolan province of Lunda, where her father is an administrative officer with the Diamang (Angolan Diamonds) Company. Childhood recollections stop at age nine, when the family goes to Portugal on an extended holiday and she stays on in Lisbon to pursue her secondary studies. The novel then concentrates on her two-month holiday back in Angola, at the end of her secondary education in Portugal, aged sixteen, in 1964 (three years into the Angolan pro-independence war), before telling of her return to Angola, aged twenty-two, as the young wife of a doctor conscripted to war service in the savannas and deserts (not the river plains) of eastern Angola (particularly Cassamba). These reminiscences focus on the quick disintegration of her marriage (they part within one year) to a man whose ‘pathological’ tendencies she now discovers. She then makes friends  Genre boundaries have, in any case, become increasingly blurred in the literature of the second half of the twentieth century.  [painting, don’t even think about it … what, to draw naked men and women?]



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with one or two women, before departing for Portugal, alone. The periods of her life in Portugal are left untold, so that the gaps in the narrative are just as large as what is recounted. Each of the book’s four parts is divided into sections, similar to diary entries, although not dated. Instead, these are registered and numbered as ‘reminiscences’. Visually, then, the book looks like a diary written neither daily nor weekly, but rather in memory blocks. Consequently, it reads as a retrospective narrative, ordered according to more or less sequential ‘reminiscences’ (with several drastic disruptions to temporal linearity), which give it a particularly fragmentary structure.

Writing and memory Four much shorter sections (one or two pages at most) which are not reminiscences, but rather in the narrative present, separate the book’s four main parts. They are written in a much more abstract and poetic language than the ‘autobiographical’ reminiscences, with truncated sentences, often without a conjugated verb. These four sections have titles: Limbo, Hiato, Interlúdio, Proscénio; and each constitutes a meditation simultaneously on the craft of writing and on the painful process of recovering and voicing personal memory or, to put it differently, setting memory the difficult task of ordering and making sense of personal experience. Limbo (43) refers to the difficulty of establishing the foundations of the ‘edifice’ of writing (‘Tantos dias para os fundamentos deste edifício’) and recovering the elements left forgotten ‘nos esconsos da matéria amorfa da memória’. In Hiato (57) the excitement of writing has temporarily evaporated (‘Consome-se enfim a euforia da escrita’) because of the distress caused by memories, now recovered, now effaced, like writings on a blackboard (‘Como num quadro negro. Produz-se a esponja e apagam-se os resíduos’). Interlúdio (79–80) becomes more explicit about the purpose of this act of writing down one’s memory (‘Quase inextricável memória hoje de rituais’): what is signalled as inextricable in the memory process is the ‘enredamento de lexemas’ (‘memória que não perdoa, o enredamento de lexemas, chana por cidade’); the difficulty lies in the attempt at unravelling the lexical confusion of Angolan words (‘chana’) and Portuguese words (‘cidade’), standing as it does for the taxing effort of untangling the  

[Limbo, Hiatus, Interlude, Proscenium] [So many days for the foundations of this building; in the recesses of the amorphous matter of memory]  [Almost inextricable memory today of rituals]  [memory that does not forgive, the entanglement of lexemes, ‘chana’ instead of ‘cidade’]. ‘Chana’ is the Angolan word for plain; ‘cidade’ is the Portuguese one for city.

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very essence of the protagonist’s identity, African or European – which is self, which is other? – as she wonders: regressar aqui enfim, tão pesada, para vestir o melhor dos sorrisos brancos … abandonar lá muito à frente a pele que devia envergar, o fato da sua carne verdadeira de que esta é tão-só um arremedo, em lisboa antiquíssima e continental.╇ (80)

Finally, Proscénio (95–6) gathers the dispersed threads together: ten years have passed, words had been jotted down in a fragmented notebook, mostly during the protagonist’s confinement in Cassamba, where writing was the only escape from tedium and the antidote to the disintegration of her personality, which the oppressive circumstances (her collapsing marriage and the war around them) threatened to bring about.

Testimony of coloniality The ‘reminiscences’ are numbered. The first one sets the colonial scene in which the little girl grows up. It opens with the recollection of a sentence in Angolan Portuguese, sounding ‘foreign’ or ungrammatical to a Portuguese reader, uttered by a black servant speaking with the girl’s mother: ‘Vai ’gora no mato, sinhora … Vai ver família … Tem ainda os minino, tirar saudade dele’ (11).10 The mother’s reply imitates the creole features to some extent, showing that the communication between white settlers and blacks is not done in standard Portuguese.11 These opening pages confirm that Percursos is not a conventional (auto)biography by avoiding the customary beginning with the subject’s birth. Instead, the little girl’s earliest recollections are tied up with the linguistic and mixed-race environment in which she grows up. And the language she uses in her own reminiscing (i.e., no longer merely reproducing the black servant’s speech) is itself ‘tainted’ both lexically (‘os monas, mangonhar’) and syntactically (‘As que mais gostava’).12 The racism inherent in this colonial society immediately emerges, candidly,  [to return here at last, so burdened, to put on the best of white smiles … to abandon farther along the skin which she should wear, the suit of her true flesh, of which this one is nothing but an imitation, in this very ancient, continental lisbon] 10 [I goes into the bush now, ma’am … goes to see the family … I still has the children, missing them] 11 Angolan linguistic features include third-person conjugated verb extended to the first person; general use of the preposition ‘em/no’ to indicate motion; plural marking only in the first word of a syntagma, with the subsequent ones unmarked for number. 12 Angolan terms for ‘children’ and ‘to loaf, to be lazy’; ‘The ones she liked best’, with omission of the preposition de used in standard Portuguese.



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through the little girl’s eyes: she is never allowed to transgress codes of social conduct and racial hierarchy. She must not water the garden, which would give the black servant an unacceptable sense of familiarity (‘dar confiança ao preto’, 11).13 Her parents dress her inappropriately for the African climate, with materials sent from Portugal (‘folhos, organzas e cambraias, … laçaÂ� rotes no cabelo, fitinhas de cetim’, 12),14 rather than the local ones, suitable only for black women (‘coisa para pretas’). The protagonist’s parents must prevent at any cost adoption of the Africans’ manners or dress,15 a sign that the fear of the coloniser’s ‘going native’ (Santos, 2002: 26–7) or the dread of ‘the colonizer’s … degeneration into the savage’ (Orr, 1994: 155) always haunted every colonial’s mind. What the first reminiscence emphasises is the process of imposition of a Portuguese identity on a little girl who feels very much at home in an African environment. First, she feels comfortable in the local mixed language: she refers to Portugal as ‘puto’, a ‘black Portuguese’ word (‘falar prètuguês’, 37) which her father explicitly forbids her to use. In fact, the use of varying degrees of ‘black Portuguese’ (the blacks’, her mother’s watered-down version for communication with the servants and her own), in the earliest reminiscence and in a context that involves the little girl’s mother, is an oblique way of claiming the Angolan variety of Portuguese as her mother tongue. Portugal, that other vague entity (‘Geografia de um continente longínquo de cor’, 12),16 makes no sense to her. Secondly, despite her father’s edict, she does have contact with the Africans in the domestic environment. And she feels more comfortable with them than with other white children. The latter tease her and humiliate her for being shy and a good student, whereas an understated affectionate complicity grows between her and the black servant who quickly eats up the food she hates but her parents would force her to have (23). This complicity is a sign of a deeper affinity between the young girl and the black servant. The parental attempt to mould her into a Portuguese identity, even though they all live in a society thousands of kilometres away from the imperial centre, compares with the concerted effort to impose a European culture upon African peoples. Osterhammel rightly sees as characteristic of colonialism the expectation of ‘extensive acculturation to the values and customs of Europe’ (1997: 15–16) on the part of the colonised. So it is in Percursos, where the acculturated black servants must adopt the Portuguese language as best they can and leave family and traditional life13 14 15

[to be too familiar with the black man] [frills, organzas and cambrics, … bows in her hair, satin ribbons] See Orr,1994: 152–68, for an analysis of colonial dress as a sign of ambivalence and ambiguity. 16 [geography of a faraway continent learned by heart]

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style behind, ‘no mato’, in the bush, a space further removed from colonial cultural control. But, although the rule was the colonisers’ unwillingness ‘to make cultural concessions to subjugated societies’, Osterhammel does recognise the existence of some effort of ‘counter-acculturation’ in the area of Portuguese colonialism, whereby the Portuguese coloniser, to some extent, ‘borrowed … from the dominated civilizations’ (1997: 16). This limited area of ‘counter-acculturation’ is the ambiguous space where the Portuguese-born little girl and the Portuguese-colonised African servant meet and develop the affective ‘forms of reciprocity’ that distinguish Portuguese colonialism (Santos, 2002: 18) and render colonial ambivalence ‘trivial’ (17) in the Portuguese manner of exercising colonial power, which was considerably different from that of other European nations.17 There is no suggestion that the mother shares a similar familiarity with the Africans, because as the white boss’s wife she must act according to her role, almost as a ‘mini-agent of the empire’ (Owen and Rothwell, 2004: xii). Still, one of the little girl’s enduring memories is that of seeing her mother and the same servant operating on a rooster’s swollen foot, ‘comentando entre eles quase cúmplices, esquecidos das diferenças naquela tarefa que os aproximara’.18 Her father, on the other hand, finds the whole operation ridiculous (‘o pai achando ridículo tudo aquilo, tinha a mania de achar ridículas as coisas naturais’, 31).19 Although both parents are portrayed as elitist and class conscious within the settler society, the mother seems to have more opportunity – or less reluctance – to get closer to the Africans, at least within the domestic sphere. On the contrary, the father is not prepared ever to forget the unspecified, but clearly irreconcilable, ‘differences’, and the ‘natural things’ he finds so ridiculous may well be those pertaining to domesticity, women’s domain, as well as to the ‘natural’ world, that of the ‘uncivilised’ blacks. The male colonist must never condone a difference that connotes ‘a remove from normative European practice’ (Tiffin and Lawson, 1994: 230), whereas the mother can be tolerated to move in a more ambiguous space, as long as this remains private. The little girl then recalls the memory of a black man who has been beaten till he is soaked in blood: [o pai] usaria talvez o chicote? Porrada lembra-se ela que sim, de ter visto algum negro de sangue ensopando o nariz ... recorda-se de alguns cuspirem 17 Sousa Santos emphasises that such ‘forms of reciprocity’ are ‘unsuspected’ in British colonialism. In the Portuguese colonial space, there is no ‘extreme polarization between colonizer and colonized’ (2002: 17). 18 [commenting to one another, almost accomplices, oblivious of the differences in that task that had brought them together] 19 [the father finding it all ridiculous, he always found ridiculous all things that were natural]



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com um silvo por entre os dentes quando eram mandados fazer coisas, ... revolta calada.╇ (14)20

The episode stands out because of the admission of the brutal treatment inflicted on the blacks by the easily offended white bosses, but also because it underlines the importance of memory in the construction of this narrative. Auditive memory registers and stresses linguistic difference, but visual memory (lembrar / recordar) always grants the subject the authoritative status of eyewitness, legally indisputable. This is also the first time the expression ‘revolta calada’ appears in Percursos, to be repeated later several times with slight variants. The first is the ‘revolta calada’ of the black servants muttering insults to the Portuguese masters (14). The mother has a similar reaction, as a ‘mulher frustrada tomada de revolta calada’ (26),21 when scoffed by her husband for her excessive appetite for reading; and her daughter too, when her father forbids her to play with other children. She stays at home, ‘tão submissa’,22 but takes revenge by painting her nails with glue (18). The twelfth reminiscence again shows the little girl in hushed rebellion: ‘sonsa na submissão aos pais, rebelde por dentro até lhe doer o corpo’ (30).23 Finally, in the forty-second reminiscence, the protagonist remembers the same ‘calada revolta’ (87) of her younger self within her parents’ circle of Portuguese colonists. The blacks and the women, then, perhaps share a feeling of complicity, in the sense in which colonial women have come to be seen as victims of ‘a double colonization’ (Petersen and Rutherford, 1986), and inasmuch as the marginalised feel solidarity amongst themselves against a common source of discrimination. Both the black Angolans and the Portuguese women living in the colony are treated as inferior, told what to do, kept under control and above all kept silent – the blacks by the Portuguese colonialists; the mother and the daughter by the male head of the family.24 In the mid-1950s Angola was still one of Portugal’s undisputed colonies; so too were women, as objects of patriarchy, a ‘colonial territory’ as yet unchallenged. Curiously, the adjective that describes the silently rebellious little girl (‘sonsa na submissão aos pais’, 30) is the same that Homi Bhabha chooses to characterise the ‘sly civility’ 20 [did he [the father] use the whip perhaps? Beatings she does remember, yes, remembers having seen some black man, soaked with the blood streaming from his nose, … she recalls that some of them used to spit with a hiss through clenched teeth when they were told to go and do something, … muted revolt.] 21 [a frustrated woman, gripped by muted revolt] 22 [so submissive] 23 [sly in her submission to her parents, rebellious inside to the point that her body hurt] 24 Tiffin and Lawson also emphasise that the female settler is ‘simultaneously an object of patriarchy and an agent of imperial racism’ (1994: 231).

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(1994: 93–101) of the colonised towards the coloniser, with its connotation of temporary and self-serving compliance. The father’s authoritarian figure looms large in the early reminiscences in Percursos. The narrator describes him as a ‘stooge’ (‘um pau-mandado’), a ‘subaltern’ constantly humiliated by the higher administrators of the multinational Diamang (‘subalterno e humilhando-se’, 13; ‘subalterno e humilhado’, 14), and an arrogant know-all (26, etc.). But this subaltern can speak25 – both in the domestic sphere, where his word prevails, and, to some extent, in the colonial public arena, because of his position within the diamond company. He is certainly not ‘as deprived of sovereignty as the colonized’ (Santos, 2002: 19), but his authority is minor in the hierarchy of the multinational. Also, much later, when he returns to Portugal after Angola’s independence, his voice no longer has any of the authority once granted by the colonial situation. As a ‘retornado’ in Portugal,26 his retrospective evaluation of his colonial working life is full of bitterness, stemming – one suspects – from the disappointment of not having derived enough profit from his time in Angola and not being paid enough attention in the metropolis: ‘desculpa de que uma vida inteira perdida pelas áfricas e imprevista a descolonização, vida toda de sacrifícios, diria, uma ridícula indemnização e já foi sorte, como não havia de estar ele traumatizado’ (13).27 The father, then, is a perfect example of ‘that ambivalent figure, the settler subject’: Situated at the very site of operation of colonial power, the male settler is part of the imperial enterprise, its agent, and its beneficiary, without ever acquiring more than associate membership of the imperial club. … From this half-empowered limbo he fetishizes … a Europe which in turn depreciates him … Simultaneously he infantilizes, displaces, and desires the indigene. (Tiffin and Lawson, 1994: 231)

The little girl’s ‘revolta calada’ summarises two aspects of one of the travels narrated in Percursos: revolt against her oppressive family leads the protagonist in her struggle for development; silence imposed on her makes her strive to find a voice of her own. Simultaneously, the protagonist also becomes aware of the parallels between the plight of the colonised Angolans and her own subaltern condition. 25 Spivak’s ‘subaltern’ (1985; rpt. Williams and Chrisman, 1993: 66–111) is of course a very different one, meaning the colonised non-elite. See Sousa Santos’s analysis of Portugal’s ‘subaltern colonialism’ (2002: 9–12) as characterised by ‘the excesses … and the deficiencies’ of Portuguese colonisation. 26 Repatriated ex-colonials are called ‘retornados’, returnees, in Portuguese. 27 [the excuse of a whole life wasted in the africas and the unforeseen decolonisation, a whole life of sacrifices, he’d say, a ridiculous pittance by way of indemnity and better than nothing at that, how was he supposed not to be traumatised]



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Percursos is therefore the story of a woman’s struggle for freedom from masculine authority – from her authoritarian father, her ‘bossy’ military grandfather and her ‘pathological’ husband;28 it is also a testimony of the Angolans’ struggle for liberation from colonial rule and from the encroachment on their culture by a colonial authority that tries to silence their voice. This side of the narrative provides constant background to the protagonist’s personal memories. The stages are parallel: the little girl’s submissiveness and the Angolans’ long-suffering endurance of colonialism; her first signs of disobedience and challenge (her lips ‘desobedientes, em desafio’, 33) and the Angolans first whispered insults (‘por entre os dentes’, 14) against the colonial masters; the adolescent’s awakening (through reading and first relationships) and the outbreak of the Angolan pro-independence war; the break-up of her marriage (initially envisaged as a temporary separation) occurs when the war is at its height, so that the collapse of the marriage in fact symbolises the collapse of the Portuguese colonial presence in Africa (Moutinho, 1993).

A fiction of female development After so much silencing, the protagonist’s struggle for self-liberation must begin by her finding a suitable voice. Painting would have been her first choice. Boasting about the achievements of his child prodigy (18), the father praises her natural talent for drawing. But when, aged fifteen, she announces her wish to study painting, the idea is immediately rejected. This career would not suit a ‘well-behaved’ young lady. The alternative she finds is literary expression. The perfecting of such a voice becomes the essential element of her liberation and a recurrent subject for reflection in the non-reminiscing sections of the book. In the first and longest part of the book (childhood), the little girl is twice described as well-behaved (‘bem-comportada’), by her parents (more a constant recommendation than praise) and by other children (to mock her). Then the ninth reminiscence opens with an ironic comment, half in French, half in Portuguese: ‘Une jeune fille bien rangée, claro’. A ‘dutiful daughter’, of course. As Simone de Beauvoir’s Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée was published in 1958 and internal dating places these early reminiscences in the mid-1950s,29 the comment attests again to an ulterior narrative, recapturing 28 Of the grandfather we are told only that he is ‘bossy’ (‘mandão’) and a senior army officer, who beats his other grandchild to educate her (‘à força de bofetada’, 27). Of the husband we know that he is a male chauvinist, ‘perversely’ domineering under a pretence of liberal-mindedness (‘machismo … dominação perversamente … falsa liberalidade’, 48) and that he stands ‘on the threshold of the perverse, the malign, the pathological’ (‘no frágil limiar do perverso, do maligno, enfim do patológico’, 84). 29 In 1957 she is aged nine.

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the past from the perspective of the present. The reiterated epithet ‘bemcomportada’ hints at the Portuguese translation of Beauvoir’s memoirs.30 The singling out of Beauvoir’s title establishes self-education through reading as the path to the protagonist’s liberation, also showing how the narrative voice reflects, much later, on what impelled the young protagonist to seek her freedom. Some of Brosman’s insights into Beauvoir’s Mémoires could equally apply to the story of female development narrated in Percursos. Like the novel’s protagonist, Simone de Beauvoir seeks to explain her intellectual awakening in her Mémoires, the volume constituting ‘a project of illumination of the self ’ (Brosman, 1991: 136). Beauvoir, too, attributes great importance to the historical events unfolding around her, and particularly the Algerian war (with its obvious parallels with the situation of the protagonist of Percursos). Limbo, the section that marks the end of the reminiscences on childhood and colonial life, signals the next step in the protagonist’s acquisition of a distinct voice. She now acknowledges an affinity with Anaïs Nin. A direct quotation from Diary I (an entry on Nin’s feelings of doubleness) appears in this reflective section, fully justified: just like Percursos and Beauvoir’s Mémoires, Nin’s Diaries amount to an immense narrative of a woman’s struggle for liberation (albeit from a differently oppressive reality). Another important link may be the fact that ‘throughout the Diary, Nin associates her life-work with the boat and journey motifs’ (Scholar, 1984: 13). It is on the long voyage to Portugal that the nine-year-old, who had hitherto experienced only ‘muted revolt’, awakens to the realities from which her parents have always shielded her, including the sexual flirtatiousness of female passengers, of whom her mother disapproves.31 As in Nin’s Diaries, the journey motif is also constant in Percursos – in the title, in the protagonist’s physical displacements and in the symbolic journey of her maturing. However, a greater affinity relates to the sense of fragmentation of self expressed by Nin in the passage quoted in Percursos. Nin’s perception of June Miller as a double made her feel threatened by ‘the prospect of endless self-duplication’ (Scholar, 1984: 79). The protagonist of Percursos experiences the same feeling, though (unlike Nin) she perceives it as imposed from the outside: social structures require her to be Portuguese, an identity foreign to her, for her familiarity with the Africans within the domestic sphere (not allowed in the public domain) makes her feel more comfortable in the inbetween space of African-raised Europeans whose sympathies lie with the Africans.

30 31

Memórias de Uma Menina Bem-Comportada. For her part, the little girl approves of these women’s freer behaviour, even thinking that her mother should follow their example.



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Hiato brings the next literary quotation. As the heroine progresses in her quest for a voice, her desire to establish artistic connections becomes more imperative. The quotation from Louis Aragon’s literary autobiography, Je n’ai jamais appris à écrire ou les incipit, appeals because its very title points to the predicament in which the protagonist of Percursos finds herself: the slow process of learning to write – which she must now undertake to give literary expression to her reminiscences. Moreover, Aragon is a poet, a novelist and an artist, just as the protagonist of Percursos continues to draw, writes poems (included in the novel’s pages) and (if protagonist and narrative voice coincide) is now experimenting in prose. But the quotation again focuses on desperation: Anaïs Nin, although ‘desperate and bewildered’, can hide her ‘despair’; Aragon feels thrown into the water and forced to swim.32 Interlúdio includes an anonymous poem in English, probably one of the protagonist’s own. Anonymity is part of the game in Percursos, where only the protagonist and her mother have no names, because they are the ones most affected by an imposition of silence that robs them of identity. The poems represent the voice that comes perhaps more naturally to her, since she is still ‘learning to write’ prose. The final literary quotation is a multiple one: Lawrence Durrell’s poem ‘Je est un autre – Rimbaud’, which evokes Durrell’s feeling of being watched over by Rimbaud while he is ‘working late’. ‘Working late’ brings out the idea of struggling to write. Above all, it evokes Rimbaud’s famous prose line, ‘Je est un autre’, from the so-called ‘Lettre du Voyant’.33 Whereas the protagonist quotes Durrell, one suspects that the attraction of this particular quotation probably stems from the seductive formulation of the French poet’s line.34 The fragmentation of self must find a deep echo in the protagonist’s own need for self-definition, disrupted as her sense of identity is by a complex feeling of Otherness. Her perception of her own alterity is manifold: she feels different from the Portuguese colonial society around her, more intelligent and rebel-

32 Water (drowning, swimming, bathing, rivers, ocean, rains, water bubbles) plays a central role in Percursos, which deserves to be analysed separately. Santos (1982) focuses on the centrality of the theme in her review of the novel. 33 Arthur Rimbaud, ‘Lettre à Georges Izambard’, 13 May 1871, repeated and expanded in ‘Lettre à Paul Demeny’, 15 May 1871, Oeuvres, 1960: 343–4 and 344–7. For an account of the developments between the first and the second formulations of the statement, see Graaf, 1960: 54–62. 34 Philippe Lejeune chooses Rimbaud’s phrase for the title of his 1980 book, explaining its appeal: ‘La formule de Rimbaud, quel que soit le sens qu’on lui donne, jette le trouble dans l’esprit de chacun, par l’apparent dérèglement de l’énonciation qu’elle produit. Non pas banalement: je suis un autre. Ni, “incorrectement”, je est un autre. Mais Je est un autre. Quel Je? Et un autre que qui?’ (1980: 7).

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lious.35 Family and social circumstances temporarily divert such feelings by requiring her to become Portuguese and be educated in Portugal. Then, her sense of Otherness becomes even more confusing as she chooses European (rather than African) literary models in her quest for a personal literary voice. Finally, however, she makes amends for her hesitations: the very last quotation, included as the epigraph to Proscénio, is from the novel Nós, os do Makulusu, by the Angolan writer José Luandino Vieira.36 The choice is triply appropriate: like the protagonist of Percursos, Luandino’s protagonist is Portuguese-born but Angolan by choice; the novel shows him poignantly torn between his Portuguese origins and a determination to become culturally and politically Angolan; and, especially fitting, the quotation selected refers to the desire for a quick end to the pro-independence war in Angola. Accordingly, the fragmentation of self experienced by both protagonists has been inflicted upon them not only by accidents of birth and geography, but also by the polarisation caused by Angola’s armed struggle for independence. The result is that Percursos is inextricably a fiction of female development and a narrative of the colonial war.

Reminiscing or the impossibility of linearity The numbering of ‘reminiscences’ in Percursos immediately indicates a preoccupation with chronology. However, this seemingly chronological narrative displays strong disruptions, generated perhaps by the intrusion of pressing memories demanding urgent attention, if they are painful and need to be quickly laid to rest. The recapturing of other, perhaps less importunate memories is left until later, or saved until last by the narrative voice for a special effect. The first part (childhood/colonial society) runs from the first to the eighteenth reminiscence, but after the third one we suddenly read the thirty-eighth, after the fifth comes the thirtieth, and after the fourteenth, the thirty-fourth, which should all come in the third part of the book. The fifteenth reminiscence is withheld. The second part (adolescence/beginning of the colonial 35 As a child, she plans her revenge: to know more than those around her, to have many husbands and to swap husbands as soon as she has had enough of them (‘um dia hei-de saber muito mais coisas que vocês … hei-de saber e viver muito mais que vocês e ter muitos maridos e trocar logo que esteja farta’, 39). 36 In the text itself, there is a homage to Luandino, when in the forty-fifth reminiscence the narrative voice claims: ‘faria talvez falta Luandino para o quimbundo, que nem uma palavra ela sabia, vivida e revivida em país de lundas e quiocos’ (91) [Luandino would perhaps be needed here for the Kimbundo [local language in the area of Angola where she finds herself as an adult], for she knew not a word of it, she who had lived and relived among the Lundas and the Quiocos].



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war) omits the nineteenth reminiscence (childhood? adolescence?) and begins with the twentieth, immediately interrupted by the forty-fourth (which should come in the fourth part), and then runs chronologically up until the twentyfourth reminiscence. The third part (adulthood/colonial war) runs from the twenty-fifth to the thirty-ninth – minus the thirtieth, thirty-fourth and thirtyeighth, which appeared in the first part; the fifteenth reminiscence is inserted after the thirty-second. The fourth part (adulthood/colonial war) goes from the fortieth to the forty-sixth, minus the forty-fourth already recalled in part two, and inserts the nineteenth (which turns out to be the last childhood recollection) just before the final one. These striking disruptions to chronology give the impression that the protagonist’s sense of fragmentation of self has somehow extended to the syntagmatic logic of the very narrative. To analyse narrative time and the workings of memory in Percursos, then, Proust’s concepts of voluntary and involuntary memory alone would be insufficient, and the tools proposed by Henri Bergson (1963: 1–157) in his studies of time as a continuous duration would be quite wrong. Percursos is a narrative preoccupied with the appearance of chronology, but where chronology is constantly disrupted. Here we see a consciousness that, in trying to impose order on and make sense of its memories, must present them in a fundamentally discontinuous sequence. Time as the narrative voice of Percursos experiences it is essentially the phenomenon Gaston Bachelard described as ‘the hatchings of discontinuity’.37 Bachelard believes that ‘being itself dialectically incorporates an absolute risk of nonbeing which is repeatedly overcome in a rhythmical, temporal duration’ (Smith, 1982: 61).38 This being threatened by a disturbing risk of non-being (or of being torn apart) corresponds perfectly to the protagonist of Percursos (not to mention to the Angolans, portrayed as themselves exposed to a threat of cultural annihilation). She displays a consciousness overwhelmed by a wave of discontinuous reminiscences, which destroy any comforting feeling of continuity of self. In her effort to order her memories, she presents them in a rhythmical – rather than continuous – progression. I have just for the first time treated the protagonist as a consciousness in charge of ordering her memories, rather than carefully referring to the narra37 See Bachelard, 1936: 130: ‘des images de la continuité, on y verra toujours les hachures du discontinu’. Bachelard’s concept of duration is the complete opposite of Â� Bergson’s ‘lullaby of continuity’ (‘la berceuse de la continuité’, 130). It is rather a consciousness of continuity constructed by the human mind out of totally separate instants, the fundamental units of time. Mary McAllester calls Bachelard the ‘philosopher of discontinuity’ (1989: 3). 38 Smith, 1982: 59–61, explains very clearly the difference between Bergson’s concept of a ‘passive duration’ and Bachelard’s notion of continuity as a mere construct, an activity of the mind.

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tive voice as a separate entity throughout the book. On a few occasions the narrative voice does lapse into an ‘I’ which allows us to presume coincidence of identity. But this lapse into the grammatical first person is yet another sign of the feeling of fragmentation of self contaminating the very narration. The replacement of the more impersonal third person with the personal ‘I’ always occurs at times when the protagonist is overwhelmed by a growing sense of panic or anxiety.39 And this spilling over of psychological difficulty onto the syntactical arrangement of the text confirms that Percursos is the work of an inner narrating self, which prefers to disguise the autobiographical voice behind the more discreet third person. Deprived of a name, as if her sense of identity had been so shattered that she cannot even maintain a personal (‘authorial’) voice, the protagonist cannot perceive her own life as a linear progression in time; rather, she registers her reminiscences as a sequence of discontinuous fragments. For the protagonist of Percursos, fragmentation of self means namelessness and constant disruption in narrative linearity. The first break in the chronological linearity happens at the end of the third reminiscence, a recollection of her father’s disappearing for days at a time to have sex with black women (although the little girl does not yet know this: ‘Mais tarde, muito mais tarde, viria a saber’, 14). At first, there is no apparent thematic reason for the jump from the third to the thirty-eighth reminiscence, which begins with the memory of the tedium she tries to dispel by writing; then comes the memory of one day of excitement when ‘a notícia da morte enfim do bolorento ditador’ (15)40 was announced on the radio. She is now in Cassamba with her husband, the war is on and she tries to learn about the local Angolans by asking her husband’s male nurse. The linguistic idiosyncrasies of his ‘black Portuguese’ speech and her wish to find out about the local customs may justify the anticipating of the reminiscence. But the trust is gone. Confiding and not confiding, the nurse tells her only what he chooses. The reader must wait for the end of the reminiscence to get a clearer idea of the reason for its anticipation: having spoken of her tedium, boredom and forced inactivity (‘tédio ... bocejo ... inércia ... pasmo’), she finally confesses her fear (‘medo’, 16) and her attempt not to forget how to use a gun.41 The third reminiscence also finishes with her mother’s fear (‘ficava a mãe em ânsias’, 14) – fear perhaps for the safety of her husband gone away in search

39 These include the moment of separation from her husband (forty-fourth reminiscence), her feelings of inadequacy on her birthday (twenty-eighth reminiscence), the first time she realises everything is going wrong in her marriage (forty-first reminiscence) and her first tentative steps on her own, in Luanda, on the way back to Portugal (forty-second reminiscence). 40 [the death at last of the mouldy dictator]. Salazar died in 1970. 41 This reminiscence refers to a time when the colonial war is already raging, hence also her boredom, as the war restricts her movements.



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of sexual adventures, or for her own safety in his absence.42 As the thirtyeighth reminiscence begins with the death of the dictator (an almost Oedipal death of a father figure in the context), the mother–daughter bond establishes the more important connection between the two reminiscences and explains the drastic temporal discontinuity introduced here.43 The mother fears for the sexual transgressions of her husband and potential reprisals by the Angolans; the daughter fears for the emotional instability she perceives in her husband and for the possibility of violence even against a woman during the war. The feeling of female disempowerment shared by mother and daughter provides the only real continuity. This intrusion of a later reminiscence also shows the protagonist’s sense of her endangered, dissipating identity: comfortable with the Africans in her childhood, but now an outsider, she sees through their eyes that they distrust her as the wife of the Portuguese army doctor. Her feeling of identification with the Angolans still stands, at the political level: she reacts to the news of Salazar’s death (15) with a disguised euphoria (‘de euforia tão alta mas amordaçando-se’) very similar to the contained joy of the Angolans’ reaction (‘a alegria contida no andar dos indígenas’).44 Here we see, thanks to the death of the ultimate colonial authoritarian figure, that extraordinary coincidence between coloniser and colonised in Portuguese colonial space, expressed in ‘a shared sense of liberation, both for the colonizer and the colonized’ (Santos: 2002: 34). The ambiguous syntax in (her or their?) ‘enjoying it inwardly in silence’ (‘gozando por dentro na calada’) expresses the enduring complicity between them. But a distance remains. The child was aware (without feeling excluded) that the acculturated servants had a life of their own going on in the bush, beyond the perimeter of Portuguese colonial society. Nowadays, she realises that the Angolans have become more zealous of their culture and that, with the war on, they view her as siding with the army: she must regain their trust before she can come closer to their reality again. In one instance a thematic reordering of the reminiscences accounts for a major disruption to linearity. The fourteenth reminiscence relates an evening of African dances organised by the diamond company when the girl was eight. The thirty-fourth narrates a night of African drumming thundering in the distance during her (war) time in Cassamba, aged twenty-two. Intended 42 See Owen and Rothwell, 2004: vii, on the ‘seductive prowess’ of the ‘weak, functionally “emasculated” man of Portuguese colonialism’. 43 Reviewing recent feminist writings on Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Fallaise points out that both Luce Irigaray and Nancy Chodorow ‘claim – albeit for different reasons – that the dynamics of the mother/daughter relation are predicated upon specularity, symbiotic identity and boundary merging, and fusionality’ (1998: 122). This critical position coincides with that proposed by Abel, Hirsch and Langland, 1983. 44 [very loud euphoria being gagged; the restrained elation in the step of the indigenous people]

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to entertain important European visitors, and for cultural propaganda, the Company’s show makes the blacks play drums, wear masks and dance in costume.45 Everything is tidy and orderly, with all the chairs placed in neat rows (‘muitas cadeiras lá dentro bem alinhadas’) and the dances performed with restraint (‘fazendo-os a Companhia dançar organizadamente, aos negros, e contidamente’, 32). The Company thus exploits the exoticism perceived by Europeans in African culture, repressing in the dancers any sign of traditional aggression or violence. Portugal’s ability to maintain order and to control its colony must be reflected in the perfectly aligned chairs and the carefully managed performance. Such order within the precinct mimics the Company’s perception of the Portuguese presence in Angola – an illusion that could still be maintained at the time of the fourteenth reminiscence (before the independence war) but not during the thirty-fourth, when the war has been raging for six years. But the fourteenth reminiscence also recaptures a moment of self-definition for the little girl: desde então entraram os muquixes na sua vida para sempre, e ainda hoje, serão porventura seu privado maravilhoso, mundo que ciosamente guarda.╇ (33)46

Cruelly, her father forces her to relinquish this cherished African world: aquele mundo que sempre deixava à porta de casa e lhe mexia por dentro [e, bem pior ainda, não lhe gostavam perguntasse aos criados alguns porquês que lhe estalavam na cabeça.╇ (33)47

The emphasis on inside/outside in these sentences (‘entrar … privado … à porta de casa … por dentro’) betrays the tension between her inner self (always more comfortable within the African space of her childhood) and the social self imposed on her (a Europeanness initially very foreign to her). The thirty-fourth reminiscence begins with the curious notion of ‘sabedoria ancestral’: ‘ancestral wisdom’ to emphasise its Africanness, or European 45 The dances the Africans are made to perform for the official visitors remind us of the swimming-pool performance the father requires of the child, to show her off and to impress his friends (37). An element of circus performance by command links both scenes. The Angolans have been domesticated by colonialism; the little girl by her father. 46 [since that time ‘muquixes’ [African rituals performed with masks] have entered her life for ever, and still today, they are perchance her private realm of the marvellous, a world she guards zealously] 47 [that world which she always had to leave behind at the front door, which moved her inside [and, even worse, they didn’t like her asking the servants some questions that burned inside her head]]



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‘sagesse’, evoking Beauvoir’s 1948 essay, L’Existentialisme et la sagesse des nations. It recalls another night (many nights, in fact) of far-away drums and piercing screams echoing in the African landscape. The drumming comes from a distant enclosure described in words similar to those used in the fourteenth reminiscence: for the Company’s show, there was ‘um grande recinto de chão de terra batida e paliçada à volta’ (32); in the real world, the rites of circumcision are being performed ‘no enorme recinto encovado de terra batida, paliçado de altos ramos’ (34).48 But the perspective has changed; in the earlier reminiscence the spectacle of the exotic is viewed by foreign, ‘imperial eyes … look[ing] out and possess[ing]’ Africa (Pratt, 1992: 31); in the later one, the rites of circumcision have been described to the protagonist by the African male nurse, so that although she, as a woman, cannot witness them, at least the knowledge that the man agrees to convey to her is inside knowledge, from someone who trusts her enough to tell her. She can at last understand (relatively from within) the African ancestral tradition, of which most Europeans see only the exotic side. The juxtaposition of the two reminiscences provides dramatic enactment of the protagonist’s sense of an identity torn apart, ‘a self caught on a cultural border’ (Gorra, 1997: 8). Essentially, this is the same dilemma experienced by colonised Africans: with colonialism, a foreign culture is superimposed on theirs, which it denigrates as inferior or barbaric. At a later historical moment, some postcolonial critics would like to see the ensuing ‘cultural syncreticity’ as a ‘valuable’ and ‘fruitful’ source of enrichment (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, 1989: 30). More realistically, though, it produces essentially the ‘feeling of inadequacy [that] inheres in the basic mental outlook of every colonized people’ (Osterhammel, 1997: 111),49 and it leads inevitably to an alienation of tribal/national identity. The protagonist’s sense of fragmentation of self thus parallels the fragmentation of cultural identity experienced by the colonised Angolans. Both are best expressed in discontinuous reminiscences, which accentuate the importance of ‘the reality of the instant’ from which ‘the function of duration’ is constructed (Smith, 1982; 63). By ordering discontinuous reminiscences into a coherent narrative, the protagonist of Percursos finally discovers a continuity in the events that lead to her awareness of her Otherness and of her fundamentally fragmented self: ‘Je est un autre’. Postponing the nineteenth reminiscence until the last pages of the book represents an inverse chronological disruption. Indeed there are no reminiscences about the protagonist’s adolescence in Portugal, where she remains 48 [a large enclosure of beaten ground and a palisade all around; in a huge enclosure, dug into the beaten ground, palisaded with long branches] 49 Cf. the ‘inadequacy’ of the colonised with the descriptions of the girl as ‘ingénua e inapta’ (31) [naive and inapt].

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with her grandparents after her parents’ holiday. The only break in the gap between her nine and sixteen years of age is the recollection of the moment of rejection of her choice of career at fifteen, which intrudes into a childhood reminiscence. The nineteenth reminiscence partly solves the mystery of this silence. She remembers her first contact with Lisbon (now spelt with a capital, though still interspersed with ‘puto’ in square brackets, from the untainted perspective of the child): ‘atravessando então Lisboa foi como que debutar na civilização’ (91).50 This amounts to a confession of betrayal of her roots: the most difficult thing to admit is admitted last. Finally, she decided to find a voice of her own within a European – not an African – cultural tradition. Having been duped by the impression of civilisation (cosmopolitanism?) with which Lisbon dazzles her, she shares the guilt for her shattered identity with those who tried to thwart any feelings of Africanness in her.51 The juxtaposition of the fourteenth and the thirty-fourth reminiscences offers a further insight into the circumstances surrounding this choice between alternative cultural identities. As she connects the memory of the earlier African show with the later nights of drumming, the protagonist is trying to come to terms with her own emergence into the adult world and the impact it has on how the Angolans now view her. The African rites of circumcision, accompanied by drumming, parallel the protagonist’s as well as the colonised Angolans’ ‘journey’. Wangari wa Nyatetu-Waigwa points out the added difficulties ‘of coming of age under colonialism’: whereas in the European world ‘the protagonist’s possession of a culture and a history is never in question’, in colonised Africa the imposed foreign culture prevents the process of coming of age, for the young man enters an adult world that has been truncated; this causes ‘the interruption of the traditional rite of passage at the liminal stage and a diversion towards a second initiation, this time into the colonizer’s world’ (1996: 7). Although Percursos has no definite closure, the parallel is clear with the protagonist’s choice of a European identity: she returns to Portugal, temporarily separated from her husband. What the return implies is a question left open. Her sense of a fragmented identity has not been solved satisfactorily. No definite goal has been achieved. It is in any case a distinguishing feature of ‘fictions of female development’ that their closures are less complete, less clear-cut, than those of male Bildungsromane.52 This indeterminacy of closure in Percursos, coinciding as it does with the reaching of ‘liminality’ only in the African Bildungsroman, confirms that the protagonist’s intuition is right: her 50 51

[Crossing Lisbon then was like making a debut in civilisation] Note the Gallicism, ‘debutar’, not to mention the implicit lapse into a Eurocentric vision that divides the world into civilised (European) and uncivilised or barbaric (Europe’s Others). 52 See Abel, Hirsch and Langland, 1983: Introduction; and Frieden: ‘a “conclusion” that is merely another step in the process of development’ (1983: 307).



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sense of self is irremediably divided because the only space where she ever belonged is a ‘counter-acculturated’ Africa, permanently shattered by colonialism and by the colonial war – for herself as for the colonised Angolans with whom she identifies. In her vacillations and in her being tempted to choose the European culture perceived as superior, we recognise many characteristics of the feelings of inadequacy and cultural inferiority that tear colonised peoples, which Frantz Fanon first evoked so powerfully and movingly. Partly induced to do so by the larger extent of Percursos’ first section, I have concentrated my analysis on the protagonist’s childhood reminiscences and on her memories of Portuguese colonial society in Angola just before the colonial war. But Percursos gives voice, moreover, to a woman’s personal memory of the conflict. As a woman, though, she is further removed from it. Her memory, although personal, places her in the background of the war (‘nos bastidores espúrios da guerra’, 15),53 not at centre stage. The memory of the colonial conflict gains poignancy here because it parallels both the process of disintegration of the protagonist’s marriage and her increased awareness that, because of the war, she too has become an Other in the Angolans’ eyes. But there are more pressing reasons for concentrating on the pre-war period recaptured in Percursos. What makes these reminiscences about colonial life and the colonial war so special is the fact that the protagonist’s memory places the war in a context both private and historical. Unlike the more involved recollections of war (by male protagonists or narrators who participate in the conflict in one capacity or another), Percursos takes an overarching view of colonialism and places the colonial war in a socio-historical context: the situation that leads to the war, as well as (briefly) the war’s consequences for the Portuguese colonists who felt forced to leave Angola in the wake of decolonisation. The novel includes an evaluation, brief and scathing in tone, by the protagonist’s father of the devastation inflicted by the war on a world he believed unshakeable: a rarity in the literature of the colonial wars, and in the literature of post-revolutionary Portugal in general.54 Furthermore, it establishes intriguing parallels between the life of the little girl growing up in Angola and those of the Angolans under Portuguese rule. Their journey is not dissimilar. Both the protagonist and the Angolans endure an imposition of silence. The female protagonist experiences a fragmentation of self that is parallel to the feelings of cultural hybridity of the colonised. Likewise, she experiences (and succumbs to) the temptation of European culture, which,

53 54

[in the spurious backstage of the war] See Magalhães, 2002: 220, note 29, on the conspicuous absence of returnees’ voices in Portuguese fiction published after 1974. Percursos does include one such voice, albeit minimally.

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as Albert Memmi (1968: 41–7) explored subtly, afflicts also the colonised in their simultaneous hatred and admiration for the colonisers. Referring to Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée, a book which often resonates in Percursos, Fallaise writes that Beauvoir offers ‘a female story which is both emblematic, in its account of a twentieth-century woman’s bid for freedom, and exceptional, since so few women have publicly chronicled their lives in this way’ (1998: 11). Percursos is no less emblematic as a narrative of female development and liberation. It is to some extent less special because it was published much later, but it is even more extraordinary as the testimony of a struggle for freedom perceived as shared by women and colonial subjects alike. This novel is definitely exceptional in that it is narrated from the point of view of a woman who feels ‘doubly colonised’ well before postcolonial criticism made us familiar with the concept.

4

Lídia Jorge, A Costa dos Murmúrios Lídia Jorge’s A Costa dos Murmúrios [The Murmuring Coast, ‘The Coast of Whispers’] differs from other colonial war novels in that the narrative focuses not on war service, but on the experiences of a woman living in Beira, Mozambique’s second city, as the wife of an army officer, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The book begins with a short narrative, ‘Os GafaÂ� nhotos’ [The Locusts], which tells in its thirty pages events similar to those re-examined and elaborated in the larger narrative, ‘A Costa dos Murmúrios’, that follows it. The short story’s setting is the wedding reception of Evita and her groom at the Portuguese officers’ mess in Beira. It reduces the time span of all the events remembered in the novel to that particular afternoon and evening. The fictional author of the short story is a character in the main narrative: here he is the interlocutor of the protagonist (Eva Lopo), whom he has come to ask what she thinks of his story. The narrative present of the novel proper is one afternoon twenty years later, during which Eva Lopo reviews her memories of the events narrated in the short story, in order to give its author her assessment of it. ‘Os Gafanhotos’ reads like a disconcertingly romantic story, with various touches of magical realism. If it were not set before television existed in Beira (as one of the characters points out), it could easily be read as the script for a soap opera. It could also appropriately carry a cinematographic title such as ‘The Discreet Charm of Colonialism’ or ‘White Mischief ’, so glamorous and carefree is the colonial army society it portrays. A Costa dos Murmúrios is a postmodernist novel, even though Portuguese literature was once considered untouched by postmodernism: in it postmodernism was ‘the unicorn of the century! … this unicorn everybody

 Lídia Jorge, 1988, A Costa dos Murmúrios (Lisboa: Dom Quixote). All quotations are from this edition and indicated in the text by page reference. English translation: The Murmuring Coast, 1995, trans. Natália Costa and Ronald W. Sousa (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P). All translations provided in the footnotes are taken from this edition.  This reminds us of Antoine Compagnon’s provocative questioning of the postmodern: ‘Is it the extreme of the modern, the ultramodern, the metamodern, or simply a return to the soap opera or adventure novel?’ (1994: 129).

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talks about without ever having seen it’ (quoted in Seixo, 1991: 303).  Written in 1988, A Costa dos Murmúrios revisits the past, that of the colonial war in Mozambique, by trying to remember some truth about it, at the same time as it resists that past with tremendous irony. It is a relentlessly self-reflexive novel, which Teixeira reads almost exclusively as a meditation on literary narrative, as ‘a complete theorisation about narrative (or its impossibility)’ (1998: 236), as a novel that ‘tells the telling, or the impossibility of doing it, that is, one which presents its own ideas about the novel as a genre, or its impossibility’ (189). Postmodernist fiction often becomes almost metafiction in its attention to the writing process itself; yet Teixeira does not recognise A Costa dos Murmúrios as postmodernist. Mário Cláudio’s Tocata para Dois Clarins was initially much criticised by those who saw in this novel an ill-disguised rehash of the language of Salazar’s regime, because the author’s parody of the regime’s discourse escaped them. A Costa dos Murmúrios runs a similar risk because it makes extensive parodic use of the official discourse of the Estado Novo and the rhetoric of heroism. Teixeira rightly notes the novel’s ironic, cynical and even sarcastic tone. But these are indeed the elements that permit us to see the novel’s general undermining strategy. And they should not be used to reduce the work’s message to one of ambiguity only. The novel’s fiercely ironic tone, a characteristic all critics see as the hallmark of postmodernism, does not in any way detract from the intensity of its political critique. A Costa dos Murmúrios uses the very linguistic weapons of the Salazar/ Caetano regime to criticise them the more rigorously. Its apparent ambiguity derives from the typically postmodernist posture it adopts: reluctance to accept universal truth-claims and to make value judgements about the possibility of one truth or one reality; suspicious treatment of History with a capital H; repeated acknowledgment of its own artificiality as fictional construct. But the ambiguity is removed by the revelations made in the unfolding of the

 Seixo goes on to identify various postmodernist features in Portuguese literature. (My translation.)  I borrow Umberto Eco’s wording in his Postcript to The Name of the Rose: ‘the past, since it cannot be really destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently’ (1983: 67).  Translations are mine.  Postmodernism is often regarded as apolitical, but not so by Linda Hutcheon, the movement’s foremost theoriser. See Selden and Widdowson’s comment: ‘Hutcheon can retain a political function for this kind of fiction (contra many cultural commentators who see postmodernism generally and postmodernist fiction in particular as, by definition, apolitical) in so far as it both inscribes itself and also intervenes in a given discursive set’ (1993: 178–9). See especially Hutcheon, 1989.  Lyotard proposed the concept of ‘truth-claims’ in his 1979 La Condition postÂ� moderne.



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plot. If the protagonist can, twenty years later, blame herself for not having denounced clearly enough the crimes she saw at the time of the war: por que razão não subia ao terraço duma casa e não gritava diante do Chiveve, com uma voz que chegasse até ao porto e aos guindastes, que estavam no Norte a fazer cenas de degola e de massacre?╇ (167)

the whole novel stands as her denunciation, as an indestructible written memoir of war crimes, which will last much longer than her useless crying into the wind and the sea. Eduardo Lourenço, who has dealt extensively with the mythology in which the Portuguese psyche has enshrined itself, seems to answer this question for the narrator of A Costa dos Murmúrios, when he admits that the drama of the colonial war will never really become part of mainstream Portuguese discourse: A lamentável peripécia que foi a guerra colonial, o seu desenlace ao mesmo tempo catastrófico e redentor … não fez, nunca fará, parte do discurso contemporâneo dos portugueses sobre si mesmos. (Lourenço, 1999: 221)

The existence of this official culture of silence, then, makes it even more important for writers to break that historical habit and register the hushed memory of the colonial war. But by shifting onto literature the responsibility for the memory that history should record, we are moving once again into a postmodernist position: the blurring of genre boundaries. Linda Hutcheon has solved this difficulty by referring to postmodernist novels as a ‘historiographic metafiction’, which ‘is overtly and resolutely historical – although, admittedly, in an ironic and problematic way that acknowledges that history is not the transparent record of any sure “truth”â•›’ (1988: 129). Such fiction is essential in the preservation of memories that society prefers to forget: Historiographic metafictions … use parody not only to restore history and memory in the face of the distortions of the ‘history of forgetting’ … but also, at the same time to put into question the authority of any act of writing.╇ (Hutcheon, 1988: 129)

 [‘Why didn’t I climb up onto the terrace of some house and scream in front of the Chiveve, in a voice so loud it would reach the dock and the cranes, that they [the Portuguese military] were engaging in massacres and beheadings up in the North?’ 172]  Included in Jorge Ribeiro, 1999. [The lamentable episode of the colonial war, its outcome simultaneously catastrophic and redemptive … has not been, will never be, part of the contemporary discourse of the Portuguese about themselves.]

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In her very perceptive reading of Jorge’s novel, Helena Kaufman also considers it ‘a type of historical fiction’ dealing with ‘History in a reflectivephilosophical, or as some have designated it, “historiographic” mode’ (1992: 41). She adopts Hutcheon’s elaborations on the postmodern attitude to history, without actually naming the novel postmodernist. Any reading of A Costa dos Murmúrios which privileges its use of irony, sarcasm, farce and playfulness, glossing over the importance of its political critique, reduces the force and painful sharpness of this novel, one of the most powerful indictments of the colonial war written to date.10 It is imperative to illuminate the density of the denunciation of the rhetoric of heroism and of the colonial war in this narrative, in which the formal ambiguity of postmodernism enhances rather than detracts from the strength of political conviction. As Medeiros emphasises, this novel presents us with various views of the same events, ‘not so as to provoke complete relativism in the reader, but rather to avoid an all-too-idealized view of memory’s reliability’ (2000: 213). And in an outstanding analysis of the workings of memory and forgetting in this novel, Vieira also underlines that this novel ‘exposes, without subterfuge, the violence and crimes committed by the Portuguese in Africa’ (2005: 68, my translation). As the main narrative’s first page explains, ‘Os Gafanhotos’ is also an ulterior narrative: ‘Para o escrever’, Eva Lopo tells the author who comes to ask her for her opinion about it, ‘deve ter feito uma viagem trabalhosa a um tempo onde qualquer outro teria dificuldade em regressar’ (41).11 Thus she emphasises the short story’s reconstruction of past events purposefully recalled; and the difficulty of the task of recovering the past by the agency of human, fallible memory, a fallibility that justifies the registering of different, possible ways of remembering. ‘Os Gafanhotos’ constantly deals with appearances and deception. After the glamorous wedding reception (splendid banquet table, evening dresses, bowing and kissing of hands, elegant dancing, endless laughing for the photographer’s camera), when the couple get away, the bride’s first question is: ‘Achas que os enganámos?’ (14).12 Likewise, as the evening advances, the photographer struggles not to include the by then collapsed wedding cake, 10 Teixeira mentions ‘o anti-colonialismo por vezes acintoso do romance’ (1998: 238) [the sometimes spiteful anti-colonialism of the novel] in passing but devotes no time to the analysis of this essential element. Simões (1995: 71–7) goes well beyond the ‘strategia narrativa affascinante’ [the fascinating narrative strategy] to an incisive analysis, unfortunately too brief. 11 [‘For you to write it like that, you have had to make a very arduous trip to a time from which anybody else would have difficulty returning’, 35. The original actually says ‘a time to which anybody else would have difficulty returning’.] 12 [‘Do you think we fooled them?’ (7) – referring to the fact that the bride is not a virgin.]



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to avoid capturing anything less than perfect. Even nature is deceptive: the Chiveve is an arm of the sea, but it looks like a river (‘parecia ser um rio sem o ser’, 19). Deception and selectiveness (what to hide, what to reveal) are thus like a game in this story, but they become fully developed themes in the main narrative. This is a book written at a time when deception and selectiveness of information (or, to use a word with a stronger ideological connotation, misinformation) have already been widely discussed as strategies used by Salazar’s Estado Novo to maintain prestige and control.13 Hence, their imitation in the novel cannot be an innocent game only: it is used to deconstruct and denounce those very tactics of the regime. The novel’s discourse ‘repeats’ the regime’s rhetoric in such a way that it negates it. Parody consists of this process of appropriating and negating (or ridiculing) the parodied discourse.14 But parody, by its very playful nature, prevents such negation from being strident or doctrinaire. And so the appearance (but appearance only) of ambiguity is maintained. The question of knowing also shapes the unfolding of ‘Os Gafanhotos’. Puzzling occurrences disturb the otherwise perfect evening: observed by the Portuguese from the roof-top terrace of the officers’ mess, the ‘blacks’ down there suddenly start shouting and running about, apparently without any aim or reason; soon many black corpses are washed up on the beach below. The anonymous narrator comments: ‘Eles [os noivos] não podiam saber, nem lhes convinha saber, o que entretanto era conhecido no terraço’ (17).15 This lack of knowledge in the married couple makes narrative sense: absent from the terrace, they cannot know what can only be seen from it. Why, though, the more disquieting claim that it was not convenient for them to know? This rather ironic aside implies strong narratorial control; but it also parodies the existence of certain extratextual (historical) controls of the amount of information the Portuguese are allowed to have, as suitable or convenient to the regime. Various explanations are given for the blacks’ deaths, and all turn out to be wrong. The lieutenant thinks they are killing each other out of intertribal hatred: São os senas e os changanes esfaqueando-se. Que se esfaqueiem. São menos uns quantos que não vão ter a tentação de fazer aqui o que os

13 See Ferreira, 2002: 121–4 and note 25 on Salazar’s slogan, ‘What exists is only that which the public knows to exist’. 14 See Kristeva, 1969: 255–7. 15 [‘They [bride and groom] couldn’t know, nor were they interested in knowing, what the people on the terrace now knew’, 9]. Convinha (emphasis added) actually means ‘it was not convenient, not advantageous’.

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macondes estão a fazer em Mueda. Felizmente que se odeiam mais uns aos outros do que a nós mesmos. Ah! Ah!╇ (17)16

The major approves, adding that the blacks often engage in ‘matanças sazonais’ (19), and later, in a flagrant case of wishful thinking, that ‘os povos vencidos por vezes se suicidam colectivamente’ (20).17 Such ‘explanations’ are the telltale of both the ignorance and the anxiety the Portuguese military experience when faced with the contestation of their power, which the outbreak of war in Mozambique represents. Fundamentally, they do not understand the Africans who, despite long centuries of colonial domination, remain for them an inscrutable Other. And the Portuguese military seek legitimation for their presence in Africa by persisting in the belief in a ‘benevolent colonialism’, imagining that Mozambicans do not really resent their presence, rather they even welcome it for the peace it brings.18 Finally, they reveal the bewildering and perhaps unconscious fear of dispossession of the Portuguese when faced with an ominous moment of historical change. Jacques Leenhardt has defined this type of anxiety as ‘le sentiment d’une Histoire qui avance vers un renversement des positions, qui anonce la perte de la maîtrise’ (1973: 74).19 Knowledge and power, as Foucault has amply demonstrated, go hand in hand. Determined to prove that they ‘know’ all about the ‘blacks’, these military men reveal – more than their real lack of knowledge – a deep-seated anxiety that they are about to lose their hegemonic position in Africa.20 Early in ‘Os Gafanhotos’ there is a parodic reference to lack of information, and particularly to the denial of the existence of a war, which became a cornerstone of the regime’s policy, acknowledged in many colonial war novels. Here that historical process of denial, which stems from the regime’s tight censorship and control of the media, is parodied when (a propos of the journalist’s arrival at the wedding reception) the narrator makes the apparently nonsensical comment: ‘A informação, venha ela de que lado vier, sempre incomoda, porque sempre constitui um perigo de se ficar com uma parte do 16 [‘It’s the Senas and the Changanes going at each other. Let them go ahead. The fewer there are of them, the fewer there’ll be to be tempted to do around here what the Macondes are doing in Mueda. Luckily they hate each other more than they hate us. Ha! Ha!’, 10] 17 [‘seasonal killings’, 12; ‘vanquished peoples sometimes commit collective suicide’, 13] 18 ‘Era uma colónia de cafres aquela que estavam a defender de si mesma’ (24) [‘This was a bunch of savages that needed to be protected from themselves’, 17]. 19 [the feeling that History is moving on towards a reversal of positions, one which spells out loss of control] 20 The major emphatically claims: ‘eu sou um africanista, eu conheço o que se passa em África como a ponta dos meus dedos’ (31) [‘I’m an Africanist; I know what goes on in Africa like I know the tips of my fingers’, 25].



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nosso corpo invisível à vista’ (34).21 This is a very ambiguous formulation in Portuguese, as the sentence can mean either ‘having a part of one’s body become invisible (hidden) to the eye’ or ‘exposing an invisible part of our body to the eye’. The book’s parodic tone justifies the first reading; but the second makes more sense when one realises, on reading the novel, that A Costa dos Murmúrios aims precisely at rendering visible the invisible ‘part of our body’, i.e. the ugly body of Portuguese colonial history, which the country would prefer to hide (make invisible to the eye) or to forget. But to this I shall return later. The denial of the existence of the war is presented by antithetical means in both parts of the book. In ‘Os Gafanhotos’ the Regional Air Commander laughs away a question raised by some of the officers’ wives: ‘Oh! Oh! A guerra! Se não fosse a guerra, mesdames, até a calmaria criaria pedra!’ (13).22 The obviously ulterior narrator comments: ‘ainda era muito cedo para se falar de guerra, que aliás não era guerra, mas apenas uma rebelião de selvagens’ (13).23 The significance of this denial of the fact of war is later confirmed by the pages devoted in the novel proper (74–5) to the ironic discussion of the euphemistic uses of the word ‘war’ in Beira: the word applies to everything (personal conflicts, dealings with children, financial worries, business, etc.) except war – a polysemy which inevitably robs it of any real force. In ‘Os Gafanhotos’ the word is never used, being replaced by a harmless place name that metonymically acts as a substitute: Mueda, the capital city of the northern Mozambican district of Cabo Delgado, where Portuguese troops are concentrating in huge numbers at the time in which the short story is set. Lídia Jorge (who must stand for the narrators of both the shorter and the longer narratives) appeals extensively to the knowledge of a common historical context that she shares with her readers. Indeed, the assumption may be a leap of faith: even in the late 1980s ‘Mueda’ was probably not very familiar to most Portuguese readers, given precisely the scarcity of information about the war during Salazar’s regime.24 Nevertheless, ‘Os Gafanhotos’ repeatedly 21 [‘News, wherever it may come from, is always disturbing, because it always presents the danger of having a part of one’s body become invisible to the eye’, 29] 22 [‘Ha, ha, war! If it weren’t for the war, mesdames, even peace would become petrified!’, 6] 23 [‘It was … much too early still to talk about war; besides, this wasn’t really a war but merely a rebellion being carried out by savages’, 6] 24 Mueda is the capital of Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province, the area hardest hit by the war in the early years, where, as Norrie MacQueen explains, the Maconde ethnic group, ‘historically hostile to the Portuguese’, provided the largest number of FRELIMO fighters (1998: 66). Jorge Ribeiro later made the name Mueda more familiar to a Portuguese audience with his novel Capital Mueda: ‘Mueda … o símbolo mais terrível de toda a Guerra Portuguesa em África. Mueda, no Planalto dos Macondes, é a Capital da Guerra’ (1993, epigraph) [Mueda … the most terrible symbol of the Portuguese War in Africa. On the Maconde high plain, Mueda is the Capital of the War].

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uses Mueda as a metonym for war, the suppressed signified: the Regional Air Commander is on his way to Mueda; the groom, his captain and all the officers at the mess in Beira are waiting to go to Mueda. War can thus remain unmentioned, in parallel to the historical situation that the narrator parodies, when news of the fighting was kept to a bare minimum. Certain details subtly confirm that ‘Os Gafanhotos’ also contains some parody of the official rhetoric. The major of the ‘collective suicide’ theory is wearing his silk gown on the terrace. As he finishes his sophistry about the nobility of suicide, supposedly brought about by the Mozambicans’ realising that they would never be independent (‘que nunca seriam autónomos e independentes? Nunca, nunca, até ao fim da Terra e da bomba nuclear’), the major opens his arms and the dragon on the back of his gown ‘desenrugou a potência da sua língua vermelha, pintada’ (20).25 The anonymous narrator makes no further comment, the painted dragon’s tongue having to speak for itself.26 Likewise, the pity expressed because the military and their families fell asleep during the night, missing out on the early development of the incident, is ironically loaded (‘tinham mergulhado num sono estúpido sem darem importância às corridas que passavam sob as janelas do hotel Stella Maris’, 20).27 Their ‘stupid sleep’ symbolises the historical slumber of a regime that did not awaken to sounds of the winds of change blowing in Africa. The adjective ‘stupid’ occurs seven times a few pages later, referring to the Africans, when the cause of their deaths is finally known: poisoning by methyl alcohol, which the ‘stupid blacks’ mistook for wine. The shifting of the adjective from the Portuguese to the Africans signifies the transference of a feeling of guilt (very likely unconscious) and the persistence of self-doubts in the minds of the military, in a narrative that couches its relentless critique in irony. From the – apparently unstated – Mozambican point of view, though, the story is very different. Although they are high on the terrace above the ‘blacks’, a vantage point for observation, the Portuguese must push each other to try to obtain a better viewing position. They pass binoculars around in an effort to see what is going on: an effort to see in order to understand – in the European logic; but in fact to see in order to dominate. The Europeans gaze to seek control; as long as the Africans are within their sight, they believe they hold

25 [‘when they realized they would never be autonomous and independent? Never, ever, until the end of the world and the nuclear bomb’; and ‘unfurled the power of its painted red tongue’, 13] 26 See Kaufman’s stimulating reading of the novel in terms of ‘what appears to exist via representation and what actually happens’ or the concept of ‘correspondence between the real and the representable’ (1992: 44). 27 [‘they had succumbed to dull slumber without giving due attention to the running sounds coming from beneath the windows of the Stella Maris’, 14]



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them in check.28 In the colonialist view of the world, the colonised are always childlike, ‘hence in need of paternal … governance’ (Innes, 1996: 123). They need to be protected from their own dangerous playing with knives/machetes (‘pensando nos changanes e nos senas às catanadas, os pretos uns contra os outros’, 17),29 and above all they must be constantly kept under the ‘parents’ ’ eyes, so that they do not get up to some mischief.30 Now the Portuguese gaze is disturbed by distance (from the terrace to the beach beneath, from Beira to Mueda); by the darkness of night (both real and symbolic);31 and by the additional cover of the cloud of locusts. They need binoculars. The Africans, instead, light fires to keep the locusts away so that they can better see in the dark.32 The struggle to maintain the ability to gaze is the struggle to keep control – and the Portuguese are losing it. Is the Mozambicans’ point of view really unspoken? The invading locusts tinge everything green, traditionally the colour of hope, as Teixeira notes. In his opinion, this represents the hope for victory of both the Mozambicans and the Portuguese army, but the image is an oxymoron, because the locusts also lay waste to every area they pass. This interpretation, however, seems insufficient.33 Surely the locust plague as the most spectacular occurrence 28 Two inspiring analyses of the role of European gaze in preserving colonial power are Jacques Leenhardt’s Lecture politique du roman ‘La Jalousie’, which illuminates the meaning of a novel previously seen as an ‘exercice de style’ with a boldly political reading; and David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, especially the chapter ‘Surveillance. Under Western Eyes’. 29 [‘thinking about the Senas and the Changanes attacking each other with machetes, blacks fighting each other’, 10] 30 In ‘Os Gafanhotos’ a brief dialogue condenses the stereotypical colonialist view of the Africans as both animalesque and infantile with trenchant irony. Confounded by the running noises she hears, the bride asks: ‘Búfalos?’ and the groom reassures her: ‘Não, meu amor, crianças’ (17) [‘Is that buffalo?’ – ‘No, my love, just children’ (10)]. For an account of the infantilising and animalising view of the colonised by the coloniser, see Fanon, 1961 (1987), especially the chapter ‘De la violence’. See also Innes 1996: 122–3. 31 See Leenhardt: ‘L’univers entier ... chavire donc à l’approche de la nuit en laquelle il faut voir l’antithèse de tout ce qui symbolise le pouvoir colonial’ (1973: 72). 32 The Portuguese, who think the Africans light fires to indulge in a primitive banquet of roasted locusts, again misinterpret Africa. Again their presumption of knowledge leads them to error (although the Mozambicans may well roast and eat the locusts as well, as did John the Baptist in the wilderness). 33 Because the locusts destroy the crops they encounter, Teixeira thinks that the locust plague in the short story reveals that, twenty years on, Eva Lopo is thinking of ‘the proved failure of communist regimes’, with which she would be familiar by 1988: ‘[os gafaÂ� nhotos] reduzem Moçambique a um wasteland e a maioria dos moçambicanos a wastelanders’ (1998: 193) [The locusts reduce Mozambique to a wasteland and the majority of Mozambicans to wastelanders]. Apart from the ideological implications that inevitably inform any interpretative act, this reading does assume (in my view wrongly) that Eva Lopo is also the narrator of ‘Os Gafanhotos’.

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in ‘Os Gafanhotos’ implies rather, at a basic level, the irresistible force of numbers – which the Africans have and the Portuguese have not; and, at a more sophisticated one, the intrinsically African quality of the symbolic locusts. The biblical locust plagues strike Ethiopia, like an African godsend or an African avenger, but in any case quintessentially African. The locusts represent the Africans’ voice in the story; they speak the African point of view without any words, in keeping with the silence imposed by the colonial masters. To ignore the essential Africanness of the locusts of the title is to rob this extraordinarily polyphonic book of the one voice which, consistently with the historical ‘truth’ of colonialism, needs to remain silent/silenced, yet vaguely menacing, within its fictional logic.34 The voice of the Africans is first heard in the story in the confused shouting down on the beach, which the Portuguese cannot understand or translate into any European sense. It is heard symbolically when the locusts vibrate the membranes on their thorax noisily, or when, already fallen on the ground, they are crushed under foot.35 It is heard again, though faintly, coming from the unnamed reporter, whom the novel later shows to be a mulatto: ‘O repórter começou a falar com voz demasiado baixa, mas ousava dizer umas coisas’ (35).36 Finally, another sound is heard coming from the Africans: their laughter. The glamorous people on the terrace laugh continuously for the photographer’s camera. But later, when a black boy cleans the groom’s feet, laughing with amazing teeth (‘rindo com formidáveis dentes’, 15) while he performs the menial task, it is a different, defiant kind of laughter.37 These timid, whispering/murmuring African voices are the counterpoint of the strong voices of the Portuguese senior military, accustomed to speak very loudly indeed, ‘como se falassem para ser ouvidos à distância, na amplidão

34 Simões implicitly recognises the weight of the African point of view in ‘Os GafaÂ� nhotos’ when he says that the narrator of the short story could be identified with the Mozambican journalist Álvaro Sabino, a character in the novel proper: ‘il primo narratore è eterodiegetico, anonimo, anche se la seconda narrativa ci consente di identificarlo con Álvaro Sabino’ (1995: 73). That would actually make the short story a postcolonial narrative, and the contrast between short story and novel even more fascinating. Nevertheless, I cannot agree with him on that point. Why would the epigraph be attributed to Sabino if the short story were also by him? How often is an epigraph by the same author as the text it heads? 35 ‘Os pés … faziam estalar a quitina dos gafanhotos como se pisassem copos. Os estalidos eram idênticos’ (37–8). [‘The feet ... popped the locusts’ shells as though they were stepping on crystal glasses. The popping sounds were just like that’, 32–3] 36 [The reporter began to speak, too softly, but he dared to say a few things] 37 The episode only gains significance when, in the body of the novel, this moment on the beach is made to coincide with the bride’s first discovery of the groom’s taste for killing.



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aberta da parada’ (12)38 – their loudness thus equated with the rousing rhetoric of military exhortations. The only (supposedly) black voice fully heard in the short story is that of the (white) singer at the wedding reception. One token black and four white musicians make up the live band. The singer is white, but he imitates a black man’s voice when he sings (‘a voz grave dum branco ... cantou, imitando a voz dum negro’, 13) in English, ‘Please, please, please, get out from here tonight’, understood by the guests as the innocent clue for the bride and groom to leave the party. To be sure, nothing is what it seems in this short story, and this is in no way the ‘naive text’ (Teixeira, 1998: 190) it appears to be.39 Instead, this is a story of complex polyphony and savage irony. Many of its apparently anodyne episodes only gain full significance when reread in the light of the revelations made in the novel proper. But ‘Os Gafanhotos’ already registers, ironically and critically, as many voices as possible, two of which are complete opposites:40 the whispering of the Mozambicans, fictionally ‘representing’ the historical need to obey colonial rule, and the loudness of the Portuguese military, ‘representing’ the assertive, nationalistic discourse of the Estado Novo.

Revisiting ‘Os Gafanhotos’ The novel proper is narrated now in the first person (particularly in the beginning), now in the third (especially when it appears to prolong the fiction of ‘Os Gafanhotos’, referring to the protagonist as Evita or as Eva Lopo). ‘Evita era eu’ [I was Evita], which closes many paragraphs, identifies the novel’s protagonist, Eva Lopo, as the bride of the short story, known as Evita as a young woman. Is the mature Eva Lopo the narrator? The identification of the narrative ‘I’ of the early chapters as Eva Lopo comes in a third-person statement in the novel’s opening sentence: ‘Esse é um relato encantador. Â�Li-Â�o com cuidado e concluí que nele tudo é exacto e verdadeiro, sobretudo em matéria de cheiro e de som – disse Eva Lopo’ (41).41 This gives the impression 38 [‘as if they were to be heard from a distance out on the vastness of the parade ground’, 5] 39 ‘Os Gafanhotos ... do ingénuo texto’ (my translation). Much more perceptively, M.I. Santos speaks of the ‘narrativa enganosamente inócua d’Os Gafanhotos’ (1989: 67) [the deceptively innocuous narrative of Os Gafanhotos]. 40 Vieira (2005: 67) sees ‘Os Gafanhotos’ as the ‘official version’ of the historical events narrated in this book. I believe there is already a critical perspective at work in this apparently ‘official’ narrative. 41 [‘It is a delightful narrative. I have read it carefully, and concluded that everything in it is exact and true, particularly as regards smell and sound (said Eva Lopo)’, 35]

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that another (anonymous) omniscient narrator controls both the first-person narrative by Eva Lopo and the fiction of a third-person narrative within the former, prolonged by Eva Lopo.42 Franz Stanze (1971: 61) proposes a useful distinction between a narrating and an experiencing self, which allows us to proceed without needing to investigate any further the existence of a separate, ultimate narrator. Eva Lopo is (at times) the narrating self (in the narrative present) and Evita is the experiencing self (of the events in the narrated past, twenty years earlier). Thus the novel creates the fiction of an autobiographical re-evaluation of the past. Paul John Eakin argues convincingly that ‘the self that is the center of all autobiographical narrative is necessarily a fictive structure’ (1985: 3). This notion throws light on the relation between historical truth and personal truth in A Costa dos Murmúrios. Here the fiction is that Eva Lopo reviews the same facts narrated in ‘Os Gafanhotos’, supplying additional ones as she sets her memory the task of remembering them twenty years later. How to interpret her assessment that everything in the short story is ‘exact and truthful’ when her own memories totally contradict what she affirms? The explanation must be, in Eakin’s words, that ‘autobiographical truth is not a fixed but an evolving content, [with] what we call fact and fiction being rather slippery variables in an intricate process of self-discovery’ (1985: 17). The discrepancies are introduced as much by what he calls ‘the unconscious workings of memory’ (applying mostly to the autobiographical effort) as by ‘the conscious agency of the imagination’ (more noticeable in the fictional construction). Eva Lopo’s memories progressively undermine any notion of ‘truth’ in ‘Os Gafanhotos’, until they finally expose that ‘truth’ to be a lie (if by ‘truth’ we mean referential truth). Nevertheless, she can still declare that all is ‘exact and truthful’ because she recognises that all truth-claims are personal, mediated by personal interpretation, conditioned by the unreliability of human memory, and above all selected according to either a desire for literary effect in fiction (as in ‘Os Gafanhotos’) or a desire to delve deeper into an understanding of one’s relationship with one’s historical context (as in the novel proper). There is, as Kaufman states, ‘an essential difference between truth and verisimilitude on one hand and reality on the other, … between what appears to exist via representation and what actually happens’ (1992: 44). With both 42 I have not seen any discussion of this problem in any of the studies of this novel. Teixeira, Simões, Kaufman, Santos and Kaufman and Ornelas consider Eva Lopo the novel’s narrator, which is undoubtedly straightforward. Kaufman always refers to the narrator of ‘Os Gafanhotos’ in the masculine. Simões, as already mentioned, thinks the latter might be the journalist Álvaro Sabino. Nevertheless, I tend to believe that both the short story and the novel are narrated by (an) anonymous, omniscient narrator(s), who in the novel prefer(s) to create the impression of a fiction of autobiographical writing by Eva Lopo.



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truth and verisimilitude being impossible, any attempt to recover something ‘exact and truthful’ from the past is reduced to finding a ‘â•›“correspondence” (correspondência) between the real and the representable’.43 Despite and against Eva Lopo’s assessment that everything in ‘Os Gafanhotos’ is ‘exact and truthful’, the ‘real’ that the main narrative recalls is totally different from the reality of the short story. Tension between reality and its literary representation permeates both narratives, functioning as the main narrative device. Reality emerges out of and in contrast to the ‘fictive’ version of the short story. The details Eva adds twenty years later directly contradict the ‘exact and truthful’ recital of the short story, even though she keeps telling the fictional author of ‘Os Gafanhotos’ that it was right not to mention them, so as not to shatter the magical atmosphere of the story. She never asserts that it was all a lie. It is the juxtaposition of the differing accounts of what different characters perceive as reality, as much as Eva Lopo’s highly ironic tone throughout, that give the lie to the supposed truth of the events narrated in ‘Os Gafanhotos’. Naturally, the novel ends with Eva Lopo’s returning the short story she has just read to its author, ‘Devolvendo, anulando “Os gafanhotos”â•›’.44 The demolishing effect is summarised in that simple juxtaposition of both verbs, in the ironic, no-comment style that characterises A Costa dos Murmúrios. Because, as a woman, the novel’s protagonist is not directly involved in the war, she has the time (and the intellectual curiosity) to learn about her new surroundings. Too intelligent to remain oblivious to the contradictions around her, Evita soon starts perceiving the colony and the nature of the Portuguese presence differently, as a result of her observation of three social groups: her husband and the other military men; the officers’ wives waiting for their husbands’ return from the front; and (as she gets increasingly bored by the latter’s company) the Africans living in the city of Beira. About her husband and his Captain, who are constant companions, she realises that what she first perceived as military zeal and lust for heroism amounts to a sadistic love of killing and inflicting pain. She comes to understand that selfish domesticity and unquestioning acceptance of the prevailing wisdom circumscribe the lives of the officers’ wives. Children, hairstyles, the savings to take back to Portugal after the overseas commission and the imperial rhetoric regurgitated by the odd visiting general set the limits of their imagination. After Evita finally decides to contact a local journalist to ask him to denounce the mass poisoning of black people by methyl alcohol, a 43 These are both Kaufman’s (1992: 44) and Eva Lopo’s words: ‘Aconselho-o, porém, a que não se preocupe com a verdade que não se reconstitui, nem com a verosimilhança que é uma ilusão dos sentidos. Preocupe-se com a correspondência’ (42) [‘I would advise you, however, not to worry about the truth that cannot be reconstructed or about verisimilitude, which is an illusion of the senses. Worry about correspondence’, 36]. 44 [‘Handing back, annulling The Locusts’]

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window gradually opens on to a new world: that of the journalist, a mulatto whose life is ruled by fear, but who is prepared to take some risks. In portraying the fears and contradictory impulses of this well-intentioned but hand-tied Mozambican, the narrator reveals great sensitivity and an unusual ability to slip into someone else’s skin: a mulatto, an ‘in-between’ embodying the mingling of Portuguese and African in the colonial contact zone. The protagonist’s capacity for human empathy manages to reduce the social distances created by colonialism. This journalist is a living example of the ‘intermediary social and ethnic status’ (Santos, 2002: 39) that Portuguese assimilation policies introduced to Mozambique in 1917: he is an acculturated mulatto, an educated man, hence above non-assimilated natives, constantly torn between denouncing colonialism and his desire to accommodate himself to its impositions in order to better his life.45 While her husband is away in Mueda, Evita ends up ‘betraying’ him with the journalist.46 If any (woman’s) marital betrayal, and particularly that of a military ‘hero’ away at the front, is utterly condemned in this world that extols the old virtues of heroism and (woman’s) devotion to family,47 betrayal with an African (albeit a mulatto), and one who writes (albeit mildly) subversive columns for the local press at that, becomes a crime of huge proportions.48 She totally subverts a system of values taken for sacred: family – woman’s unconditional submission to the role of loyal wife and mother;49 and patriotism – complete Portuguese support for the nation’s hegemony in Mozambique. ‘Sleeping with the enemy’, Evita commits a double transgression: of the code of honour for married women, and of the ideological imperative that patriotic Portuguese and subversive Africans do not mix. Furthermore, she transgresses an unspeakable racial taboo. Racism (which officially did not exist in the Portuguese colonial world) operates here in obscure ways: intercourse with African women was sanctioned for the Portuguese military, and even encouraged amongst settlers, to compensate for small numbers of white women in the colonies. But sexual relations between a white woman and an African man somehow awaken deep-seated feelings of disgust and 45 Sousa Santos pinpoints the ‘double de-identification’ of assimilated Africans, who ‘stop having direct access’ to their African roots but have no full access to ‘the options of European life’ (2002: 32). 46 See Sousa, 2002: 171–4, on the strategy of ‘cloistering army wives’. 47 The God of Salazar’s trinity – ‘Deus, Pátria e família’ [God, Fatherland and family] – does not appear in this novel. Graça Abreu (2003: 262) rightly points out that this triad is totally reductive of individual liberty. 48 The same crime, committed by the Captain’s wife, and not even with an African, was punished by the Captain’s killing of his wife’s lover. 49 With the exception of the Captain’s wife, the novel’s other adulteress, all the women are mothers. Evita has no children. She also comments sarcastically on the expectation of pregnancy on the part of all female students except her in her university days. Motherhood is not for her.



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moral condemnation in a Eurocentric world vision, as Fanon observes with excruciating insight.50 Miscegenation was widespread in the Portuguese colonial context, but abhorred between white female and black male.51 Evita’s affair betrays a man, a military man, and (worse still) an aspiring ‘hero’. And her affair is with a mulatto, a journalist (‘a informação sempre incomoda’ echoes from ‘Os Gafanhotos’) and worst of all one who opposes colonialism (if only by the meagre means at his disposal). In other words, she completely violates the decorums of the dominant value system.52 Kaufman makes similar points, recognising A Costa dos Murmúrios as a ‘double discourse’, which confronts ‘the dominant and the marginal’: [Eva Lopo’s] feminine discourse on History remains marginal when confronted with the dominant (masculine) discourse but, in a broader social context, it also identifies itself with other socially marginalized groups that, in the concrete situation of the novel, mean the oppressed of the colonized country.╇ (1992: 45)

However, Eva’s discourse does not remain as marginal as it seems. In fact, it goes further in its demolition of the dominant ideology of the Estado Novo than most other novels of the colonial wars.53 This it achieves by its parodic treatment of that cornerstone of nationalism: heroism.

The reverse of the medal The rhetoric of heroism runs in the western tradition from the Greek heroic age to the two world wars. In Portugal, heroism has always been part of the national mythology. Whenever the Portuguese think of themselves with pride, they think of themselves as heroes. Vergil’s arma virumque cano (one single man) becomes Camões’s as armas e os varões assinalados (the heroes, either collectively or individually) in Os Lusíadas. The glorification of heroism is so ingrained in the Portuguese psyche that the national anthem opens with 50 The example of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India also springs to mind. See Fanon, 1952, chapter 2. 51 See Santos, 2002: 17–20, who concludes that ‘Portuguese postcolonialism calls for a strong articulation with the question of sexual discrimination and feminism’. 52 Sousa (2002) examines the potentially erotic gaze between Evita and Helen. A lesbian relationship would be equally subversive in this environment, but no relationship between the women ever develops. 53 I use the word ‘demolition’ in its literal sense, appropriate for a novel in which the very notion of colonial domination is symbolised by a building, the hotel Stella Maris transformed into Portuguese officers’ mess, imagined to be, twenty years later, very likely on the verge of collapse (107–8).

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the line: Heróis do mar [heroes of the seas]. Heroism becomes an essential ingredient of the nationalistic rhetoric of Salazar’s regime, though fundamentally reduced to military defence of the colonies. Praise for heroism reached its apogee in the Estado Novo’s military pomp during the annual ceremony for decorating colonial war heroes, on 10 June, Portugal’s Day.54 The officers about to go to the front at Mueda in A Costa dos Murmúrios are no longer heroes of the sea, but latter-day heroes on the ground. The Captain stands right above the rest in heroism, which affiliates him most closely with the regime.55 Before he has even been named, the groom introduces him to the bride: ‘Apresento-te um herói’ (‘Os Gafanhotos’, 13).56 This Hero sports a large scar, which he proudly exhibits through his open shirt: via-se-lhe sob a camisa uma profunda cicatriz que se lhe abria no peito à altura da quinta costela, envolvia todo o flanco e desaparecia no meio das costas com um remate de carne do feitio de um punho espalmado. (22–3)57

This mark of heroic behaviour appears repeatedly in the book. When the bride asks the groom if he is envious of his Captain (actually referring to his wife’s beauty), he replies: ‘Alguma, a começar pela cicatriz’ (29).58 The Captain got his scar in a previous commission in Portuguese Guinea (not actually in action, but while reconnoitring), and Evita’s husband is so obsessed with the heroism it symbolises that he harps on about it. Ever preoccupied with the presentation of different versions and conflicting truth-claims, the narrator comments, tongue-in-cheek: ‘o noivo tinha várias formas de descrever a mesma versão, porque nunca havia duas versões diferentes’ (64).59 War service is the great opportunity to become a hero. Evita’s husband feels sorry for the old generals who face their last chance to distinguish themselves, now that there will be no more occasion for active service. When on of the lieutenants is flown back to Beira after sustaining injuries in Mueda, the wife of another captain laments his having lost the opportunity to become a hero: ‘ele jamais teria um louvor, agora que a guerra ia acabar! Ele jamais 54 On this Dia da Raça [Day of the Race], Portuguese newspapers invariably had ‘heroes’ all over their front pages. See Jorge Ribeiro, 1999: 13–24. 55 His surname is half Italian, half Portuguese: Forza Leal, ‘loyal’ to the Portuguese regime, and Forza with the f of the Italian ‘fascio’. 56 [‘Let me introduce you to a hero’, 5] 57 [‘He wore his cotton shirt open … through the shirt one could see a deep scar that started on the chest at about the fifth rib, ran across his entire side, and disappeared in the middle of his back in a fleshy knot that looked like a flattened fist’, 16] 58 [‘A little, starting with the scar’, 24] 59 [‘the groom had several ways of elaborating the same version, for there were never two different versions’, 60]



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seria um homem condecorado’ (110).60 Heroism couples with the build-up of nationalistic fervour, which the regime’s medal-awarding ceremonies exacerbated.61 Evita’s recollections gradually demolish the glorification of heroism. Her irony negates any intrinsic value in a scar. With disconcerting candour, she begs to differ as to the significance of scars (the word ‘significance’ appears four times in six lines of the finest irony),62 pragmatically stating that the development of plastic surgery has made scars anachronistic: A cicatriz foi uma bela marca enquanto se lutou com uma arma de lâmina ... Depois, a meio do século, caiu. Até sem explicação, caiu. Como caiu o chapéu, o suspensório, o cinto-ligas.╇ (63)63

Evita completely deflates any symbolic value of a scar, simultaneously equating heroism with anachronism, and throwing heroism into the bric-abrac of out-of-fashion accessories. What else could happen to the signified when even the signifier loses significance? Soon, however, irony gives way to more sinister observations, with devastating effects for any belief in military heroism. While their husbands are away at the front, the Captain’s wife leads Evita to an inner sanctum, where the Captain keeps certain photographs under lock and key. Evita had already seen both men shoot a whole colony of birds just for the fun of it (‘fazer um pouco o gostinho ao dedo’, 49). The secret photos now reveal the truth: the two men derive pleasure from killing and inflicting pain, and have committed war atrocities,64 killing civilians, cutting off the heads of insurgents, and impaling them as an example to black villagers. The photographic evidence of these acts is hidden and clearly marked – in English, to ensure that the warning is universally understood – ‘TO BE DESTROYED’. But it is not destroyed – because the heroes are proud of these moments, not ashamed or repentant. Puzzled, Evita now discovers in her husband a man poised on 60 [‘never would he receive a medal, now that the war was about to end! He would never be decorated’, 110] 61 The Captain also received a medal for the moment of ‘bravery’ in which he received his scar. The attribution of this medal is, again, a parody of heroism: he was nominated for a medal only because everybody thought he was going to die – but he didn’t. 62 The echo of Saussurean linguistics adds to the irony in Portuguese (but it is lost in English) because of the polysemy of ‘significado’, which means both significance and the signified (as opposed to the signifier, ‘significante’). 63 [‘The scar was a handsome mark as long as people fought with blade-fitted weapons ... Then, in the middle of the century, it disappeared. Without even an explanation, it disappeared. Just as did hats, suspenders, garter belts’, 59–60] 64 M.I. Santos accurately explains Evita’s husband’s taste for aiming at the anus of African hens as ‘a demystifying minor atrocity by a tragicomic hero’ (1989: 66, my translation).

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the obscure threshold where sadism and heroism intersect. She would like to pinpoint the moment when his ‘taste for cutting off heads’ (139) arose, but she cannot ask direct questions in a society where these men are heroes. The scars received by such heroes lusting after heroism are only the surface of deeper scars inflicted on the colonised. This demythologising of heroism inevitably leads to the denunciation of the darkest side of Portuguese ‘heroism’ in Africa: the massacres in Mozambique – ‘Wiriamu, Juwau, Mucumbura’ (250), of which Wiriyamu became the most notorious because the international press denounced it, breaking Salazar’s code of silence surrounding this war.65 Such war atrocities are the hidden ‘part of our body’ which we would most like to remain ‘invisible’, and which A Costa dos Murmúrios gradually ‘exposes to the eye’. Lídia Jorge has been criticised for her use of scatological details in this novel. Nevertheless, Eva Lopo’s identification of the ‘smell of shit’ – the smell of a human being ‘shitting himself with fear’ – as the smell of colonialism and of the human degradation it entails, has a precise structural function: it marks the point when the protagonist has managed to step into the shoes of the African Other.66 Her attention to the unpleasant, human detail achieves a perception of universality that reduces the distances created by colonialism: Eu conhecia o significado desse cheiro … Como podia o jornalista imaÂ�ginar que eu o reprovava? Esse foi o momento em que ele se fez irmão verdadeiro de toda a África negra do seu tempo … Dentro de poucos anos, exactamente três … será esse o cheiro que se desprenderá de Wiriamu, Juwau, Mucumbura, será esse o cheiro que se desprenderá dos abatidos, dos queimados, dos que ficaram a arder ainda vivos … Foi isso que sempre nos uniu [Evita e Álvaro Sabino] – a mesma compreensão do sofrimento.╇ (250–1)67

This shared ‘understanding of suffering’ amounts to ‘the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers’ that Richard Rorty considers essential to a changed view of the world and to acquiring the ability to feel empathy 65 According to MacQueen, in 1973 there was another blow to military morale, ‘following revelations about massacres of civilians by the colonial army. Foreign missionaries informed about the assassination of hundreds of villagers in December 1972, in Wiriyamu, in the Tete province. … the uncovering of this massacre by the London Times was particularly detrimental’ (1998: 71–2, my translation). 66 See Esty’s observations on the ‘political vocation’ of excrement: ‘it draws attention to the failures of development, to the unkept promises’ of colonial regimes (1999: 53). 67 [‘I understood the significance of that smell … How could the journalist think that I disapproved of him? It was at that moment that he became a true brother of all of black Africa of his time … In a few years – three, to be exact – … that will be the smell that will rise from Wiriamu, Juwau, Mucumbura … That will be the smell rising from the murdered, from the burning victims, from those burned alive … That’s what always united us [Evita and Álvaro Sabino]: the same understanding of suffering’, 265]



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with other people (quoted in Clendinnen, 1998: 183). The growing respect the protagonist shows for this mulatto man, who is now seen as ‘the true brother of all black Africa’, is a major literary gesture of acceptance between coloniser and colonised. Eva Lopo recognises the key role that he and others like him play in the social changes she perceives in the air. The dismantling of the notion of heroism – by juxtaposing the boastful bravery and sadism of the ‘heroes’ with the mere biological humanity of the victims – necessitates the inclusion of the ugly details. This also finally explains Eva Lopo’s baffling evaluation of ‘Os Gafanhotos’ as exact and truthful, ‘particularly as regards smell and sound’. In ‘Os Gafanhotos’ no smell is recorded at all, for such smells cannot be mentioned in a fictional representation aiming at the beautiful and the literary. The main narrative also illuminates the strange touch of magical realism at the end of the short story. In ‘Os Gafanhotos’, the groom commits suicide ostensibly because he is overwhelmingly happy: ‘Todos, incluindo Evita, compreendiam que o excesso de harmonia, felicidade e beleza provoca o suicídio’ (38).68 This individual suicide due to ‘an excess of happiness’ provides a counterpoint to the Mozambicans’ ‘collective suicide’ imagined by the major. But the novel’s concern with dismantling heroism suggests another explanation: the parallel with the suicide of Mouzinho de Albuquerque the hero par excellence (1855–1902) of Portuguese colonialism, honoured as the conqueror of emperor Gungunhana, whose defeat in 1895 allowed for the consolidation of colonialism in Mozambique. A much-fêted hero in his day, Mouzinho de Albuquerque killed himself for reasons never explained. The parallel is perhaps nebulous, but it could imply that heroism may lead to self-destruction. Heroism became a cri de guerre of Salazar’s regime, totally blown out of proportion by the ‘loudness’ of military parades and the nationalistic rhetoric of medal-awarding ceremonies. Dismantling the ‘excesses’ of heroism and militarism thus becomes the way to strike at the nerve centre of the regime’s ideology; or, in the highly symbolical language of this novel, to disentangle ‘a razão profunda do pêssego’ (41).69 If this novel ‘reclaims the margins of history’ (Kaufman, 1992), it nevertheless strikes at the core of Portugal’s history, culture and mythology, undermining the very kernel of its dominant discourse. But it does so from a postmodernist stance, which appears to tone down the fierceness of its critique. A Costa dos Murmúrios is thoroughly postmodernist:70 it blurs genre boundaries (short story, soap opera, novel, history, ‘historiographic 68 [‘Everybody, including Evita, understood that an excess sense of harmony, happiness, and beauty can provoke suicide’, 33] 69 [‘the profound being of a peach’, 35]. See Vieira (2005: 65), who also associates the phrase ‘a razão do pêssego’ with Eva’s desire to engage with the real facts. 70 See Ferreira, 1992; Vieira, 2005.

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metafiction’, even the whodunnit regarding the mass poisoning); it handles several conflicting truth-claims; it rewrites history from below; and it includes the point of view of the Other. In short, it shows the reverse of the medal:71 in its incessant ‘calling into question of narration’ (to use Compagnon’s phrase) or its ‘metatextual reflexiveness’ (to use Linda Hutcheon’s); in its understanding that all ‘perception is subjective and reality is a fictional construct’ (Wilde, 1989: 140); in its ‘exuberant, iconoclastic play’ and in its rejection of ‘representation, mimesis, or realism’ (Wilde, 1989: 135, 137); in its revisiting the past with the enormous irony that ‘prevent[s] the postmodern from being nostalgic’ (Hutcheon, 1988: 230); and, above all, in its determination to ‘correct’ history’s ‘official version’ (Seixo, 1991: 310). What of the postmodern ‘indeterminacy of meaning’ (Compagnon, 1994: 128), which makes postmodern fiction appear ambiguous, with all meanings provisional and any value judgement as good as another? That is but its deceptive appearance, which Hutcheon clearly explains: One of the lessons of the doubleness of postmodernism is that you cannot speak outside that which you contest, that you are always implicated in the value you choose to challenge. ... self-reflexivity works in conjunction with their seeming opposite (historical reference) in order to reveal both the limits and powers of historical knowledge. To challenge history or its writing is not to deny either.╇ (Hutcheon, 1988: 223)

Even the inclusion of the short story can be regarded as a postmodernist trick. In a world in which mass-media imitation of reality has come to substitute for reality itself (Baudrillard, 1981, 1984), ‘Os Gafanhotos’ amounts to a playful ‘simulacrum’ (the soap opera elements, the smiles for the photographer’s camera) trying to substitute for (and obliterate) the reality the novel chooses to reveal – by constantly revising the supposed truth of the short story and showing it to be false, while simultaneously claiming that everything in it is ‘exact and truthful’: a subtle denunciation far more effective than a tirade against the evils of imperialism. Perhaps we would never read this novel as ‘reclaiming the margins of history’ if we did not know its author to be a woman. Perpetrators or accomplices in colonialism and colonial war crimes, both men and women, have a responsibility to denounce and to keep alive the memory of the episode. As Magalhães has persuasively shown (1987, 1995), narratives by female and male voices undoubtedly differ, but the difference is rather in perspective,

71 Compagnon calls it ‘l’envers du décor’, in English ‘the reverse side of the scenery’ (1994: 128).



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emphasis and subtleness of tone.72 A Costa dos Murmúrios may appear to be the narrative of a marginal voice, but not necessarily because it is a feminine discourse: it is above all the result of its postmodernist aesthetic stance. Postmodernist fiction ‘does not pretend to operate outside [the] system, for it knows it cannot; it therefore overtly acknowledges its complicity, only to work covertly to subvert the system’s values from within’ (Hutcheon, 1988: 224). This deliberately constructed appearance of complicity, of speaking from within the discourse it aims to subvert, does not in any way stop the novel from being one of the most forceful diatribes against the colonial war written to date; or against the (predominantly masculine) nationalistic discourse of heroism. Curiously, the novel parodies the very masculinity of heroic discourse:73 towards the end, when the impossibility of a Portuguese victory becomes evident, Evita’s husband’s tone becomes feminine and high-pitched, sounding more and more like a woman’s.74 With the groom’s sudden, inexplicable falsetto voice embodying the very parody of bravery in the novel, heroism is definitely pushed into the margin traditionally occupied by women.75 Unlike his ridiculous and ridiculed pitch, the voice that speaks through many versions (and whispers) in A Costa dos Murmúrios is one of the most lucid and courageous (‘heroic’) in contemporary Portuguese narratives of the colonial war. It is also, artistically, one of its most accomplished. One last word about fiction as a means to preserve a country’s memory of its history. This recurrent preoccupation appears formulated in ironic terms in ‘Os Gafanhotos’, where an officer claims: ‘Sim, se ninguém fotografou nem escreveu, o que aconteceu durante a noite acabou com a madrugada – não chegou a existir’ (21).76 This ironic veiled reference to the regime’s censorship and to Salazar’s belief that what is not reported does not exist (Ferreira, 2002: 121–4) is also a reminder of its historical consequences: without written or photographic record the memory of the colonial war 72 Magalhães also recognises that ‘these women writers do not compose their narratives on specifically feminine, and still less, feminist subjects, but on societal questions in general: the life of the polis, in many of its nuances. This seems not to be very common in the female fiction of many European and American countries’ (1994: 191). 73 See Sousa, 2002: 172–5, on Helen’s suggestion for revenge on military husbands. 74 ‘Quando fala não tem mais voz de noivo, mudou-a, de repente o noivo tem voz de mulher … disse o noivo cada vez mais com voz de mulher’ (237) [‘when he speaks he no longer has a groom’s voice; it has changed. Suddenly the groom has a woman’s voice’, 250]; ‘o noivo continua fêmeo, chorando sob o duche’ (238) [‘The groom is still female, crying under the running water’, 251]. 75 This is also a good example of postmodernist ‘carnivalisation’ (in the Bakhtinian sense) or a perfect ‘vehicle for insinuating the supernatural or the paranormal into “normal” reality’ (McHale, 1987: 174). 76 [‘Of course, if no one took pictures or wrote about it, whatever happened last night would end at dawn – never even having existed’, 14]

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(which is still very much a living memory) would eventually disappear – as if the conflict had never taken place. A Costa dos Murmúrios, together with the other narratives of the colonial war, fights against collective oblivion. When the same preoccupation finds expression in the novel, Eva Lopo emphasises the physical difficulties of recovering the memory of the war: one has to go to the Military Archive, and ask for heavy boxes of documents, request reserve material not immediately available, and so on – but one must not give up: Meta as mãos nos farelos da história, veja como ela empalidece implacaÂ� velmente nas caixas, como morre e murcha, e os seus intérpretes vão. Vão, sim, a caminho do fim do seu tempo … sem que nada importe – nem as grandezas nem os crimes. Muitos crimes cheios de dever, que é o que faz a grande história.╇ (216)77

The colonial war novels recreate each individual writer’s memory (whether personally experienced or mediated by other people’s testimonies) of events that time will make us forget – time which erodes memory, but also the obscure forces that make us want to forget the dark side of our history. A Costa dos Murmúrios preserves the highly uncomfortable memory of war atrocities (including compulsory sterilisation of colonised populations, hinted at in ‘Os Gafanhotos’). These are the memories everybody would prefer to forget, memories ‘TO BE DESTROYED’ – like their photographic record. Memory, too, can be destroyed by silence. And even this final admission of intent to fight against forgetting is couched in that most postmodernist of formulations: ‘grand history’ is dead; ‘les grandes narratives’, which Lyotard proclaims to be dead in postmodernity, are replaced by the ‘petits récits’, which keep memory alive even when they appear to be as marginal and insignificant as the ‘little’ people who make up history with a small h, and as fragile as withering human memory threatened by time’s erosion.

77 [‘Run your hands through the chaff of history, see how it fades implacably in the boxes, how it dies and wilts away, and its interpreters pass on. Yes, they pass on to the end of their time … nothing else mattering – not the great deeds, not the crimes. Many crimes full of duty – which is what makes up great [grand] history’, 226]. Emphasis added.

THE COLLECTIVE MEMORY

5

João de Melo, Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas Unlike the novels studied in the previous chapters, which move between one of the colonial war settings (Angola, Guinea or Mozambique) and Portugal, Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas (1984) [Autopsy of a Sea of Ruins] is set solely in Angola. Its chapters focus alternately on the daily routine of a unit of Portuguese soldiers serving at the front in northern Angola and on the lives of the indigenous Angolans in a nearby enclosed village (sanzala). The stories of the Portuguese battalion and the people of the Angolan sanzala are presented in parallel, the Portuguese side of the plot unfolding in the oddnumbered chapters and the Angolan in the even-numbered ones. It is never exactly clear who the narrator of each chapter is, and this ambiguity is maintained as an effective technique for widening the scope of the narrative. In the chapters relating to the Portuguese soldiers, the narrative voice shifts from the third to the first person and back to the third, sometimes even within the same paragraph. For example, the opening chapter begins through the eyes of the night sentry (‘sentinela’), who raises the alarm when he thinks that an enemy attack is about to occur. We read ‘pensou’ [‘he thought’] several times, and the subject of the internal focalisation is that soldier for the next three pages. Then, the first person appears – ‘pensei eu’ [‘I thought’] – in a sentence which deliberately cultivates the ambiguity by using the word ‘sentinel’ in its not strictly military sense, together with the unexpected ‘I’: ‘pensei eu, de sentinela ao medo do meu rosto’ (12). The  João de Melo, 1992 [1984], Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas, 4th edn (Lisboa: Dom Quixote). All quotations are from this edition. Translations provided in the footnotes are mine.  I refer to this type of enclosed village under surveillance of a military unit stationed nearby as sanzala, rather than translating it into English. It is a loaded word, in that senzala signified the slaves’ quarters in a plantation in Brazilian Portuguese. The word has maintained a connotation of squalor and oppression. Possible translations are ‘black settlement’ or ‘black compound’.  Margarida Ribeiro observes pertinently that ‘the elaborate narrative construction’ of this novel ‘contains in itself a structure that absolves the Portuguese narrator’ (1998a: 144, my translation). But there is more at stake here. There is also an attempt to multiply the narrator, to make his a collective voice; and then also to absolve him, through safety in numbers: if we are all implicated, we are more likely all to be absolved.  [I thought, standing sentinel to the fear in my face]

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reader is led to believe that this is simply a shift in focus, whereby he, the sentinel, becomes I, watching my own fear. But soon after, the subject of the internal focalisation becomes the captain, and afterwards an NCO. Each time the cogitative verb is repeated in the third person, and each time the reader follows a different character’s point of view as if from inside his head. Between these, there appears a plural ‘o nosso olhar’ (16), which already seems to implicate the whole battalion. At the end of the chapter, the narrative voice speaks in the first person again but assumes a collective persona: ‘eu aqui, soldado ocidental, a mão armada, o olhar deserto, esquecido me dou’ (24), in a sentence which now also introduces an unspecified addressee in the familiar second-person singular: ‘lembras-te?’ Thus the first chapter establishes the essential clue for reading this novel: its narrative impulse is a collective voice, and one that is epic and poetic. The voice of this soldier is ‘occidental’ because it resounds with echoes of the history of the country Camões described as ‘ocidental praia lusitana’ (Os Lusíadas, I.1: 2). His voice is embodied by a collectively ‘forgotten’ soldier (‘esquecido’), setting itself a double task: first, to record the memory of his fellow soldiers, because private memory is fragile (‘lembraste? … (e tu recordas)’, 24); and second, to prod the memory of their forgetful countrymen who did not go to war, because a country’s collective memory is even shorter than that of its individual soldiers (‘sentei-me na noite, em Calambata, … e de lá vos mandei escrito de toda a memória que há sobre os dias desta guerra’, 25).10 Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas is thus a novel of the collective memory of colonial war in Angola. This impression of a collective effort is achieved essentially through the strategy of implementing multivalent narrative voices. The reader continues to be baffled as to the identity of the narrator throughout the book. The narrative voice of the army chapters goes to extremes to confuse the reader. Chapter 5 is told in the first person, and this first person insists on his status as an eyewitness to the events he narrates: ‘Vi … vi … vi’ [‘I saw’]. This, however, unpredictably becomes: ‘Renato viu’ [‘Renato saw’]. Chapter 7 stresses the collective aspect of the narration (firstperson plural), but suddenly mystifies the reader again: ‘Eu vou endoidecer, pensou. … tenho medo do deus N’Zambi’ (88).11 This sentence is doubly  

[our gaze] [I, here, occidental soldier, a weapon in my hand, emptiness in my gaze, forgotten I give myself]  [do you remember?]  [the occidental Lusitanian seashore]  [do you [singular] remember? … (and you [singular] recall)] 10 [I sat down in Calambata, … and from there I sent you [plural] the record of all the memory there is of the days of this war]. Emphasis added. 11 [I am going to go crazy, he thought. … I am afraid of the god N’Zambi]



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perplexing because it is the quartermaster nurse who is disturbed to the point of illness, not the soldier Renato; but the character who thinks of the Angolan god N’Zambi is the unnamed sentry of the beginning. Could he be an African soldier? It is not until chapter 21 that we realise the sentry of chapter 1 was Renato too. Later we read a conversation between the quartermaster nurse and his childhood friend, fellow soldier Gonçalves. Here we learn that the nurse comes from a left-wing family; his father is a political prisoner in Portugal, and the son too is regarded as subversive in the army; moreover, he writes ‘literature’. Although the narration is in the third person, the impression it conveys is that this literary nurse is the most likely (fictional) author of the book we are reading. But chapter 9 finally identifies the narrating I: ‘eu, soldado Renato’ (109),12 and shows Renato sitting next to the quartermaster nurse on a military vehicle. Chapter 11 sometimes has a first-person narrator, who seems to be Renato, sometimes a third-person narrator, who refers to Renato as well as others. We must, then, take it as fictionally given that the narrator of Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas is private Renato, who occasionally refers to his island origins and to the sea off the Azores archipelago. His is an extremely selfeffacing narrative voice. In any case, the narrative seems to follow most frequently and closely the point of view of the quartermaster nurse. Renato and the nurse form a kind of inseparable double, the one doing the (ostensible) thinking and writing, the other taking the active role in attending to the warwounded. Disconcertingly, though, it is the nurse and not Renato who is described within the novel as a writer – though apparently not of this book; Renato is only presented as writing letters to his wife. Renato is meditative, whereas the nurse, at the front, is exhaustingly busy. And yet it could be argued that, of the two, the nurse is the one most inclined to think, ponder and question: ‘tem a mania que é filósofo, faz literatura, vai ser génio um dia’ (174).13 In any case, the novel’s narrator multiplies himself not just into a double, but also into many voices. The narration never appears to stem from one omniscient narrator; rather, it adopts the points of view of several characters in turn, focusing both on their actions and on their thoughts and feelings (variable internal focalisation).14 Such a complex process must represent a deliberate strategy. To try to disentangle all the characters involved in the multiplication of the narrative voice would be to impoverish the reading of 12 13

[I, private Renato] [he is convinced that he is a philosopher, he writes literature, is going to be a genius one day] 14 The term is Prince’s (1982, 1987), to convey the ‘vision avec’ of Pouillon’s terminology (1946).

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the novel, which itself at times underlines the importance of this collective aspect: ‘pensávamos nós em coro’ (110), ‘responderam, à uma, os meninos do coro’ (111), ‘sabiam que só era possível pensar em coro, todos à uma’ (202).15 Although initially disconcerting, this is a very effective literary device, allowing these chapters to be read as a collective narrative, the record of the entwined lives of a group of men thrown together by war.

Telling the Other side of the story This novel of collective memory also tries to encompass the Angolan civilians’ memory of the colonial war – a rarity in Portuguese literature. This attempt is ‘at best critically naïve’ and raises many questions of authenticity, which Paulo de Medeiros warns could lead to ‘the elaboration of a false memory’ (2000: 205–6). But it is worth investigating how it works in literary terms. In the chapters concerning the Angolans, the narrative voice is no more homogeneous than in the army chapters. The focus is equally plural, falling on the activities of the sanzala’s families and on their decrepit local chief, soba Mussunda. In chapter 2, narrated in the third person, Natália, an Angolan woman whose husband is brutally attacked by the chief of police, generally holds the narrative point of view. But soon others step in: ‘À parte, outra pessoa contava …’ (28).16 Just as in the army chapters, a collective voice (with sudden shifts between third- and first-person narration) appears behind this story, that of ‘the poor women’ (‘As pobres mulheres’, 29) who observe the violence and endure the hardship of their disempowered life in the sanzala. A sliding from ‘them’ to ‘us’ emphasises personal involvement in this collective story: ‘eram mulheres ainda mais grandiosas no silêncio. Por vezes, falavam umas nas outras só no nosso dialecto’ (29).17 More radically, in chapter 4, ‘she, Natália’ of chapter 2 becomes the narrative ‘I, Natália’. Soon, another drastic change of grammatical/narrative person occurs. INatália becomes silenced when she endures sexual abuse by a Portuguese soldier, giving way to another first-person voice that remembers being raped by white colonists. This deliberate entangling constitutes the imaginative embodiment of a different collective memory, retained by the Angolan women who hold the point of view in many of these chapters, that of rape by white men. Chapter 8 begins with yet another memory of sexual abuse, committed

15 [we thought in chorus; they answered, in unison, [like] choir boys; they knew that it was only possible to think in chorus, all at once] 16 [Aside, another person was telling …] 17 [they were women even more grandiose in their silence. At times they spoke with each other only in our dialect]. Emphasis added.



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by a Portuguese policeman, whose victim is now Anica, a washer-woman, but the narrative voice here does not appear to coincide with Natália’s either. Here, too, the focalisation is internal and variable, most often inside Natália’s head, but also closely following Mamã Josefa, Vavó Katuela, Anica and all the women who need to rescue their husbands from their blind drunkenness. Sometimes it seems more external, particularly when following Romeu, Natália’s husband, or Cavungi, Josefa’s husband, as if the narrative voice could not follow a man’s point of view as effortlessly as a woman’s. But it becomes internal again when following soba Mussunga, the elder Loneque and, later, Romeu. When Romeu becomes the subject of focalisation we learn more of his connections with guerrilla fighters beyond Angola’s northern border.18 Romeu is simply the most outspoken, who dares to vent feelings of revolt and desire for revenge against the Portuguese. Nevertheless, when the narrative becomes engaged in the revelation of the Angolan people’s profound aspirations for independence, it does so in the first-person plural. Plurality remains the dominant note: Quase sempre, combatentes escondiam-se no meio do povo. Traziam notícias de outros combatentes para a família, levavam informações sobre a tropa. Então, secretos caminhos atravessavam as anharas, os rios e as matas, na direcção da fronteira; ... passavam nas lagoas mansas da noite, nos ninhos quentes e nas sepulturas sem nome, onde que a guerra, a guerra dos nossos, esperava ainda a voz ausente e a respiração única deste povo. (157)19

Thus the colonial war of the army chapters becomes ‘a guerra dos nossos’ (‘our war’) in the sanzala chapters. The entanglement of voices, so carefully interwoven, becomes the principal strategy for achieving the impression of a collective account of the conflict, with the Angolan civilians adding echoes of another two involved parties, the guerrillas and the white settlers. Furthermore, rather than a narrator’s, the Angolan voice is that of a traditional storyteller: ‘Ih!, esses acontecimentos estão ter lugar na minha história, é porquê então?’ (102).20 Phrases normally used to catch listeners’ 18 The guerrilla connection is not a male prerogative. Anica, too, is described as the wife of a guerrilla fighter who has left to join the MPLA army. The storyteller herself is privy to much information that reveals close contact with the guerrilla movement. 19 [Almost always the fighters would hide among the people. They brought news of other fighters to their families, they took away information about the army. Then secret paths would cross the capim-plains, the rivers, and the bush, towards the border; ... they’d pass by the quiet lagoons at night, the warm nests and the tombs without names, to where the war, the war of our people, still awaited the absent voice and the breathing together of this people]. Emphasis added. 20 [Ih! those happenings are taking place in my story, why is that then?]

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attention in a situation of oral communication punctuate the story: ‘sabias?’ (32), ‘Eu conto’ (81), ‘Vê só’ (181), ‘estou-te falar’ (207).21 These oral markers occur most frequently in chapters 8 and 14, which give an overview of aspects of the colonial war as the Portuguese author imagines they could be seen by Angolan civilians, but they are conspicuously absent from those dealing with guerrilla involvement (chapters 10 and 12), perhaps because the latter convey a more historicised version of events. Given the predominantly oral character of the narrative and the emphasis on the telling, the narrator(s) of the sanzala chapters should more properly be referred to as storyteller(s). The descriptions of everyday life (with the men working in the fields, and only women, children and the elderly left in the living quarters), as well as the attention to rape, children’s play and difficulties in feeding the family, suggest that the storyteller is a woman talking or gossiping with a friend. But certain explanations the storyteller(s) assume(s) the addressee needs to hear may imply that the addressee is a Portuguese character conversing with the Angolan speaker(s): most likely the quartermaster nurse, the only one who goes to the sanzala regularly (other than for sex), and who has endless hope for the children of the enclosed village (‘os miúdos da esperança do furriel enfermeiro’, 49).22 Described as the only white character devoted to the blacks, he may spend time listening to the women, these being then the collective storyteller(s) of the sanzala chapters. In chapter 5, however, it is Renato who goes to the sanzala and spends time talking to Júlia and her mother, then also to her husband, Bungo. The book provides yet another clue: Renato is afraid of the god N’Zambi, a fear he may have learned explicitly from Anica: ‘para Anica, o grande deus N’Zambi estava lá’ (106).23 But given that N’Zambi is ‘the Creator, the Author of existence and its dominant characteristics – good and evil’ (Ribas, 1989: 31, my translation), any other Angolan character might fit the role. Anyhow, Anica could well be the main storyteller in the Angolan chapters, as much a self-effacing character as Renato, the acknowledged narrator of the Portuguese chapters. So, too, Renato could be the addressee of the Angolan chapters. The novel’s deliberately misleading clues cultivate an ambiguity that constantly adds to the impression of a collective narrative, or a collective account, written or spoken, by many voices – ‘in chorus’.

21 22 23

[did you know?; I’ll tell you; Just imagine; I’m telling you] [the children of the quartermaster nurse’s hope] [for Anica, the great god N’Zambi was there]



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A productive tension The question remains of how far these voices engage in dialogue. Undeniably, the voices of the black Angolans are much more present here than in most Portuguese colonial war novels. While such voices arise occasionally in the narratives of traumatic memory and become a little more audible in those of personal memory, here they make up half of the novel. In fact, the very language of Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas changes as the narrative alternates between military and indigenous chapters. Those relating to the military are in standard Portuguese; those by the Angolan storyteller(s) are told in the local variety of Portuguese, with its ‘ungrammatical’ traits (‘um português desgramaticado’, 71), which to a Portuguese reader immediately sound foreign. Naturally, the language presented as Angolan Portuguese remains an imitation, an artificial, literary recreation of what a Portuguese author perceives as the speech of the sanzala. Nevertheless, half of Autópsia abrogates the metropolitan standard and consistently adopts the Angolan variety of Portuguese (or what a Portuguese speaker perceives as such),24 alongside the European standard. This constitutes a radical linguistic and political choice, conferring the same literary prestige to both languages, rather than simply including the African variety to give exotic flavour. Unlike other Portuguese colonial war novels, Autópsia very strikingly removes the quotation marks from around the reported speech of the Other, thus much reducing the distance between Portuguese selfhood and Angolan otherness. This linguistic duality gives the novel a radically dialogical feel, in Bakhtin’s sense. Expanding his linguistic concept of dialogism to apply to the novel as a privileged genre, Bakhtin understands dialogism as a basic trope of human thought and literary expression. None of the colonial war novels analysed here so far could be considered monological, inasmuch as each of them sets up a dialogue at least between a new vision of the world, generated by the author’s participation in the war, and the old, until then the universally received vision (within the cultural environment of Salazar’s regime). But Autópsia goes a significant step further: the dialogism that can be sensed in the other war novels here becomes the very essence of the narrative. As Bakhtin explains: in the process of literary creation, languages interanimate each other and objectify precisely that side of one’s own [and of the other’s] language that pertains to its world view, its inner form, the axiologically accentuated system inherent in it. For the creating literary consciousness, existing in a field illuminated by another’s language … what stands out is precisely that

24

Teixeira (2000: 366–7) lists its salient features.

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which makes language concrete and which makes its world view ultimately untranslatable.╇ (Bakhtin, 1981: 62. Emphasis in the original)

There has been much debate about the rightness or propriety of postcolonial writers’ employing the language of their former colonising powers. Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas is an exceptional, inverted case, in which a novelist from one of the latter chooses to use (at least an approximation of) the language of a former colony together with that of his own country. Published in 1984 (when the notion of postcoloniality had already gained currency, though certainly not in Portugal), the novel is set in 1972, about three years before Angola achieved independence. The author’s linguistic choice amounts, therefore, at least in the eyes of parts of the political spectrum, to adopting the language of the ‘enemy’.25 The fact remains that if a Portuguese writer adopts the Angolan variety of Portuguese as a literary medium, this is only possible as a result of the historical situation that enabled him to become familiar with that language. In any case, most Angolans do not speak either standard or local Portuguese, but only their own African languages, a reality the novel also underlines occasionally. Indeed, is it really possible to express even in Angolan Portuguese the identities of peoples from various ethnic and cultural backgrounds, dislocated by colonialism?26 Nevertheless, Autópsia represents a sustained effort to engage dialogically (in Bakhtin’s sense) with the Angolan reality, to view the world also through Angolan eyes. In other words, the normally ‘denied or outlawed self ’ (Tiffin, 1988: 171) of the colonised Other is here given equal weight linguistically and narratively, a shift which destabilises the imperial supremacy of the Portuguese standard. Does the book succeed in what it sets out to achieve in literary terms? The privileging of the Angolan variety of Portuguese expresses political sympathies with the rebelling Angolans, with such sympathy actually crossing the linguistic border between coloniser and colonised. But most of all, the inclusion on an equal footing of the chapters in Angolan Portuguese serves the purpose of rendering this novel a joint account of the colonial war, which to be truly collective should include the point of view of the Africans. By allowing the Angolan characters to express themselves in their own (albeit second) language, i.e. as their own selves, Autópsia transforms 25 On the other hand, critics more steeped in postcolonial thought might well consider the literary use of the colonial lingua franca an illegitimate and patronising appropriation of a tool of the colonised by the coloniser. Linda Hutcheon rightly draws attention to this danger of ‘imperializing appropriation’ substituting for appropriate ‘interest and concern’ (1990a: 170). 26 Many postcolonial African writers continue to adopt Portuguese as their literary language anyway.



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that alterity into a selfhood that becomes less unfamiliar to the reader as the novel progresses. Dialogism is noticeable in this novel in more than typographically ‘visible’ terms (removal of quotation marks, alternation of army/sanzala chapters), which would amount to a mere juxtaposition of monologues. Bakhtin’s concept of a dialogical imagination goes well beyond the juxtaposition of two ‘foreign’ languages. For the Russian scholar, the foreignness of any two juxtaposed languages is much more than a linguistic concept: In an intentional novelistic hybrid, … the important activity is not only (in fact not so much) the mixing of linguistic forms – the markers of two languages and style – as it is the collision between differing points of view on the world that are embedded in these forms. Therefore an intentional artistic hybrid is a semantic hybrid … a semantics that is concrete and social. (Bakhtin, 1981: 360. Emphasis in the original.)

Two such juxtaposed languages stand in an interrelation that induces a process of ‘mutual illumination’. If the Portuguese and the Angolan chapters alternated without any ‘inter-illumination’, the novel would not be dialogical in any real sense. But a progressive – dialogic – change in each other’s view of the world is brought about by the interpenetration of these ‘social languages with their internal logic and necessity’ (quoted in Todorov, 1984a: 62).27 The Portuguese narrator(s) gradually acquire(s) an understanding of the Other, which informs his/their changing view of the colonial war. The Angolan storyteller(s) has (have) had to internalise some knowledge of the Portuguese Other, shaped primarily over the eleven years of colonial war (since the events of 1961 in Píri), but also, and more insidiously, over the last five centuries of colonisation and acculturation. Consequently, the changes in their consciousness of their own world are perhaps less drastically noticeable. But the Portuguese soldiers, or the narrator(s) representing them, find themselves thrown into a situation that introduces huge changes in their view of themselves as subjects and the Angolans as Others, and of the colonial war in general, resulting in a profound feeling of decentring. This may explain why this novel does not move between the colonial war setting and an acknowledged cultural and geographical centre (Portugal, the Azores). ‘Verbal and ideological decentering’, argues Bakhtin, ‘occurs only when a national culture sheds its closure and its self-sufficiency, when it becomes conscious of itself as only one among other cultures and languages’ 27 Bakhtin’s words. In this analysis, I have now moved from the concept of a strictly speaking ‘foreign’ language to the more complex notion of ‘social language’, which Bakhtin defines as ‘a concrete socio-linguistic belief system that defines a distinct identity for itself within the boundaries of a language that is unitary only in the abstract’ (1981: 356).

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(quoted in Todorov, 1984a: 67). Such is the transformation experienced by the Portuguese narrator(s), the sign that a real dialogical interaction has begun within the fictional microcosm of this novel. I first tried to extricate the identity of the narrator(s) of the Portuguese army chapters and that of the storyteller(s) of the Angolan ones. However, a dialogic interpretation of the novel must seek points of convergence between the two. The novel offers enough clues to allow us to accept (also) the possibility that Renato is both the Portuguese narrator and the addressee of the Angolan storyteller’s account. As a national of a country that always insisted on the religious dimension of its ‘civilising mission’ in Africa, he accomplishes a huge cultural step in admitting to fearing an African god. This respect reveals a much deeper involvement in the culture of the Other than the questioning of the litany of ‘expanding Faith and Empire’ recurrent in most colonial war novels. Renato can only have heard of N’Zambi in the colony itself, where he finds himself because of the war, so that it is the war situation that generates the dialogical cultural exchange. But his belief in the African god appears together with intertextual echoes of the romance of Don Quijote and of a Portuguese medieval ‘cantiga de amigo’,28 as if to emphasise that there is no rejection of his own heritage, only a widening to encompass that of the people who should also have made significant contributions to Portuguese culture, if a real fusion had been allowed to take place. Moreover, Renato’s acceptance of the African god goes together with repeated references to angels, bells and other symbols of a traditional Christian religiosity (but no other signs of faith, in a war situation that renders the notion of God absurd and void). The frequent references to angels in the novel configure a childlike (or ‘primitive’) private, religious imaginary. But when the Angolan storyteller also refers to angels, these are the ‘angels’ of the bush (‘os anjos escondidos nas matas’, 278), as the guerrilla fighters are known for their ability to become invisible in the Angolan savannah. The dialogue of the two ‘social languages’ is thus at work, with one taking on essential elements of the religious imagination of the other and fusing them with its own. Nowhere is this dialogical fusion more surprising than when the narrative point of view in a Portuguese army chapter abruptly shifts to become that of the guerrilla fighters. In an emotionally loaded chapter, the quartermaster nurse has just collapsed from exhaustion after having attended to numerous soldiers maimed in an ambush and having had to write nine death certificates.29 28 ‘Montado na sua égua, combatia contra moinhos-de-vento, movia-se na imaginação e na loucura dos caminhos e nunca ninguém trazia novas do seu regresso’ (39) [Riding his mare, he fought against windmills, moving in the imagination and in the madness of the paths, and nobody ever brought news of his return]. Emphasis added. 29 The nurse is exhausted and extremely thin (‘com sua magreza quase suplicante, mas temerária’, 192) [with his almost imploring, but foolhardy thinness]. His thinness matters



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The focalisation at that stage seems to be external: ‘Pairava então sobre a Calambata a sombra suspeita de mais uma trégua’ (194); and it continues to be so, as it concentrates on the ensuing guerrilla activities: Os comandantes da guerrilha … haviam de estar escrevendo agora os seus relatórios, com profusas descrições sobre as emboscadas: … o número dos brancos mortos, o material de guerra apreendido aos tugas – ao exército colonialista, corrigiriam depois – e proporiam tudo à consideração superior … numa altura em que os tugas tinham bons motivos para desmoralizar e ir embora para sempre da nossa terra.╇ (195)30

What shocks here (not politically, but narratively) is that the quotation marks have been removed from the last part of the sentence, so that ‘our country’ becomes an independent black Angola, precisely what the Portuguese army is there to combat. Within a Portuguese army chapter, the military themselves are now called tugas, the Angolan word for them. This profoundly dialogical chapter enacts the fusion of initially opposing world views by this – literal and figurative – removal of quotation marks.31 Textual dialogues Dialogic interrelations in Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas occur also within the Portuguese chapters, assuming an intertextual dimension: a dialogue between the novel and the Portuguese literary lineage in which the narrator(s) insert(s) his/their narrative. In their respective presentations of Bakhtin’s theories, both Todorov and Kristeva have pointed out intertextuality as a specific case of dialogism, which Bakhtin did not demarcate as clearly as they do. Todorov prefers to save ‘the denomination dialogical for certain instances of interbecause it places him within the European lineage of the foolhardy Don Quijote, with connotations of visionary madness, as well as within the field of pro-Angolan sympathies, so to speak, because fat is an extreme sign of difference for the famished Angolans: ‘as barrigas a transbordar dos cinturões’ (30), ‘gente barriguda e avermelhada’ (253), ‘volumosa barriga de proscídeo’ (254), ‘gorducho como toucinho’ (255), ‘pescoço adiposo’ (256), ‘a bunda gorda’ (259) [their bellies spilling over their belts [the policemen’s]; potbellied, red-skinned people [the colonists]; a voluminous belly like a proboscidean’s; fat as lard; adipose neck; fat bum]. 30 [There hovered over Calambata the suspicious shadow of another truce; The guerrilla commanders … would be writing their reports now, with detailed descriptions of the ambushes: … the number of whites killed, war equipment seized from the tugas [Portuguese] – from the colonialist army, they would later correct – and they would be submitting it all to the consideration of their superiors … at a time when the tugas had good reason to be demoralised and to leave our country forever.] 31 For a discussion of the role of quotation marks in the demarcation of the discourse of the Other, see Bakhtin, 1981: 338–55.

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textuality, such as an exchange of responses by two speakers’ (1984a: 60), reserving ‘intertextuality’ to a dialogue between texts, whereby various texts become present within a new text, through quotations, allusions or direct commentary. Intertextuality implies dialogue between a text and the cultural tradition to which it belongs. More recently, Gérard Genette has amplified the concept to include everything which ‘puts a text in manifest or secret relation to other texts’, preferring to call it transtextuality. In his terminology intertextuality (as a separate category within transtextuality) is reserved for ‘quotation, plagiarism or allusion’.32 Intertextuality in Autópsia is yet another strategy by which collective memory finds expression. While the polyphony of the novel allows for the inclusion of synchronically co-existing accounts of the war, intertextuality brings forth another type of collective voice, a diachronic memory, shaped by numerous previous literary texts dealing with Portugal’s history, which inform the present-day view of the war. The Portuguese narrator initially defines himself as ‘soldado ocidental’ (24), which immediately places him in intertextual dialogue with the Portuguese epic poem Os Lusíadas.33 Earlier there was another echo of Camões’s poem: the reference to ‘pátria muito amada’ (16) [‘the much loved fatherland’].34 Autópsia re-examines the notion of fatherland, put into question by the raging war and the misery of both Portuguese soldiers and Angolan civilians: ‘a noção de pátria em crise’ (22).35 Salazar’s regime always exalted the fatherland in its slogan ‘Deus, Pátria e Família’. In Autópsia, N’Zambi seems to have almost replaced God.36 Each Portuguese soldier has been torn from a family to which he may well be returned in a coffin, while in Angola the wives of guerrilla fighters live as widows. Only the abstract notion of fatherland remains, so the narrator(s) continuously engage(s) with it. Camões’s poem made his countrymen endlessly proud of their nation, but the historical weight of the fatherland it defined as conquering the seas now constantly burdens the soldiers in the colonial war: ‘um mar de quinhentos 32

tion.)

I follow Carlos Reis’s concise presentation of the terms (1997: 187, my transla-

33 The force of the adjective ocidental in the Portuguese historical imagination is highlighted in Manuel Alegre’s poem ‘Coração Polar’ (1998: 33–7): ‘Não é apenas um lugar físico algures no mapa/ é talvez o adjectivo ocidental/ o verbo ocidentir/ o advérbio ocidentalmente/ quem sabe se o substantivo ocidentimento’ [It is not merely a physical place somewhere on the map/ it is perhaps the adjective occidental/ the verb occidentise/ the adverb occidentally/ who knows maybe the noun occidentment]. 34 Os Lusíadas III.21 (‘Esta é a ditosa pátria minha amada’) and X.143. 35 [the notion of fatherland in crisis] 36 This can be viewed as another attempt to emulate Camões’s epic poem, which makes a successful synthesis of the Christian and the pagan worlds. ‘Ancient gods’ (107) also inhabit the forests in Autópsia.



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anos’ (132), ‘Era um homem de quinhentos anos, de um país que se voltara na direcção de um mar inocente’ (165).37 Five centuries, carefully counted not from Portugal’s independence in the twelfth century, but from the beginning of the seafaring era (which led to colonialism) in the fifteenth, must now be re-evaluated and questioned. Even the constant references to sea and shipwrecks on the totally landlocked northern Angolan front must be understood as a dialogical confrontation with Portugal’s history of maritime expansion, as celebrated in Os Lusíadas, as well as in Portugal’s other major epic poem, Fernando Pessoa’s Mensagem.38 But the fifteenth-century caravels have become ships wrecked in the savannah of the colonial war: ‘um navio perdera o rumo do seu mar de árvores e morros, entrara com a quilha pelo capim dentro’ (126).39 Camões’s glorification of Portugal’s past makes way for a brutal verification of the country’s inability to go forward from here, in the present, in Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas. The very sea that was innocent before the Portuguese ventured forth over it is now the sea in ruins of the novel’s title. Not surprisingly, therefore, a dialogue begins with the texts that celebrated the beginning of this history, because the present moment feels like the end of it. At times, the soldier-narrator(s) undermine(s) the language of Salazar’s propaganda by directly quoting medieval Portuguese chronicles. When the radio transmits an SOS from a military column the guerrillas have just devastated, the narrator breaks into fifteenth-century idiom, with archaic spelling and medieval morphology: É só preciso chegar depressa, acudir aos nossos e à sua perdiçom, aos nossos, aos nossos, acudamos prestes que matom o meestre, que os matom todolos nossos e de pronto nom serão mais vivos.╇ (116)40

The echo is of a famous passage from Fernão Lopes’s Crónica de Dom João I. It was during King John I’s reign that Portuguese voyaging began, and it 37 [a five-hundred-year-old sea; He was a five-hundred-year-old man, from a country which had turned itself toward an innocent sea] 38 The best-known of the Mensagem poems, ‘Mar Português’, immediately springs to mind: ‘para que fosses nosso, ó mar’ [that you might become ours, o sea]. António Cirurgião points out how this poem, too, represents an important aspect of Portugal’s collective memory, through the ‘collective drama that was the maritime adventure’ (1990: 186, my translation). 39 [a ship had gone adrift in her sea of trees and hills, had wrecked her hull in the capim-grass] 40 [All that is needed is to arrive quickly, to go to the help of our men and their ruin, to ours, to ours, let us go quickly for they are killing the Master, they are killing all our men, and soon they will no longer be alive]. The Master, who clearly does not belong in this story, is the Master of the House of Avis (‘o Mestre de Avis’), the future King John I (also the subject of one of the Mensagem poems).

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would lead to the establishment of the country’s overseas empire. The political critique achieved by directly borrowing the language of this chronicle is thus most piercing: Portugal’s long-standing obsession with its historical past is such that the country’s whole ethos has been completely arrested in time: and not only as a consequence of the forty-odd years of Salazar’s dictatorship but as the result of a much longer and more pervasive historical self-Â�indulgence, from the beginning of the imperial venture. It is as if the country’s imagination had remained anchored in the fifteenth century, basking in its glory, but forgetting the human cost, that ‘ruin of our men’ which Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas expresses so eloquently. The wastage of human life that began with the very high death rates on the early sea voyages continues on land five centuries later. The intertextual dialogue alternates between chronicle and epic. From the epic, the narrator(s) borrow(s) posture, language and the ‘peculiar qualities of memory and vision’ of the epic bard (Preminger, 1974: 242). The recording of events as they unfold is certainly also the aim of the chronicle in general. But the choice of Fernão Lopes’s work is also otherwise justified: although his chronicle is of a king’s achievements, Fernão Lopes always pays detailed attention to the contribution of the anonymous, small people, so that his work focuses equally on the myriad non-heroes without whom history could not be made. And those are now the anonymous, ordinary soldiers whose voices we hear in Autópsia 500 years later. Secondly, the chronicler states the importance of the visual component in his narrative, for which he claims the same sort of eyewitness status that is essential narrative strategy in Autópsia: ‘Ora esguardae, como se fossees presentes’, says the medieval text.41 While the storyteller(s) of the Angolan chapters emphasise(s) the orality of her/their account, the narrator(s) of the Portuguese ones repeatedly underline(s) his/their role as eye-witness(es), taken as proof of authenticity: ‘I saw, I have seen’ – death and mutilation among the Portuguese soldiers; death, disease and malnutrition among the Angolan civilians; massacres perpetrated by desperate army officers who have lost all sense of proportion; endless horrors described in more vivid, bloody detail than in any other Portuguese novel of the colonial war. However, the inclusion of all the gore and carnage in the central chapters cannot be attributed to any particular bloodthirstiness on the part of the narrator(s). On the contrary: the narrator is a man of angels, bells and gentleness, as much as he is (another) man of books, ideas and selfless devotion to others. He expresses himself mostly in very poetic language, with surprisingly lyrical imagery, which contrasts sharply with 41 [Now, do look, as if you were present]. Fernão Lopes, Crónica de Dom João I, 1ª parte, cap. CXLVIII, quoted in many anthologies with the title ‘Das Tribulações que Lisboa padecia’. Portuguese novelist Olga Gonçalves uses the phrase Ora Esguardae as the title of a work of testimonial fiction.



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the vulgarity and crudity of the other military men’s language, whenever their speech is quoted. But the macabre is there for a purpose: to underline the visual character of this memoir (chronicle and epic) of the colonial war. Anti-personnel mines, military vehicles bursting into flames, explosion of hand-grenades, the instant severing of arms and legs, the bursting of internal organs and especially the long, desperate agony of the dying young men, hopelessly waiting to be rescued by the medicine of a quartermaster nurse who cannot play God – all of these have an intrinsic place in the novel, side by side with the angels, bells and beautiful poetic imagery of the (other?) narrator. These strong visual images seem to function as a denial of the aseptic, sanitised official accounts of the colonial war, which were the only ones censorship allowed in Portugal’s media in the 1960s and ’70s. Thus, Autópsia addresses – transtextually – the phrase that became common on television and radio sets in every Portuguese household during the war years: ‘ADEUS ATÉ AO MEU REGRESSO’ (quoted in capitals and set out in a graphic box on p.€165).42 Those five anodyne words ended almost all of the interviews with soldiers serving in Africa, which were broadcast each evening, particularly before Christmas. That was the dedramatised impression of the war that the Portuguese public was allowed to have. The radically different visual image Autópsia presents is the response that becomes imperative in a book determined to tell the full story: that which might have been the soldiers’ uncut and less formulaic message to their families. The style of Autópsia sometimes sounds like a scream of despair, the scream that the soldiers’ totally controlled ‘good-bye until my return’ could never let out: ninguém conseguirá nunca sobre eles deixar escrita a memória desse dia. Só talvez um grito, um berro altíssimo e distante, erguendo-se no espaço, fora do tempo e de toda a memória … só talvez um grito, atravessado por muitos outros gritos.╇ (160)43

Thus intertextuality in this novel establishes a dialogue not only with other literary texts, but also with the contemporary, censored representations of the war by the Portuguese media. But the subtlest instance of intertextual dialogue in Autópsia is perhaps the one the novel establishes with the poetry of Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935).44 42 43

[GOODBYE UNTIL MY RETURN] [about them [the nine killed soldiers] nobody will ever be able to write down the memory of that day. Only perhaps a cry, a terribly loud and distant scream, rising up in space, outside of time and of all memory … only perhaps a scream, traversed by many other screams] 44 Not necessarily in Mensagem, which has an esoteric dimension completely absent from Autópsia.

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Especially relevant here is the poem ‘O Menino de Sua Mãe’ (1942), whose title is quoted directly (169) or with alterations (‘à pobre mãe do seu menino’, 134, ‘todos os meninos de suas mães’, 167) three or four times in the novel. It is worth quoting the opening and final lines: On the plain left alone / Where the breeze now softens, / With bullets in his brain – / Two, once and once again – / He lies there dead, and stiffens. // His tunic is bloodstained. … // (O nets the Empire knots!) / He lies there dead, and rots, / His mother’s little boy.╇ (Pessoa, translated by Bosley, 1997: 36)

The situation in Autópsia corresponds closely to that portrayed by Pessoa, whose language inspires the novel’s gory imagery. For its thematic parallels with the war fatalities presented in Autópsia, this poem is mentioned above all in chapter 13, where there lie the nine corpses of the young soldiers who had, until recently, also been their own mothers’ little boys. In this chapter, too, appear capitalised references to the regional commander as ‘o Homem’ [the Man] and the expected disastrous outcome of the next enemy attack as ‘a Grande Coisa’ [the Great Thing]; likewise, in chapter 15, ‘o Grande Inimigo’ [the Great Enemy] seems to echo Fernando Pessoa’s ‘Grande Arquitecto’.45 Many echoes of this and other poems by Fernando Pessoa can be traced in the novel (including the fact that bells also appear in poems by one of his heteronyms, Alberto Caeiro), but such direct quotations and indirect resonances are not the only form of intertextual dialogue with the poet’s work in Autópsia. One of Pessoa’s most striking contributions to Portuguese culture was his creation of various heteronyms, characters he brought into literary existence with a life of their own, with different professions, and to whom he attributed different styles of poetry, each different from his own. Pessoa even determined the time of death of some of his heteronyms. The entangled double that the narrators of the army chapters in Autópsia seem to constitute (i.e. Renato and the quartermaster nurse, whose actions Renato describes as separate, but whose thoughts, feelings and hopes have become inextricably fused with Renato’s) could well be seen as a later heteronymous pair. Heteronymity was as essential to Pessoa’s poetic universe as the doubling up, even the multiplication, of the narrator(s) is in Autópsia as a strategy for the gathering of a collective memory of the colonial war. The comparison appears all the more pertinent as the quartermaster nurse is often described as possessed by a madness (‘loucura’) very similar to that attributed by Pessoa to King Sebastian in Mensagem.46 As Cirurgião points out, ‘King Sebastian’s legacy to 45 46

Camões has ‘o grande arquitector’ (Daedalus) in Os Lusíadas IV.104.3. ‘D. Sebastião, Rei de Portugal’ is the fifth poem in the third section of Mensagem’s first part (‘As Quinas’).



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his people is his madness’, meaning ‘the dream of an empire without frontiers where the sun never sets’ (1990: 117, my translation). The quartermaster nurse’s ‘madness’ is his hope for the Angolan children; he is repeatedly described as ‘the man whose hope was the children of Angola’,47 with epic overtones, as in the formulaic duplex Ulysses or pius Aeneas. His madness, then, corresponds to a further historical development, which will only become possible after what appears already as the inevitable collapse of the empire of which Sebastian dreamt. His madness begins where King Sebastian’s ends, but both share a visionary quality: one, that of the emergence of Empire; the other, that of the future of Africa (its children) beyond it. Nevertheless, what leads us to see in the doubleness of Renato and the nurse a case of heteronymity created in the mould of Pessoa’s heteronyms is the fact that Renato is killed at the end of the novel (‘No dia em que eu morri na guerra’, 283).48 The narrative continuing in the first person (after ‘I died’) confirms that someone else is writing the story previously attributed to the named narrator – which finally explains the deliberate entanglements of Renato and the nurse. Although not strictly heteronyms in the Pessoan sense (but Pessoa too ‘killed’ some of his heteronyms), the two men certainly fall well within the imaginative realm of Pessoa’s creations. Rather than as heteronyms, they should perhaps be viewed as the King Sebastian who got killed in North Africa and the madness that survived him, for ‘Sebastian was two: himself and his madness’ (Cirurgião, 1990: 117, my translation). A more substantial case of creative heteronymity in the Pessoan model, involving the structure of the whole novel, appears in the doubling up of Portuguese narrator/Angolan storyteller. Perhaps Pessoa created heteronyms to experiment with different styles that did not ring true within his own voice. João de Melo may well have devised a similar sort of heteronymity to bring the voices of (some of the) African Others into mainstream Portuguese literature, which has never otherwise seriously engaged with African cultures or given them more than a fleeting voice in its texts.49

The question of authenticity Does Autópsia succeed in giving voice to the Africans? Do the sanzala chapters convey a faithful representation of the life of a section of the Angolan 47 48 49

Similar formulations on pp. 47, 48, 49, 92, 99. [The day I died in the war] See Magalhães (2000: 398–400): ‘Our literature about the colonial wars is almost entirely bereft of African characters. … rarely do we hear a person-to-person dialogue. … Blacks become invisible to the Portuguese soldiers.’ See also Magalhães (2002: 215–17), on the generalised ‘erasure of the Other’ in the colonial war novels, with which I agree in general, but less so in the case of Autópsia.

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population during the colonial war? We could only argue in the positive for a Portuguese readership. An Angolan reader would more likely find this representation external and flawed. Magalhães underlines that in Portuguese war narratives the African voices are always ‘translated, filtered … somehow anthropophagised by the “white” voice that gives them a voice’ (2002: 187, my translation). Nor indeed could it be otherwise. A Portuguese audience perceives the language used in the sanzala sections as distinctly deviant from standard Portuguese, but an Angolan linguist would no doubt judge them inauthentic. Yet the language used does not attempt to emulate the Angolan standard, as spoken and written by the educated classes. It tries to represent the language of the partly acculturated Angolans living in the artificial conditions of a sanzala created for civilians displaced by the war. And the novel makes no secret of the fact that this language could only be that of a small percentage of that population (for example, the acculturated soba must act as interpreter between the local coffee-growers and the Portuguese colonists who come to buy the coffee). With these strong limitations then, yes, Autópsia tries to give voice to the Angolans’ point of view. The conditions portrayed seem real enough when Autópsia deals with the Angolans’ sense of displacement. In the north, the two Calambata sanzalas assemble people forcibly removed from their native territories in the south. Because some members of their community joined the liberation movements, the Portuguese authorities punished the whole village, relocating them far away. Here, they suffer hunger and exploitation but are ironically called ‘rehabilitated people’ (‘povo recuperado’, 31). There follows a more explicitly political lament: pessoa do povo levou muita porrada e viajou nos camiões da tropa té neste lugar de Calambata, bem longe de nossa terra, pra ser vigiada dia e noite e não poder dar encontro com os irmãos que estão a fazer a guerra de libertação.╇ (31)50

Humiliated and flogged (‘Fulano ou cala ou tem chicote no corpo’, 120), they feel defeated (‘Vencidos e calados’, 258).51 Their soba has become a puppet figure, for the Portuguese secret police use him as a tool to control his people, thus undermining his standing in the community. Inevitably, they must see him as siding with the authorities, whose language he speaks. Using him as a mediator is a sure way to disempower and silence him. Enforced displacement, 50 [Us folks got slammed plenty times, and we got brought here in those army trucks right to this Calambata place, a whole long way from home, so as they can keep watching us by day and by night, and so as we can’t join up with our brothers who are fighting for freedom] 51 [A man either holds his tongue or gets the lash on his body; defeated and silenced]



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cultural dislocation, the silencing of the colonised and disempowerment through acculturation: the language used to depict the situation may well be inappropriate, but the situation is nevertheless portrayed from the perspective of the Other. The problem remains that ‘speaking for the Other … is merely a form of ventriloquism’ (Medeiros, 2000: 206) which, apart from good intentions, can lead to a perpetuation of the silencing of the colonised. Furthermore, Autópsia attempts to validate African history by explicitly referring to its different – oral – mode: ‘O povo sabia e guardava na memória o testemunho dessas histórias que todos os dias ficavam escritas na terra-mãe, nossa pátria bem-amada’ (119).52 African history has not been recorded in European-style chronicles, but people’s memories of the war are transmitted orally, by the women and by the elders, with their special kind of wisdom: ‘são muito sábios, os mais-velhos, mentira? Ciência da vida está neles’ (150).53 The people of the sanzala struggle to maintain a sense of self-esteem despite deep-seated feelings of inferiority, which colonialism has projected on to them. Romeu is torn between beating his wife, when she accuses him of drinking, and not behaving in an ‘uncivilised’ manner: ‘Precisava respeitar na companheira de sua vida. Tinha toda igualdade ali na família, como nas pessoas civilizadas’ (151).54 His tone shows that he has internalised the long humiliation imposed on Africans, whom colonialism viewed, and ultimately made to view themselves, as primitive and barbaric.55 The undignified manner of life forced on the sanzala characters leads almost all of them to despair. But a ray of hope remains, through an incipient consciousness of historical purpose. They envision ‘uma pátria que estava talvez crescer, ainda invisível, por dentro das pessoas’ (152).56 This notion of the deliberate construction of a nation, with the compromises it necessitates, also finds clear political expression here. We read several times that the sanzala people dislike one Bailundo character, perhaps for his different ethnicity but especially for his being an assimilado. The Estado Novo’s creation of the assimilado category (one step above the indigenous majority) was of course responsible for added tensions among the Angolans. Later in the novel, a voice already much more politically aware of the need to transcend ethnic differences in the interests of national unity disavows racial prejudices:

52 [The people knew and kept in their memory the testimony of those histories which every day were written in the mother-earth, our beloved homeland] 53 [they’re very wise, the elders – a lie? Science of life is in them] 54 [He needed to respect the companion of his life. There was all manner of equality in the family, just like in civilised people] 55 Fanon (1952) movingly analyses the process. 56 [a nation that was perhaps growing, still invisible, inside the people]

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Tinha ainda muitos bailundos, pessoas de dignidade. Só esse Bartolomeu era tolo. ... Povo de Angola é só um. A independência não vinha pôr qualquer diferença nas pessoas.╇ (266)57

It is certainly true that the sanzala chapters cannot in the end represent an authentically African voice, even though they adopt the point of view of the Angolans and (an imitation of) their language. In this respect, it is important to recall that accusations of lack of authenticity have also been made against the exponents of the négritude movement, who may have been trapped in an internalisation of European values. Rather than postcolonial, Autópsia has a négritude feel about it. It could almost be read as a response to Amílcar Cabral’s famous 1970 declaration that the African liberation movements rose against imperialist domination, i.e. against Salazar’s regime, not against the Portuguese people (hence the conspicuous lack of antagonism against the Portuguese in Autópsia); and also to his view that the (Guinean) people should continue to use Portuguese as their language for communication (hence the incorporation of an African variety of Portuguese in the novel).58 Autópsia attempts to represent traditionally oral African culture by inserting marks of oral communication throughout, but the genuine ‘initial and final formulas’ (Moser, 1979: 43) that punctuate Angolan storytelling are missing. So too are genuinely African elements: folk and animal tales, myths, legends, songs, riddles, proverbs. Also, the more externally focused chapters, those dealing most extensively with the Angolan view of the war, sound in a way least authentic, because they become less oral in texture. The reader becomes aware that they are still part of a fictional written text – in the sense, as Homi Bhabha would say, that they ‘historicise the colonial experience’ (1993: 115). They make it read as a master narrative, which is a European, not an African genre. Perhaps the epic perspective of the army chapters begins to pervade the sanzala chapters too, by now making us forget that elsewhere the novel tries to express the validity of an alternative, oral form of history. Nevertheless, the sanzala chapters of Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas endeavour to express – as much as possible in a Portuguese novel – the inauthentic, ‘mimicking’ lives the Angolans lived under the colonial war.59 A 57 [There were many other Bailundos, people of dignity. Only that Bartolomeu was stupid. … The people of Angola are only one. Independence wasn’t going to put up distinctions between people] 58 See Pires Laranjeira (1995: 407–8). Cabral was not Angolan. But the soba’s name in Autópsia is Mussunda, as in the poem ‘Mussunda amigo’ by Agostinho Neto, a major Angolan figure of the Négritude movement. 59 I allude to Bhabha’s famous definition of ‘colonial mimicry’ (1994: 86). Also very significant in this context, though, is Leela Gandhi’s comment on Bhabha’s concept: ‘But “mimicry” is also the sly weapon of anti-colonial civility, an ambivalent mixture of deference and disobedience’ (1998: 149).



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good example here is the one party described as taking place in the sanzala on a Sunday afternoon. A traditional party in Angola, a sunguilamento, would have occurred in the evening, when the cool hours invite relaxation and entertainment. It would culminate in storytelling, generally by the elder women (Moser, 1979: 43). The sanzala party in Autópsia is but a pale imitation: a joyless, adulterated occasion in the afternoon heat, with drums and Portuguese music playing from a portable radio (‘batuque e dança com música do Putu’, 153). The point is that the sanzala chapters of Autópsia cannot, indeed should not, be expected to represent the diversity of authentic Angolan cultures; these chapters must settle for an overview of the life of a displaced and semi-acculturated population, robbed of its real cultures by the colonial presence itself. Its best symbol is the old soba, who according to African custom has several wives and still commands some respect from his people, but who is so contaminated by the colonial presence that he no longer has ‘the soul of a soba’ (‘mesmo o soba deixou já de ter alma de soba’, 123). Or, more prosaically, how could the sanzala people hold an evening sunguilamento when there is a war curfew on? Ultimately, Autópsia does succeed in portraying the lives of Angolans in the altered conditions the colonial war imposed, as well as in representing the intricate ways whereby the Portuguese and the Angolan monologues eventually engage in – albeit tentative – dialogue. The reader may worry that the initial chapters still perpetuate an imperialistic view of the world in Portuguese terms. Even the intertextual echoes reinforce such an impression, taken as they are from Portuguese epic and from the mythology that has shaped the Portuguese view of themselves for centuries. More worryingly, the sanzala chapters initially come from a female voice and concentrate on a collective memory of rape, appearing to perpetuate the imperialist view of a powerless Angola enduring the rape of Portuguese colonialism, which the army is there to uphold.60 This would amount to what Chrisman calls ‘imperialism as sexual allegory’ (1993, passim). However, a radical change occurs when the sanzala chapters become more collective, following the point of view of both male and female characters. The inclusion of male voices brings a shift from impotent endurance of imperial rape to an indictment of the capitalist practices that went together with colonialism (specifically when the Angolan community is forced to sell the yearly harvest for miserable amounts to the wealthy, obese Portuguese colonists). Here the myth of a Portuguese civilising mission falls apart, a myth which the Portuguese army may have accepted without questioning, for it is part of the country’s epic memory – but only until this point. Now the 60 According to Williams and Chrisman (1993: 144), Freud was perhaps the first who ‘described woman as “the dark continent” … [and] expressed a number of prevalent associations between femininity and the colonised Other’.

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novel points the finger at the political economy that sustains colonialism, the practical side of imperialism. The military now see that they are in Angola to defend not the ideal of an imperial fatherland, but the colonists’ interests (cheap labour and cheap coffee). Thus, Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas engages in a profoundly intertextual dialogue with the spirit of Portugal’s epic poems and that of the chronicler of the beginning of the imperial age, and it challenges both. Simultaneously, it engages also with the most original aspect of Pessoa’s poetic imagination: heteronymity – the self and the other, building its narrative structure on this concept, as the most appropriate one to represent in literature that fundamental split in Portuguese culture: the encounter with the African Other that made Others of the Portuguese too.61 In the Portuguese colonial zone, not one but ‘two others’ emerge, who ‘neither conjoin nor disjoin. They merely interfere in the impact of either on the identity of the colonizer and the colonized’ (Santos, 2002: 18). Accordingly, the dual narrative structure and the ‘heteronymous’ (or, if we prefer, polyphonic) split/doubled/multiplied voices within each part do not remain impervious to each other: their ‘interillumination’ is there to be detected, though it could only take place with great risks, in times of war, between an army and its ‘enemy’. Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism implies interrelation between two different world views, as expressed by their respective ‘social languages’. Monologue, in his terms, is typical of authoritarian regimes, always greedy for ‘the last word’ (Bakhtin, 1994: 250). Surely nobody has the last word in Autópsia. Renato has already been killed in the penultimate chapter. Romeu, the most active guerrilla-sympathiser in the sanzala, is almost beaten to death on the novel’s last page. Nevertheless, Renato’s voice continues to be heard, via an obscure, alternative (heteronymous) narrator, though fictionally still in his own words, from beyond death. So too do the voices of the sanzala people. Each and all of the characters62 has a lasting word, which becomes more important than having the last one – words that will last as part of two nations’ collective memory. What this novel achieves most successfully is the summoning and recording of the various voices that make up a collective memory of war, voices of the dead and voices still alive. Included too, therefore, must be the echoes of important milestones in Portuguese literary heritage, with which the novel establishes its intertextual dialogue; as well as an attempt at representing the oral character of the other side of the story, the marks of the Angolan cultural heritage – because the collective memory of a nation is inextricably 61 Peres (1997: 191) mentions that Mendes Pinto’s Peregrinaçam is the first Portuguese text in which the Portuguese (not in Africa, but in the East) are viewed as the Other, ‘an imperial version, so to speak, of the empire writing back’. 62 Including the colonists and (to a limited extent) the guerrillas themselves.



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bound up with the texts (written or oral) that record it. In this novel of dual structure and double/multiple narrators, memory also has a double role: first, to record the personal experiences of not one, but many soldiers, who either were killed or survived. As the novel’s narrative time is contemporary with the war, such experiences are narrated as in a chronicle (i.e. as if not yet a memory). Secondly, it perpetuates those experiences for future generations, thus aiming to become a new epic – one that rebuts the rhetoric of the old texts with which it engages, thus bringing closure to the discourse that gave rise to the earlier epics. And memory in this novel works in yet another double way: it recalls a Portuguese literary canon that is written and has maintained its prestige even throughout and after the colonial war; but it becomes also the (imagined) repository of moments of an Angolan history which had not yet been institutionalised in writing. In this way Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas attempts to become a truly collective memory of the colonial war in Angola.

6

Manuel Alegre, Jornada de África Published in 1989, Jornada de África [Expedition to Africa] is the first novel by Manuel Alegre, who had until then been one of Portugal’s most prolific and best known lyric poets. Manuel Alegre has since published another three narrative works, all well received by the critics, at the same time as he continues to produce poetry, so that he is now as much a well-established novelist as an acclaimed poet. Poetry plays a major role in the composition of Jornada de África, with many of the novel’s chapters directly quoting lines by Portuguese and other European, as well as African, poets; thus, in the first chapter, for example, there appear passages of poems by the Portuguese Herberto Hélder and by the Angolan Agostinho Neto (who, like Manuel Alegre himself, was both a poet and a politician in his country). Of the three epigraphs placed at the opening of the novel, though, only one is taken from a poet, from Rilke’s prose-poem Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke [The lay of love and death of Lieutenant Christoph Rilke] quoted in a Portuguese version; cited are the opening lines, referring to endless riding day and night and to a heavy heart. The other two epigraphs are taken from prose works, one by René Char, alluding to a war in which political considerations are at stake; and the last one from Jerónimo de Mendonça’s homonymous chronicle Jornada de África, subtitled ‘Depoimentos de contemporâneos de D. Sebastião sobre este mesmo rei e sua jornada de África’ [Statements by King Sebastian’s contemporaries about this king and his expedition to Africa]. The African expedition in question was that undertaken by King Sebastian in 1578 against the Moors at Alcácer-Quibir (now Ksar-al-Kebir, in Morocco), where the visionary young king lost his life, leaving the way open for Spain’s temporary rule of Portugal.  Manuel Alegre, 1989, Jornada de África: Romance de Amor e Morte do Alferes Sebastião, 2nd edn (Lisboa: Dom Quixote/Círculo de Leitores). All quotations are taken from this edition and indicated by page reference in brackets in the text. Translations are mine.  ‘Reiten, reiten, reiten, durch den Tag, durch die Nacht, durch den Tag. Und der Mut ist so müde geworden, und die Sehnsucht so groß’ (Rilke [1912]) [Riding, riding, riding, by day, by night, by day. And the courage has grown so tired, and the longing so great] (my translation).



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It is from this chronicle that the novel derives its most immediate inspiration: Manuel Alegre’s twentieth-century Jornada de África takes not only its title but also the names of its principal characters from Jerónimo de Mendonça’s early seventeenth-century work. The extensive quotation that appears as the novel’s third epigraph mentions the internal opposition to King Sebastian’s determination to engage the Moors in battle at Alcácer-Quibir, which many of his noblemen saw as ‘jeopardising the honour and the reputation of the Kingdom’ and endangering its survival. Here there is a striking parallel with the circumstances surrounding the twentieth-century colonial war in Africa, which also attracted considerable internal opposition (though only in the later stages of the conflict) and which many in Portugal, including military men, equally saw as threatening the regime’s credibility. The three epigraphs very aptly condense three of the most striking features of this novel: its use of a lyrical, highly rhythmical prose, now and then interrupted by poetry, which gives the book a very peculiar rhythm, clearly reminiscent of Rilke’s Cornet; its inclusion of a vast survey of the political events leading up to the war itself (Char); and its main narrative strategy, that of reusing the plot and characters of the earlier chronicle (Mendonça). From Rilke, Manuel Alegre derives also the powerful imagery of riding, which becomes either marching or driving in military column in the updated circumstances; the theme of despondency in a war that seems impossible to win, which also runs through many other Portuguese novels of the colonial wars (Rilke’s ‘courage grown tired’ and endless homesickness); and the thematic combination of heroism, love and death, which captured the imagination of Rilke’s earliest readers and which is unique to this particular novel of the colonial war (nowhere else do we find a story of youthful, passionate and inevitably tragic love running parallel to the war plot in the narratives included in this study). The novel’s subtitle indeed spells out its debt to Rilke’s prose-poem, of which it is a direct translation – the ballad/lay of love and death of Lieutenant Christoph Rilke; and it emphasises the love story element – Jornada de África: Romance de Amor e Morte do Alferes Sebastião [Expedition to Africa: novel/ballad/lay of love and death of NCO Sebastião]. Some of the novel’s most illuminating studies read it as an attempt to redefine Portuguese identity after the loss of the colonial empire. Other scholars have seen Jornada de África as an anti-epic, and as a work that engages in profound intertextual dialogue with Portugal’s literary heritage. Following the lead of the novel’s blurb, Clara Rocha calls it: ‘Esta antiepopeia da guerra colonial’, as well as ‘um romance de acção’ (1990: 187–  The same is true of many other novels of the colonial wars that I know, but naturally I cannot claim to have read them all.  See Vecchi, 1995b, 51–8; Magalhães, 2002, 173–8; Ribeiro, 1999.

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8). Margarida Calafate Ribeiro includes it amongst the novels that record ‘a história da anti-epopeia pessoal e colectiva que foi a guerra colonial’ (1999: 210). Likewise, despite actually pointing to several aspects of the novel that seem to contradict the claim, Rui de Azevedo Teixeira concludes his analysis with remarks about ‘o tempo dos anti-heróis’ and the colonial war being ‘a anti-epopeia’ (1998: 328). Both Rocha and Teixeira also address questions of metanarrativity and intertextuality as narrative strategies in the novel, both establishing extensive lists of the authors directly or indirectly quoted in Jornada de África – with some important omissions. Given that Jornada de África has a colonial war setting on the one hand, and presents itself as based on the earlier chronicle of a failed expedition to Africa (significantly, the defeat at Alcácer-Quibir, in 1578, was the first setback in Portugal’s imperial venture in Africa, which had begun in 1415) on the other, it is easy to see the book as an action novel and an anti-epic. Nevertheless, I argue that Jornada is not an action novel, but a political novel; that it is not really an anti-epic, but rather an epic of a different sort; and that it is precisely because of the names so far omitted from the established lists of authors cited in Jornada de África on the one hand, and because of the treatment of the role of memory in the novel on the other, that it becomes that different sort of epic which Roberto Vecchi much more appropriately calls an ‘epopea rovesciata’ (1995b: 58), an inside-out epic. The novel’s first chapter indicates a precise location (a road in central Portugal, leading to a village near Coimbra), which soon gives way to several other specific locations (London, Lisbon, Mexico, Coimbra, Luanda and Coimbra again), where various events relating to the beginning of the colonial war in Angola are taking place at a precise historical moment: 1960. Given that the second chapter begins on a more specific date two years later (19 June 1962) and that the plot of the novel develops from that date on, following NCO Sebastião’s commission at the front in Angola, it is fair to see the first chapter as a kind of historical introduction to the events upon which the novel concentrates. Chapter 1 fictionalises some of the events that led to the outbreak of the war. Others are simply presented as historical facts. Initially the chapter follows the point of view of Lázaro Asdrúbal, director of the Portuguese political police in Angola. Given that the name of the real PIDE director in Angola in 1960 was Aníbal São José Lopes, it is likely that the fictional character’s name points to the historical figure, via the echo of the famous Carthaginian generals’ names (Hasdrubal and Hannibal), as well as in the biblical resonance (Saint Joseph and Lazarus). Lázaro Asdrúbal has just been   

[this anti-epic of the colonial war; an action novel]. [the history of the personal and collective anti-epic which was the colonial war] [the time of the anti-heroes; the anti-epic].



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to an interview with a character referred to as the Chief, whose physical description (‘os óculos na ponta do nariz, os esses quase assobiados’, 11) corresponds to that of the then Portuguese Prime Minister, Salazar, though he remains unnamed while the holder of the narrative point of view is Asdrúbal. Salazar’s historical, documented words ‘Para Angola e em força’ become a kind of refrain in the novel, repeated at regular intervals, for they signal the outbreak of the war and explain the presence of this generation of Portuguese soldiers in northern Angola. Soon the narrative presents a brief survey of contemporary political events, disclosing real names and locations: in London, in the House of Commons, the first international press conference of the MPLA, the PAIGC and the CPG takes place, where the names of the Angolan activist Agostinho Neto and of the Portuguese head of State Salazar are freely used.10 In Lisbon, the activities of the political figures who attempted to introduce democratic reforms in Salazar’s regime are described. In Mexico, there is a hint at the preparations by Henrique Galvão, another historical figure, which led to his 1961 seizing of the luxury cruise ship Santa Maria, a hijacking that captured the attention of the Portuguese public for weeks, being as it was one of the few overt acts of political dissent in the country in decades. And in Lisbon, in the Aljube prison, the political prisoner Agostinho Neto writes poetry. All these political facts are presented as taking place behind the scenes of the novel’s plot. And these characters, who can be described as historical, in the sense that they are real-life figures summoned into the novel’s universe, are above all political figures.11 Simultaneously, the reader briefly follows the actions, in Luanda, of Domingos Da Luta, a semi-literate Angolan who has been a political prisoner but is now free and continues to hope for opportunities for political action. The story of this character is clearly set apart, in that it is told in a long parenthesis and in italics, as if it were merely an aside. The parentheses thus reflect graphically the only possibility that there would have been in the Portugal of the early 1960s to pay attention to the point of view of the African. This character’s status is not exactly clear; his story is full of historical details, including the fact that he, too, has met Agostinho Neto, but his name, Domingos Da Luta [Domingos of the Fight], endows him with   10

[with his glasses on the tip of his nose, almost whistling his ss] [To Angola with might and main] The MPLA is the armed Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola; the PAIGC is the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde; the CPG is the Political Convention of Goa. 11 Teixeira’s (1998: 253–8) analysis of the mixture of historical figures, purely fictional figures and figures which combine reality and fiction in this novel is extensive and interesting. He does not, however, emphasise the fact that most of the ‘historical’ characters are in fact political figures, figures from the Portuguese and international political arena.

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an allegoric dimension, so that he may be seen simply as the epitome of the Angolan (MPLA) independence fighter.12 Most of all, the inclusion of both extensive details concerning the political lobbying which aimed to bring about the end of Portuguese colonialism (presented as taking place in various locations) and the political activities of one MPLA fighter taken as the epitome of Angolan pro-independence guerrillas serves a particular purpose in the novel: to emphasise the extent and importance of the agency of the Other, which is certainly a new departure in a Portuguese novel of the colonial war. Written almost fifteen years after the end of the war and, also, by an author who in real life has had a long career as a politician and parliamentarian, Jornada de África widens the portrayal of the African independence wars in contemporary Portuguese narrative to include a strong political edge, and above all to attribute a dimension of real agency to the actions of the Angolans. It is appropriate to point out here that Domingos Da Luta is famous (in the novel) not for indiscriminately killing large numbers of Portuguese troops with unerring rifle shots, but specifically for killing Portuguese army officers only, stressing not just his skill in guerrilla warfare, but above all his political determination and purpose. This specific emphasis on the agency of the Angolan is a new element in the genre, where the presence of the African is not necessarily erased, as we have seen, but where he is mostly presented as an Other who elicits some distant compassion (for example in Os Cus de Judas)13 or fear – derived from lack of direct contact or lack of understanding (in Até Hoje, for instance, or in José Martins Garcia’s 1975 Lugar de Massacre, to mention only one of many other novels of the colonial wars not included in this study). The same is true even of Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas, where the Africans have a much stronger presence than in any other of these novels, but are nevertheless portrayed less clearly as agents of their own historical change, except for the echoes of the guerrilla fighters’ activities which reach the sanzala people. It is for this reason that Jornada de África is much more a political novel than an action novel. There are two action chapters (chapters 20 and 35), in which military columns are under fire, ambushed in the mato, but these do not match the vivid detail of action scenes elsewhere, for example, those in Os Cus de Judas (or in Carlos Vale Ferraz’s Nó Cego, again to mention another colonial

12 Always spelt with a capital D, Da Luta, uncharacteristic as it is of Portuguese surnames. Teixeira (1998: 255) uses lower case and identifies him as Pedro Afamado, better known as ‘o Mata-Alferes’, an ex-soldier of the Portuguese army. 13 I refer to the African here deliberately in the masculine form because African women are somewhat more evident in the other Portuguese novels of the colonial war: they are the ones left behind in the sanzalas, the ones who have most contact with the Portuguese troops, either as washer-women or lovers.



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war novel not included in this study).14 It is as though, as time progresses from the date of the end of the conflict, Portuguese narrative becomes more capable of presenting the colonial war in a different perspective, which finally encompasses the political agency of the Other. While chapter 1 is built upon a very striking juxtaposition of geographically distant places, connected only by the political drama unfolding in them, chapter 2 opens with an equally striking juxtaposition of different historical periods, with the not immediately apparent connection between them made intelligible: 19 de Junho de 1962. Dentro de quatro dias (23 de Junho de 1415), terão passado quinhentos e quarenta e sete anos sobre a partida para Ceuta. … Há quase trezentos e oitenta e quatro anos … um outro Sebastião partiu de Oeiras e com ele oitocentas velas.╇ (25)15

What these juxtapositions of surprisingly discordant spatial and temporal co-ordinates achieve is clear: first, by emphasising the parallel between the departure of the twentieth-century Portuguese troops to colonial war in Africa and the sailing of the earliest Portuguese navigators, they add to the novel the epic grandeur of the imagery of caravels and the theme of the great unknown; secondly, they enlarge the novel’s immediate chronotope16 to include locations and historical periods that need to be taken into account the better to understand the historical and political background of the colonial war on which the novel focuses. They project geo-political and historical-political factors into the novel’s diegesis, lending it magnitude and historical significance. Thus, a slightly didactic tone is never too far away from the narrative, although it is constantly deflated both by the abundant quotations from poetry, unexpected as they are (in such large numbers) in either a novel or any text of didactic, political intention, and by the playful challenge the novel presents to the reader when it becomes almost a ‘spot the quotation, remember the author’ game. 14 The violence of war tends to be reported in Jornada de África: war action has occurred off-stage and is narrated to the principal characters by secondary ones who participated in it. Carlos Vale Ferraz’s Nó Cego (1982) is more of an action novel than most others of the colonial war. 15 [19 June 1962. Within four days (23 June 1415), five hundred and forty-seven years will have passed since the departure for Ceuta. … Almost three hundred and eighty-four years ago … another Sebastião left Oeiras with eight hundred sail.] 16 The term created by Bakhtin to refer to the conjuncture of temporal and spatial co-ordinates underlying any literary work. What is distinctive about the chronotope as a tool of literary analysis is that it does not privilege either time over space or space over time. The two essential factors are considered completely interdependent. See Clark and Holquist, 1984: 275–94.

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Historical and fictional characters cross paths in this novel. Some are ‘real’, contemporary, political or military figures transfigured, either renamed (Lázaro Asdrúbal – Aníbal São José Lopes; also NCO Roque, the Exterminating Angel, behind whom Teixeira recognises real-life NCO Robles) or unnamed (the Chief – Salazar; the General – the then commander-in-chief in Angola, General Venâncio Deslandes; the Colonel – António Spínola). Others are the real-life sixteenth-century expeditionaries who accompanied King Sebastian to Alcácer-Quibir, now brought back to life in literature as the group of military men around this latter-day Sebastião: Jorge Albuquerque Coelho, who loses his legs like his earlier namesake; Leandro, the first one to lose his life in both Jornadas; Luís de Brito, the last one to see (one and the other) Sebastião alive; João Gomes Cabral, Duarte de Meneses, Miguel Noronha, Vasco da Silveira, Alvito, who share names and vicissitudes. The first group is contemporary with the novel’s setting; the second is made up of historical figures rescued from time’s oblivion by Jerónimo de Mendonça’s chronicle. There is an unmistakably aristocratic ring to many of the sixteenth-century names reused in the novel, which naturally adds to the epic impression it produces. These are the names of heroes worthy of an epic. Nevertheless, in true parodic vein, that epic tone is also undercut, when the narrator reveals that these young men who find themselves together at the front in Angola were also the members of the Académica soccer team in their Coimbra university days. A new epic is needed to sing of these men, but let it not become too obsessed with self-glorification. It is here that the intersections between history and fiction, and those between poetry and prose, as well as their role in recovering and preserving a country’s collective memory, become most intricate. The (real-life) author of the early seventeenth-century chronicle becomes a (fictional) character in Jornada de África, called either Jerónimo de Mendonça or ‘o Escritor’ [the Writer]. Sebastião’s girlfriend in Portugal is Mariana, a name that many Portuguese readers will immediately associate with that of Mariana Alcoforado, the seventeenth-century nun traditionally credited with writing the famous Lettres portugaises to a French army officer.17 More significantly, the name of the Angolan woman with whom Sebastião falls in love in Luanda is Bárbara, one of the most celebrated women’s names in Portuguese literature, being that of Camões’s oriental beloved, a slave or a captive, whom he celebrated in the roundels ‘Endechas a uma cativa com quem andava de amores na Índia’.18 The literary echo is freely acknowledged when Sebastião quotes the first line of the roundels, without mentioning Camões, as is often

17 18

These 1669 letters are now generally attributed to the Vicomte de Guilleragues. [Dirge to a prisoner with whom he was in love in India]



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the case in this novel (157).19 That echo, however, is further expanded when the fact that Bárbara is a flight attendant is used to connect her name also to Brazil and to the poetry of the Brazilian modernist Manuel Bandeira, by calling her Avatlântica [Atlantic bird] and making a direct reference to the latter’s poem ‘Balada das Três Mulheres do Sabonete Araxá’.20 Aware that the Brazilian echo is not so familiar to Portuguese readers, but wishing also to emphasise it (for reasons which will be analysed below), the narrative voice makes Sebastião actually mention the Brazilian poet by name. Thus, while the character’s name, Bárbara, already connects her to India and to Portugal because of its poetic associations, the connection that the narrator establishes between it and Brazilian poetry gives it a further dimension – geographical, literary and still imperial (or rather, neo-imperial).21 What is important here is that this reappropriation of names of previous historical and/or literary characters is part of a more general strategy for the reinterpretation of the country’s collective memory of its imperial past, intricately bound up as it is with the colonial war to which it eventually led. The summoning forth – accepting or rejecting – of a whole literary tradition (which dealt with, informed and glorified Portugal’s imperial venture) amounts not just to a rereading of that canon, but indeed a rewriting of it in a new light. What Manuel Alegre does in Jornada de África is to test his readers’ literary memory to the limit, by transcribing, quoting, misquoting, rewriting or simply alluding to a whole array of texts of the Portuguese literary tradition, including its ramifications in Brazil and Africa. By this means he constructs something similar to what Kristeva calls a ‘mosaic of quotations’ (though quotation alone is here too restrictive a term), whereby ‘any text is the absorption and transformation of another’ (1980: 66). Such a mosaic makes use of the European canon too,22 which is important also as a strategy for the building of a novel type of epic: Jornada de África is thus inserted into a long and illustrious European tradition, not because the European authors with whom it engages are necessarily epic, but because their inclusion heightens the general tone of the novel. It is worth further quoting the words with which Julia Kristeva introduces her own explication of Bakhtin’s theory of intertextuality:

19 Manuel Alegre returns to Bárbara in a beautiful poem of his later collection Com que Pena (1992): ‘Endechas ou Canção da Diferença’ [dirge or song of the Difference]. 20 [Ballad of the three women of the Araxá soap] 21 See Ribeiro, 2004a, for a superb analysis of the love affair between Bárbara and Sebastião, in which Bárbara’s engagement in Angola’s liberation war matches and encourages Sebastião’s determination to bring Portuguese fascism to an end. 22 Euripides, Sophocles, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Pound, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Camus, Pirandello are all there, more or less disguised.

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What allows a dynamic dimension to structuralism is his [Bakhtin’s] conception of the ‘literary word’ as an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writings: that of the writer, the addressee (or the character), and the contemporary or earlier cultural context.╇ (1980: 65)

This process of creating an ‘intersection of textual surfaces’ is of course not new in literature, Portuguese or other. It is arguably as old as literature itself, but it has been our age that has created for it all the new names by which we now know it: Bakhtin’s dialogism, Kristeva’s mosaic of quotations or intertextuality, Genette’s transtextuality or even palimpsest history.23 Darlene J. Sadlier identifies it in Fernando Pessoa’s ‘kind of literary ventriloquism’ when she demonstrates that ‘his aesthetic depended on techniques of pastiche or quotation’ (1998: 4). Pessoa’s is a case in point here, precisely because, together with Camões, he is one of the poets most used in Jornada de África’s own ‘ventriloquism’. However, while Pessoa ‘tends to deconstruct his various personalities, casting doubt on the idea of individual authorship’ (Sadlier, 1998: 7), which eventually leads him to the creation of heteronyms, the narrator of Jornada de África emphatically deconstructs the notion of authorship, parodically pushing it to the limit in the opposite direction: who is the author of Jornada de África? Manuel Alegre? The chronicler Jerónimo de Mendonça, whose work is, so to speak, repeated in this novel? The poet Rilke, whose Cornet determines the form and to some extent the contents of this new Balada de Amor e Morte? The other Jerónimo de Mendonça, ‘the Writer’, who is a character in the novel? The writer of Jornada de África, then, is presented as a collective author, built up from a vast, collective cultural memory. The reader soon realises that this Sebastião must disappear at the end of the novel, as did the other, more illustrious Sebastian – just as an audience watching even the most revolutionary rendition of Othello knows that the play, or the opera, will end with the protagonist’s death. Whatever end the novel’s narrator might like to give to its plot, he cannot escape the necessity of that disappearance. ‘Estava escrito’ (174),24 says Bárbara with all the irony and ambiguity of something having been written in the stars, or written by a previous author, or simply indelibly inscribed in our collective memory. Fate or intertextuality, the possibilities are humorously left open to interpretation. Is it possible for a literary work to escape its predestined conclusion? Is it 23 Gérard Genette defines transtextuality as ‘tout ce qui met [le texte] en relation, manifeste ou secrète, avec d’autres textes’ (1982b: 7). 24 [It was written]. Writing about the Fifth Empire, in the Addenda to Análise da Vida Mental Portuguesa (n.d), Fernando Pessoa uses the expression ‘está escrito já’ [it is already written] – quoted in Sousa, 1981: 150 and note 23.



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possible for a country to escape the notion of its historical destiny as written by its epic poets and perpetuated by its governments and in its cultural memory? In a particularly tongue-in-cheek passage towards the end of the novel, a friend comes to warn Sebastião that his life is in grave danger, as if to give the reader a sense that a reversal of destiny might be possible. If this Sebastião were to survive, that would constitute a rewriting of what ‘was written’. In the end Sebastião manages to escape the narrator’s control, but he still (fatefully?) disappears. However, the speculation about the identity of the friend who comes to warn him reveals that other kinds of change are possible – through parody, through intertextual and extratextual games. The friend, someone claims, is ‘o Poeta’ [the Poet], about whose identity the immediate question is: ‘O A.?’ (216) [The A.?], which ambiguously can mean in Portuguese either ‘the Author’ or Alegre himself. The pendulum clearly swings to the side of a playful summoning of the extratextual Author, who lends the novel his signature as a historical person, contradicting the narrator who tries to make it a work of ‘collective’ authorship. The irony implied in the possibility that events are written by fate is particularly strong in this book that rewrites King Sebastian’s story. The earlier Sebastian’s disappearance, presumed dead at Alcácer-Quibir, was the starting point for the long-standing belief that the sixteenth-century king would one day return to Portugal to restore the country to its former glory – the basis of the Sebastianist myth which has repeatedly found literary expression and popular support among sections of the Portuguese population.25 The myth that King Sebastian will one day return and rescue the Portuguese from the mediocrity of a present which does not match the glory of their past is of course responsible for an attitude of generalised ‘desviver’ [unliving], to use Manuel Alegre’s neologism, that is, a morbid attachment to the past with consequential avoidance of responsibility in the present. With his liking for the occult and for esoteric theories, Fernando Pessoa was the ideal poet to give new expression to Sebastianism, the myth he reformulated in his modernist epic poem, Mensagem. For Pessoa, whom Ronald W. Sousa sees fancying himself as ‘the messenger, the bearer of a divine word’, that message has to do with ‘the future of Portugueseness’ (1981: 144), as expressed in a Fifth Empire, a new, spiritual rather than territorial, Portuguese empire. Naturally, such a belief in a Fifth Empire of spiritual glory is yet another way of ‘unliving’, i.e. avoiding true engagement with the present. The technique of reappropriation and pastiche, together with partial rewriting of the literary tradition into the fabric of another text, is one that Manuel Alegre himself has always employed in his poetry, though not to the highly ironical (and sometimes almost disconcerting) extent to which he 25

In English, see, for example, José I. Suárez, 1991: 129–40.

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pushes it in this novel. But the model that seems to inspire this technique in Jornada de África most directly is a new one. It is derived from a major contemporary novel: José Saramago’s O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis (1984). This novel has as its main character precisely one of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms, Ricardo Reis, who is presented as a true fictional character, around whom the novel’s microcosm is built, and whom readers not familiar with Pessoa’s work may well take to be an ‘original’ Saramago character. So too does Manuel Alegre bring back to literary life characters who, although they were once real-life figures, are nowadays better known to us as figures in a seventeenth-century chronicle, and, in Sebastião’s case, a household name in Portuguese history, literature and myth. Faithful to the philosophy of life expressed in Ricardo Reis’s poetry, the Reis of Saramago’s novel is a character reluctant to participate in the affairs of a world in turmoil.26 Likewise, Pessoa’s reluctance to engage with the present is an important point against which the narrator of Jornada de África frequently rebels. His departure from Pessoa’s attitude is one that determines the nature of his own critical engagement with such a major poet of the Portuguese canon. He acknowledges his fascination with Pessoa’s oeuvre, which he says he began reading as a very young man, and with quotations from which he used to dazzle his female friends – ‘Até que uma lhe disse: Estou farta do caixa-de-óculos’ (20).27 While the iconoclastic comment is attributed to one of the narrator’s female friends, it is from the narrator himself that the need to revolt against Pessoa undoubtedly stems. The narrator of Jornada begins by questioning Pessoa’s attitude of detachment from the world (exactly the same attitude that Saramago opposes in O Ano da Morte): Repugnava-lhe essa festa do avesso, o narcisismo da renúncia e a tão portuguesa autoternura da derrota. Agora procura escapar ao império tutelar e totalitário daquele heterónimo de si mesmo. … Nem Ode Marítima sem viagem, nem Mensagem sem acção. Não ao escrever-se desvivendo. O poeta, o narrador, sabe-se lá quem, quer outra vida, outra escrita.╇ (21)28 26 See the lines from Ricardo Reis’s poetry quoted in epigraph: ‘Wise is the man who contents himself with the spectacle of the world’. The English translation is by Giovanni Pontiero (1991). 27 [Until one told him: I’m sick and tired of the man with the glasses]. Fernando Pessoa’s best-known portrait, by the painter Almada Negreiros, as well as photographs of the time, show him always wearing his distinctive glasses. 28 [He loathed that inside-out party, that narcissistic renunciation and that oh-so-Portuguese self-pity in defeat. Now he tries to escape the protective and totalitarian empire of that heteronym of himself. … Away with a Maritime Ode without voyage, away with Message without action. Away with writing through unliving. The poet, the narrator, who knows who, wants a different life, a different writing.]



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Here for the first time we come across two notions which become very significant in the whole novel: that of an ‘inside-out’ reality and that of ‘desviver’ [to ‘unlive’], an accusation directed by the narrator at Fernando Pessoa, but also more generally at the sort of lifestyle imposed by Salazar’s regime on the Portugal of the 1960s. The statement can almost be read as programmatic for the whole book. The narrator has just declared that Fernando Pessoa has already said everything (20) and that his own path is like that of an inside-out Pessoa (‘Pessoa do avesso’, 21). This is a novel, then, preoccupied with turning inside out both Pessoa’s work and a generalised attitude of non-engagement with the present in Portuguese society. For this narrator, for whom Fernando Pessoa has already said everything, there is a clear need to find novel ways of expression. The technique used by Saramago for widening the horizons of a character unwilling to take a stance concerning the political events of the world around him is the inclusion of passages from the contemporary (1936) Portuguese press, which Ricardo Reis reads assiduously. The same device is used in Jornada de África, though once again transformed: whereas in O Ano da Morte the newspaper items are simply inserted in the narrative, in Jornada they are set out graphically in stanzas, as if they were poems, with various metrics and with different visual layout. The technique is all the more striking since the novel’s prose is so often densely poetic and many times interrupted by direct or indirect quotations from a wide variety of poems. The fact that journalistic prose should be presented as poetry, and that poetry, on the other hand, should be so deeply assimilated into the novel’s prose that the sentences frequently burst into decasyllables is a defining element of the fabric of this novel in which genre boundaries are deliberately, challengingly and playfully blurred. The effect this technique achieves is that of involving as many aspects of Portugal’s cultural heritage as possible (history, historiography, poetry, prose, contemporary politics, journalism and the myths that these have created) in a reappraisal of the country’s ethos (or, to use a term dear to Eduardo Lourenço, the country’s mythology), which led to its engagement in the colonial wars. Such a reappraisal aims to be far-reaching and above all collective. This kind of chiastic construction (in which the narrative prose is pregnant with quotations from and allusions to poetry, whereas prose passages taken verbatim from the newspapers are presented as poetry) reflects structurally what the novel attempts to achieve: a different kind of writing (‘outra escrita’, 21) which, I argue, aims at a new kind of epic. As to its form, such a new epic is now written not in verse but in prose, albeit poetic prose; for its theme, it chooses to question the self-aggrandising epic rhetoric of a small peripheral country enamoured of its image of historical grandeur, first created by Camões’s epic poem and then reinflamed by Pessoa’s rewriting of many of its themes. Instead, Jornada proposes a new epic theme.

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The prose of Jornada de África is above all strikingly poetical, not so much because of the numerous poems cited in the text, but because of the ever-present echoes of Camões’s lines, which keep erupting into the novel. Indeed, the poetry of Camões imbues the whole novel, not just in terms of lines quoted or alluded to,29 but above all and most distinctly in the rhythm of the prose. The narrator is well aware of this ‘interference’, as he humorously points out at some stage.30 This is, however, not simply a case of one poet’s work bursting into the narrative of another writer; it is rather part of a deliberate search for a new epic language: one which (unlike Os Lusíadas and Mensagem) is not expressed in verse, but which takes as its formal model Rilke’s prose-poem and makes abundant use of not only the epic, but also the lyrical tradition in Portuguese poetry. Most obviously, the prose of Jornada de África privileges Camões’s epic rhythms – because these are the ones that come naturally to a writer aiming at creating a new epic in Portuguese, or indeed to a reader steeped in the Portuguese heroic tradition. This prose bursts into decasyllables in the most unexpected places: ‘este é de novo o tempo da partida’ (28), ‘ir à guerra ou não ir, eis a questão’ (100), ‘Mas já Caxito fica para trás’ (115) or ‘os trabalhos tão longos compensando,/ naquela incógnita, doce alegria,/ de um dia quase todo ali passado’ (149).31 Thus the narrator uses rhythm to make the point that an epic spirit is somehow ingrained in a Portuguese readership. And this visceral attachment of the Portuguese reading public to its principal epic (one which has allowed Eduardo Lourenço to see Camões as an embodiment of the Portuguese soul),32 should not be wasted, but built upon to achieve a new epic, capable of singing these latter-day heroes, even if they are inside-out heroes. Sebastião writes to Bárbara despondently: ‘Não há aqui epopeia para dizer. Somos lusíadas do avesso, ninguém nos cantará’ (186).33 On the contrary, Jornada de África is the new epic; it celebrates them in poetical prose.

29 In this Camões’s lines are treated in the same way as many other lines from a variety of other poets cited in the text. 30 On a page crammed with phrases that are purely decasyllabic and full of echoes from Camões’s epic poem, the narrative voice comments humorously: ‘O melhor é não ligar, senão começa a assobiar em decassílabos’ (26) [Best to think of something else, otherwise he’ll even begin to whistle in decasyllables]. 31 I quote these ‘lines’ for their decasyllabic rhythm only, and they are of course part of the novel’s prose, although I have set out the last ones as one would automatically read them: as perfect decasyllables. 32 See Lourenço, 1983: ‘Camões e a Nossa Alma’. 33 [There is no epic to be told here. We are inside-out Lusiads, nobody will celebrate us in song]



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A new epic mode Just as Pessoa’s Mensagem replaced Camões’s glorification of the Portuguese maritime venture and the development of a territorial empire with the yearning for a new, this time spiritual empire for Portugal, so too does Jornada de África find a new epic theme, a new realm of excellence for the Portuguese. The novel exalts the development of a different kind of ‘empire’: a Lusophone community, in which the literature of many different Portuguese-speaking countries will constitute a new achievement worthy of celebration. As such, while Jornada de África is strongly anti-colonialist in its depiction of the colonial war, there is also undeniably in it the glorification of a major result of the Portuguese imperial expansion: the (epic) dream of a neo-imperial future for the Portuguese language. This corresponds to the notion of lusofonia, which has been promoted by Brazilian and Portuguese democratic politicians and intellectuals, leading to the creation in 1996 of a commonwealth of Portuguese-speaking countries (CPLP), to include, besides Brazil and Portugal, the five African countries that were once Portuguese colonies, known as PALOP.34 East Timor joined the CPLP in 2002. The concept of lusofonia, which has a close model in the French-based francophonie,35 has both strong supporters and detractors.36 Miguel Vale de Almeida points out that the concept of Lusophony has been gaining currency as ‘a device’ to make up for political losses (‘Empire as such’) in the compensatory ‘spiritual realm’ (through language) and ‘the institutional one, with the CPLP’ (2004: 45). This new realm of Portuguese excellence celebrated by the narrator of Jornada de África is in fact not very far removed from Pessoa’s original claim: ‘Minha pátria é a língua portuguesa’.37 But this novel takes the concept a step further: the Portuguese language, which clearly constitutes the 34 PALOP are the ‘Países Africanos de Língua Oficial Portuguesa’ [African Countries whose Official Language is Portuguese]. The Angolan writer Ondjaki (2006: 40) has called for the inclusion of Galicia in the CPLP. 35 In this connection, it is interesting to point out that Jornada de África also displays a political preoccupation with establishing parallels between the situation in the Portuguese sub-Saharan colonies and the developments in French colonialism in North Africa. 36 Most African writers who use Portuguese as their literary language support Lusofonia, which allows them greater exposure in the international literary world; at the same time they assert their right to appropriate the Portuguese language to suit their needs. One of the strongest detractors of Lusofonia is Alfredo Margarido (2000: 55–79), who sees it as ‘aiming to maintain the colonial spirit’ (12) and denounces the ‘imperial force’ of the Portuguese language (55–79), pointing out at the same time that Portuguese colonisation was particularly deficient when it came to building (and leaving in place) educational infrastructures in its colonies. 37 [My country is the Portuguese language]. The line comes from Pessoa’s Livro do Desassossego, por Bernardo Soares (1982, vol. I: 17). See Almeida (2003: 144) on the Estado Novo’s nationalistic misappropriation of Pessoa’s verse and the Mozambican

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imaginative territory where the narrator of Jornada feels at home, is already the post-imperial Portuguese language around the world. Hence the novel’s concern with an intertextuality that includes not only the European, but also the Brazilian, the Indian (if only in the echo from Camões’s Bárbara and from his poetry, which pervades the prose of Jornada most strongly), as well as the African literary heritage in Portuguese language (Agostinho Neto as a poet, pp. 17 and 163, José Luandino Vieira, mentioned by name on p. 161, António Jacinto, p. 161, Manuel de Andrade, pp. 196–7 and 208, Costa Andrade, p. 203, to mention only those directly cited). In the novel’s narrative present, though, Angola is still a Portuguese colony, a colony at war, and the fact that Angolan literature is acknowledged and praised in it is also a manifestation of the novel’s anti-colonialist sentiment. The novel’s praise of literature in the Portuguese language around the world may be seen, in political terms, as a neo-imperialist attitude, a desire to prolong in the linguistic and cultural domain a hegemony that has been lost territorially. But fundamentally, in literary terms, it amounts to the fostering of a new epic spirit, spreading over the continents as did the small nation that Camões celebrated in his epic, but now limiting or rather elevating itself to a higher, more disinterested pursuit. Jornada de África promotes an epic spirit in yet another way: in its defence of heroism, the uppermost epic quality. Whereas in several other novels of the colonial war we see men who do not feel any heroic vocation puzzling over the validity of the reasons for which they have been sent to fight in the colonial wars in Africa, in Jornada the protagonist is overtly a political dissident, a long-time opponent of the regime that sustains colonialism in Africa and of the war itself. It is not because he finds himself thrown into the war that he starts questioning the government’s motives. He has always opposed them. But having decided not to become a deserter he is prepared to fight the war with military valour. He is not there simply to try to save his skin and return home alive; he is willing to show courage and perform his duty well. He soon has his first chance to prove himself in an incident in which, against all odds, something that looks like a mine during what everybody believes to be a military exercise turns out to be a real mine. And lives are saved only because of Sebastião’s military discipline and, indeed, heroic disposition. Elsewhere, the narrative voice praises military ‘galhardia e brio’, and there is the long, extremely poetical passage in which Sebastião’s dreaming conjures up highly romantic images and echoes of cavalry charges, with Jeeps for horses, and the rhythm of military drums: ‘as belas, velhas, loucas cargas de cavalaria’ (49).38 It is a dream perhaps, or a half-dream in writer Mia Couto’s postcolonial abrogation of it: ‘My country is my Portuguese language’ (my translation). See also Margarido, 2000: 71. 38 [spiritedness and sense of honour; the beautiful, mad cavalry charges of old]



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the somnolence of the column’s advance, but one unashamedly enamoured of old-fashioned heroism, as much as Rilke’s early work. This is a novel against the colonial war, but not an anti-heroic novel. Jornada de África attempts the different kind of writing that its narrator desires and also engages intertextually with the whole mythology of a Portuguese cultural tradition obsessed with its glorious maritime past, with the voyages of discovery, with magnificent military expeditions and conquest of other peoples and territories. But it chooses to draw attention to the first such expedition that went wrong, that of King Sebastian to Alcácer-Quibir. His was the first defeat in the history of Portuguese overseas expansion, ominously spelling out an eventual, much larger defeat, which would mark the end of Portuguese colonialism. In this novel in which nothing is ‘innocent’, in the sense in which Umberto Eco refers to the loss of literary innocence in postmodern literature, the defeat thus foretold can be seen as fate (history repeating itself) or as point of departure for new ventures. While the loss at Alcácer-Quibir gave rise to that ‘tão portuguesa autoternura da derrota’39 which has led the Portuguese to Sebastianism and ‘passadismo’ or ‘saudosismo’, the nostalgia for the past, it has also spurred others – such as the narrator of Jornada de África – to try to find new ways forward, even new kinds of writing. The poet-narrator finds himself at a particularly interesting confluence in time: ‘a saudade e a inquietação do que não há’ (20),40 simultaneously pulled towards the past (the yearning) and towards the future (the desire to create that which is lacking). Expressed yet again in a Pessoan turn-of-phrase,41 this tension underlies the very original voice of the narrator of Jornada de África, whose love of Portuguese culture makes him engage with the authors of the past, but whose desire for new directions in literature (as in life) leads him to search for new writing techniques. In order to be faithful to its purpose of engaging with the present, that search must also include contemporary literary works. It appears to be as a poet, not as a prose writer, that the narrator cares to establish his credentials. He mentions his love of various Portuguese poets (Sá-Carneiro, Antero de Quental, Pessoa, Pessanha, Herberto Hélder), acknowledging that he feels part of that literary lineage: ‘O poeta sente-se dessa linhagem’ (20). Notwithstanding this acknowledgement, Jornada de África is still a novel, a work of prose. And it is not only by its use of poetical rhythms and its powerful, constant intertextual dialogue with other poets’ work that this novel achieves what the narrator claims to be his aim: ‘outra escrita’ (21), a different way of writing. This it achieves in yet another sense: 39 40 41

[so Portuguese self-pity in defeat] [the longing and the restlessness for that which is not] Cf. Fernando Pessoa, ‘D. Sebastião, Rei de Portugal’, Mensagem: ‘Ficou meu ser que houve, não o que há’.

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by cross-referencing the work of both African and Portuguese contemporary novelists, not only the great models of the past. While Camões’s Os Lusíadas can be said to have given rise to and simultaneously embodied a love for the epic in the Portuguese, the contemporary novels of the colonial war are in a way creating a similar epic interest among the post-revolutionary Portuguese reading public.42 They keep alive the memory of the colonial wars, which the country would perhaps prefer collectively to forget. Jornada de África does so in a more literary self-conscious way than most other novels of this sub-genre, by engaging in unobtrusive but powerful intertextual dialogue not only with the literary works from the past that exalt Portuguese imperialism, but also with the very novels of the colonial war which are shaping the country’s re-imagining of itself in the present. Curiously, while critics have so far brought to light the extensive interplay between Jornada de África and the more or less canonical Portuguese literary heritage,43 its important intertextual engagement with other novels of the colonial war appears not to have been noticed. First of all there is the name by which Bárbara affectionately refers to Sebastião: Olhos-Azuis [Blue-Eyes], which is exactly what the flight attendant in Lobo Antunes’s Os Cus de Judas (120) calls the protagonist of that novel. Even the fact that both female characters are flight attendants cannot be coincidental. In Os Cus de Judas, the narrative situation requires her to be a flight attendant; in Jornada, Bárbara’s profession is less important than her portrayal as fundamentally an Angolan political activist and an avid reader of Angolan poetry.44 And in another passage reminiscent of Os Cus de Judas (‘a picada onde a poeira é o pó acumulado dos séculos’, 49)45 Sebastião defines himself as ‘o filho da tribo que espera a iniciação’,46 using exactly the same word (‘tribo’) with which the narrator of Os Cus (17) refers to his family when describing their expectations as to the positive changes military service should operate in him.47 42 The narrative present in Jornada de África is the beginning of the colonial war in Angola in the 1960s, but like the other novels here studied the book was written in postcolonial times. 43 Teixeira (1998: 234, 254) updates the list with the addition of one important contemporary writer, Miguel Torga, poet and prose writer too. Although Miguel Torga is not an author of the colonial war as such, he does warn of horrors to come in Africa in ‘Day Six’ of A Criação do Mundo. 44 Nevertheless, Ribeiro’s (2004: 90) reading reveals the significance of her profession: a flight attendant who, ‘between planes and boats, between steeds and jeeps’, helps Sebastião undertake an essential voyage towards other choices. 45 [the dirt-road on which centuries-old dust has accumulated] 46 [the tribe’s son waiting to be initiated] 47 It must be noted that this is a case of circular intertextuality. Manuel Alegre first referred to ‘a Tribo’ in the final lines of the opening poem of his second collection of poetry, O Canto e as Armas. Lobo Antunes borrowed the expression in Os Cus de Judas



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In chapter 7 there is an unusual expression lifted directly from A Costa dos Murmúrios: the military who have seen action and developed a taste for cruelty are described as ‘gente que já fez o gosto ao dedo’ (Jornada 58), Lídia Jorge’s own striking formulation (Costa 49). Nor can the scars displayed by Miguel Noronha in Jornada (‘uma grande cicatriz no braço esquerdo, outra no peito, vê-se através da camisa aberta’, 98)48 fail to remind us of Captain Forza Leal’s magnificent specimen of a scar proudly displayed through equally open and transparent shirts, on which the narrator of A Costa dos Murmúrios lavishes her ironical attention. In chapter 12 the unusually detailed physical description of the military men sitting around the table appears to be a send-up of the list of men whom the protagonist of Álamo Oliveira’s Até Hoje first encounters in Binta. The insistence on the physical beauty of the latter is as initially surprising in Até Hoje (62) as the detailed physical description of the former is unexpected in Jornada (98), a novel that does not otherwise devote much time to such descriptions. The words with which the commander captain signals his readiness to attack, ‘Vamos a eles’ (101), while they are not unusual in colloquial Portuguese, nevertheless sound very much like the imaginary title which the narrator of Autópsia invents for the war memoirs which one of the characters in that novel may one day write.49 The fact that four pages later (in Jornada) there is a sentence using exactly the same imitation medieval language that appears in Autópsia confirms that there is a real intertextual intention: ‘se iam a eles com Padres Nossos e Ave Marias e os limpavam a todolos que era uma beleza’ (Jornada 105–6).50 Here the intertextual echoes go further back: they recall a passage in António Lobo Antunes’s first novel, Memória de Elefante, which appeared only a few months before Os Cus de Judas:51 ‘e com muita Avé Maria … nos fomos a eles e em menos de um credo os matámos a todos’ (Memória 122).52 (see my footnote 16 to that chapter); and Manuel Alegre now uses it again, in my view more as an acknowledgement of the ‘first’ novel of the colonial war than as a reference to his own poetry. This is not to deny that there are constant echoes of Alegre’s poetry in Jornada de África, as Margarida Ribeiro has explored (1998b; 2004). 48 [a large scar on his left arm, another one on his chest, you can see it through the open shirt] 49 The title of NCO Tavares’s memoirs is made to sound like a possible sub-section of the Crónica de Dom João I: ‘De Como Nos Fomos A Eles Em África’ (Autópsia 52). 50 [reciting Our Fathers and Ave Marias, they would attack them and kill them all, doing a clean job of it]. Emphasis added. The same verb is used, and the article, which in this case should not even be part of the sentence, is positioned enclitically in the same archaic manner (‘todolos’ instead of ‘todos os’). See Autópsia 116. 51 Several critics have examined both novels in parallel. 52 [and with many an Ave Maria … we attacked them and in less time than needed to say the Credo we killed them all]. Emphasis added.

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Further intertextual dialogue with the work of João de Melo can be identified in the use Jornada makes two or three times of the expression ‘matar ou morrer’, to kill or to die, which even though it describes a common war situation was in fact part of the title of an earlier version of Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas (initially published as A Memória de Ver Matar e Morrer, then totally rewritten before the change of title).53 No doubt, it is also from Autópsia that the narrator of Jornada gets the model for the format he uses in this novel: separation of the passages and chapters dealing with the Angolan Other. In Autópsia the chapters are totally independent; in Jornada there are sometimes independent chapters, sometimes independent sections separated by parentheses. And, as in Autópsia, Jornada’s narrative voice also emphasises the oral character of Angolan culture, when in chapter 17, which deals with the victory the guerrilla fighters have just scored, it is the telling of the story and the process of transmission of oral history that come to the fore: ‘cada um conta à sua maneira’ (139), ‘desde menino os mais velhos lhe contaram’, ‘ainda se fala da grande vitória de 1907’ (140).54 Sebastião’s thoughts about ‘o racismo de uma gente que se desforra aqui das frustrações vividas em Portugal’ (219)55 may simply describe a situation that various writers encountered in colonial Angola, but it does sound remarkably close to Wanda Ramos’s formulation of the same phenomenon in Percursos (46–7). If blue eyes are not uncommon in Portugal, blond hair appears rather less frequently. Nevertheless, both NCO Roque in chapter 7 and Captain Garcia in chapter 8 are extremely blond – perhaps recalling the fact that the most sinister characters in José Martins Garcia’s Lugar de Massacre are blond too. Much more clearly reminiscent of Lugar de Massacre is the use of prolepses initiated by the phrase ‘within a few years’: ‘Daqui a uns largos, largos anos’ (Jornada 100), very frequent in Martins Garcia’s novel.56 Furthermore, although Lugar de Massacre has not been included in this study, I should also like to suggest that the spelling of Domingos Da Luta’s surname with the uncharacteristic capital D is an intertextual response to the equally uncharacteristic d’ spelling of Count d’Avince’s surname, the aristocratic character in Lugar de Massacre. On the other hand, there is a strong possibility that the choice of this name for the MPLA fighter pays homage to the work of the Angolan novelist (and political activist) José Luandino Vieira, the bestknown writer of his generation. Not only are some of Luandino’s memorable 53 54

João de Melo, 1977, A Memória de Ver Matar e Morrer. [each tells it in his own way; the elders have told him since he was a child; they still talk about the great victory of 1907] 55 [the racism of people who avenge themselves here for the frustrations they once endured in Portugal] 56 Lugar de Massacre 151, 153, 155, 156, 159, etc.



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black characters motor-mechanics like Domingos Da Luta,57 but also this independence fighter’s name can be seen as a direct reference to another of Luandino’s characters, Domingos Xavier, the political activist brutally killed by the PIDE in his first novel (1974 [written in 1961]). There is another very likely echo of Luandino’s work in the passage where Sebastião recalls his childhood in Coimbra. The activities of the group of four young boys are very reminiscent of the activities of the four young boys (white, black and mulatto) in another of Luandino’s novels, Nós, os do Makulusu (1975 [written in 1967]). As if to confirm the literary homage to Luandino, the narrator mentions a few pages later the ‘negros, mestiços, brancos de Angola’ (Jornada 87).58 Attention to all these details may seem excessive, but indeed they are important in the definition of what Jornada de África attempts to do: to recover a country’s collective memory of its most recent war, and to search for a new way of doing so, one which no longer looks only towards the past for models but must learn to engage with the present and find models in contemporary literature too. To build a new epic must not mean destroying the old epic tradition, because part of a country’s epic sense of itself comes indeed from a feeling of historical continuity and collective identity, which the epic tradition both constructs and reinforces. Rather, the fashioning of a new epic must imply engaging with and transforming the tradition, or, as Margarida Ribeiro suggests, metaphorically ‘revisiting Alcácer-Quibir’, the complex process that constitutes the very fabric of Jornada de África. But the narrator of the novel also explores new possibilities. Perhaps a new epic mode must now be found in prose, not in poetry, given that it is in narrative fiction that most contemporary authors have dealt with the colonial wars. As such, even though the text is interspersed with myriad echoes from poetic works, it also calls forth a vast number of other narratives dealing with the same theme in the present – both in Portugal and in Angola, to keep within its Lusophone ideal.

A different kind of memory Memory plays a double role in this novel. First, as we have seen, the narrator uses his vast cultural memory – both of the canonical literary tradition and of the contemporary corpus of novels of the colonial wars – to make the reader realise the significance of the theme which here engages her attention. By placing the colonial war in a context that involves the long-standing interest 57 For example, Maneco, in José Luandino Vieira, Luuanda: Estórias (1974 [written in 1963]). 58 [blacks, mulattoes, whites of Angola].

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of the Portuguese in their own epic, the narrator of Jornada de África lends his novel a new epic weight.59 And by simultaneously establishing intertextual connections with contemporary narratives on the same theme, he makes the point that the colonial war too (contemporary as it is) has already become an epic theme, in the sense that many other contemporary narratives (as well as this one) deal with it in what amounts to a reappraising of the country’s recent history. The achievements (and failures) of the new ‘heroes’ are regularly being narrated in a stream of contemporary works and are slowly but steadily achieving epic scale.60 Secondly, like most other novels of the colonial war, Jornada de África is also evidently preoccupied with preventing the loss of the memory of that war. Nevertheless, the way in which this novel does so is presented in quite different terms from those in other novels of the colonial war. Arriving in Luanda, Sebastião is overwhelmed by memories of life in Portugal, as we have seen is the case with many other protagonists of the colonial war novels: Talvez a esta hora, algures, em Portugal, as raparigas passeiem em grupo à beira de um rio. … Sebastião recorda outros risos e outras vozes, o jogo dos olhos e das mãos.╇ (37)61

This generalised memory of common leisure activities of young women in Portugal gives way to memories of Sebastião’s own girlfriend. Nevertheless, even such an apparently personal memory is used to historicise the impact that the colonial war has had on Portuguese society, to remind a contemporary audience of the changes that the war has imposed on previously prevailing social mores. The unacceptability of sexual relations prior to marriage before the colonial war, for example, functions as a metaphor for the non-existence of social and political freedom too. The point is made that it was the war that changed everything, its very prospect already affecting everybody in Portugal even before the departure of the first generation of soldiers: ‘de 59 Jornada de África also clearly ‘repeats’ some of the epic episodes from Os Lusíadas, for example, the lamentations of fathers and mothers upon their sons’ departure to war and the soldiers’ recreation on Alegre’s new version of Camões’s Ilha dos Amores, the island of Mussulo. 60 Although this study concentrates only on prose works, the narrator’s frequent references to ballads and songs of the colonial war would allow us even to claim that the new ‘heroes’ are being sung, in the sense in which the epic genre sings of its heroes: ‘arma virumque cano’, in Vergil’s formulation, or ‘cantando espalharei por toda a parte’, in Camões’s (Os Lusíadas, I.2,â•›7) [Bacon’s translation: ‘My song shall sow through the world’s every part’]. 61 [Maybe at this time, somewhere, in Portugal, the girls are walking in groups on a riverbank. … Sebastião remembers other laughter and other voices, games played with the eyes and with the hands]



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repente percebeu: a guerra já estava ali. Havia uma sombra por dentro dos rapazes e raparigas que se sentavam à beira do rio’ (69–70).62 Later, more explicitly, the narrator recalls the change that the colonial war brought upon the sexual mores of a society until then so moralistic: Não admira que os hábitos tivessem mudado. As raparigas entregavam a virgindade sem cálculo nem resistência. De certo modo era um desafio, uma forma de camaradagem, um acto de rebelião e cumplicidade que profundamente subvertia tudo.╇ (70)63

Personal memory is thus used to remind the reader that if her society is now utterly changed, that is also due to the colonial war, in which not only the men were involved, but also the women, who understood and accepted the fact that war had to change civil society too. The most striking difference between the memory of the colonial war as expressed in this novel and the same memory in other narratives of the same genre is that Jornada de África avails itself only rarely of details provided by visual memory. In other words, this narrator does not claim for himself or his protagonist the eyewitness status so frequent in the other narratives.64 The narrator goes beyond that implicitly legitimising device (‘I saw, therefore it is true’), trying instead to achieve a vaster perspective on the subject. About Sebastião’s way of seeing the reality around him, the narrator says: ‘Por isso olha de outro modo, é um outro ver, talvez de errância ou de demanda’ (39).65 The very choice of words cannot be innocent: the ‘errância’ is as much Ulysses’ epic wandering as that of the Portuguese navigators who ventured into unknown seas; the ‘demanda’ (evocative of the search for the Holy Grail, known in Portuguese as A Demanda do Santo Graal) could also simply refer to an epic spirit of quest. Jornada de África always brings a further-reaching 62 [suddenly he understood: the war was already there. There was a shadow inside the young men and the young women who sat on the bank of the river] 63 [It was not surprising that the mores had changed. Young women surrendered their virginity without calculating or resisting. In a way it was a challenge, a form of solidarity, an act of rebellion or complicity which profoundly subverted everything] 64 Manuel Alegre did indeed see action in Angola, at the northern front, in Nambuangongo, a place name mentioned in Jornada de África, which Alegre had already made famous in Portuguese lyric with his hauntingly beautiful poems about that desolate location, ironically known by one of the most musical names one could wish for in poetry. However, as I prefer to exclude biographical considerations from the study of literature, such details become unimportant here. While it is true that many of the novelists of the colonial war were personally involved in it, it is also true that others, such as Mário de Carvalho, were not, and they simply write of the war because they see it as the main factor that determined most of the major changes in their society. 65 [That is why his gaze is different, it is another [way of] seeing, as if in wandering or in searching]

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dimension to the treatment of the colonial war in literature, remembering it – and making the reader see it – from a wider, historical and cultural perspective. Occasionally we read here too the ‘I saw’ claim so often repeated in other colonial war novels. After the incident with the mine that was expected to be part of a training exercise but turned out to be real, one man says: ‘Se não visse com os meus olhos não acreditava’ (87).66 But this is rather tongue-incheek in the light of the parodic lines that precede the statement: a guerra é assim, um minuto altera tudo, transforma-se a desconfiança em confiança e a dúvida em certeza. Já não há fronteira entre o que é a fingir e o que é a sério. … Chega-se a fingir que é guerra a guerra que deveras é.╇ (87–8)67

The incident cannot fail to remind us of the simulation-of-war episode which so much enrages the protagonist’s husband in Lídia Jorge’s A Costa dos Murmúrios. Above all, it is a further reminder that the depiction of the colonial war in this novel is not particularly visual but rather filtered through a cultural vision already informed by other readings and writings – in this case through the pastiche of two of Camões’s most famous sonnets and of one of Pessoa’s best-known poems (‘Autopsicografia’).68 Direct visual experience is sometimes acknowledged, especially when dealing with war atrocities officially denied by the regime.69 But generally Jornada de África recaptures a different kind of vision: ‘Olha-se mais para dentro do que para fora, os soldados não fixam as paisagens, o que vêem só

66 67

[If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I wouldn’t believe it] [War is like that, one minute changes everything, mistrust changes into trust, doubt changes into certainty. There is no longer a border between what is make-believe and what is for real. … One ends up pretending that it is war the war that truly is]. Emphasis added. 68 Camões’s sonnets: ‘Transforma-se o amador na cousa amada’ [The lover changes into what he loves] and ‘Mudam-se os tempos, mudam-se as vontades / Muda-se o ser, muda-se a confiança’, (emphasis added) of which I quote Keith Bosley’s translation: ‘Times change with seasons, men too change their mind / We change the way we are, the way we feel’. More literally: We change our being, we change our trust. Pessoa’s ‘AutoÂ� psicografia’, about the fact that a poet is a fake, a pretender, finishes with the lines: ‘chega a fingir que é dor / a dor que deveras sente’ [the poet pretends so utterly that he ends up pretending that it is pain / the pain that he truly feels]. Emphasis added. 69 ‘Vi gente a arder regada pelo napalm’ (105) [I saw people burning alive, doused with napalm], or ‘Estes que a terra há-de comer já viram soldados a jogar futebol com cabeças cortadas’ (123) [These eyes which the earth will devour have seen soldiers playing soccer with severed heads]; soldiers playing soccer with severed heads is also an episode narrated in Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas.



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eles sabem’ (113).70 Indeed some of the most memorable pages of the novel deal with the invisible, the intangible, for example, the smell of fear and the smell of war (79–80). The narrator’s memory of the war is unmistakably filtered by a prodigious literary memory: ‘Vem-lhe à memória o ritmo de uma prosa antiga, é a Relação do Naufrágio da Nau Conceição’ (41).71 The digression that follows again conjures up images of sixteenth-century India and the long tradition of Portuguese writing on early voyaging. It also includes repeated mention of ‘pássaros guarajaus’, guarajau birds, a point that seems lost on Sebastião’s military companion. As he does not recall that guarajau birds tried to warn the caravel’s crew of impending danger, he cannot understand why Sebastião insists on calling common bats that archaic name – in a chapter pregnant with echoes from the História Trágico-Marítima, as well as from various Portuguese poets, Camões, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, the Fernando Pessoa of ‘O Menino de Sua Mãe’ (perhaps once again in intertextual response to João de Melo’s Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas), also Bocage and, extensively, the very Manuel Alegre of the early poetry collections.72 While the narrator’s literary memory is triggered by the view of the moonlight common to the shipwreck narrative and to the present night in Luanda, the theme of presage introduced by the guarajau birds (presage of the shipwreck, presage of Sebastião’s inevitable disappearance) provides the occasion for an historically and literarily informed warning about the impending collapse of the colonial empire. Nevertheless, even if the technique for the recovery of the memory of the war is different from the most common one employed in other novels of this genre, the aim is implicitly the same – to fight against oblivion, the fear of which is so often expressed by the Portuguese soldiers: Estamos longe, demasiado longe. Choram por nós mas esquecem. Vamos ser os grandes cornos deste tempo. … quem vai querer saber o que se passou aqui. Ninguém vai pôr em causa os brandos costumes, os mortos serão esquecidos, nós próprios faremos por esquecer, mais tarde ninguém contará. … A guerra não existe, um dia vais ver que nunca existiu.╇ (124)73 70 [They look more inwards than outwards, soldiers do not remember landscapes, what they see they alone know] 71 [His memory recalls the rhythm of ancient prose, it is the Record of the Shipwreck of the Caravel Conceição] 72 Reference to Manuel Alegre’s own poetry, or ‘restricted intertextuality’, as Jean Ricardou calls this device, is an essential element in this novel, which Margarida Ribeiro (1998b) has analysed finely. 73 [We are far away, much too far away. They cry for us but they’ll forget. We are going to be the great fools of this time. … who is going to want to know what happened here? Nobody is going to doubt the gentle mores, the dead will be forgotten, we ourselves will

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Forgetting will occur naturally, due to the distance at which the colonial war is fought and due to memory’s own natural processes: forgetting is a self-protective mechanism. But forgetting will also occur deliberately, as Medeiros (2000: 201–4) has emphasised in relation to other colonial war novels, because people will choose to forget. The Portuguese will prefer not to know about the violations of the ‘brandos costumes’ (another echo of Camões), which official history will keep denying. However, the fact that even war atrocities can here be referred to as departures from ‘brandos costumes’ shows an awareness of the importance of rescuing historical events from generalised oblivion by preserving the memory in literature. That is why the narratives of the colonial war play such a major role in balancing memory and forgetting, indeed in reversing ‘the memory crisis attributed to Western culture’ (Vieira, 2005: 69, my translation). The fact that the memory of wars or any other great historical events is most vividly kept alive in literary form is confirmed by the rewriting of newspaper headlines into the novel as if they were poems. The point seems to be that journalistic writing will be the easiest to forget, given the ephemeral nature of the medium. But if humble daily news can be preserved in metrical form, it will not necessarily become epic because of that alone, but it will acquire a more lasting dimension. The juxtaposition of two chapters dealing with two very different ways of keeping collective memory alive makes the point especially clearly: chapter 17 presents the Angolan guerrilla fighters’ oral way of letting their people know of their recent and not so recent achievements, followed by chapter 18, which brings journalistic news of the rest of the world (Khrushchev, Cuba, the UN, then Portugal and NATO) in stanzas of various classical metres. It is interesting to note that, on the Portuguese army side, what we see is a fear that the country will forget them: ‘os mortos serão esquecidos. Mais tarde ninguém contará’ (124), ‘ninguém nos cantará’ (186).74 This novel and the others of the genre are the actual proof that that is not the case, but the formulation of such fear appears always in very strong, pessimistic terms – and grammatically in the negative. Curiously, the need for keeping the memory intact appears in more positive words at the end of chapter 28, when Sebastião’s disenchantment with the war is at its highest. The narrative voice suddenly turns away from military concerns to speculate about two African writers. The Angolan Mário de Andrade is probably writing his anthology of African poetry in Portuguese at that very moment; or else he is reading the work of Senegalese author David Diopp.75 A passage from do our best to forget, later nobody will tell. … The war does not exist, one day you’ll see it never existed] 74 [The dead will be forgotten. Later nobody will tell; nobody will sing of us] 75 The standard spelling of the French West African author’s surname is Diop.



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Diopp is quoted, which finishes with the mention of the role of poetry in ‘preserving the memory of Africa’ (209). In a statement which shows that the optimistic, self-affirming attitude of postcolonial writers applies not only to their writing but even to their confidence in history’s memory, the African positively affirms that poetry will preserve the memory of his continent – a sharp contrast with the depressing fear on the Portuguese side that they will be forgotten by their country. Thus, towards the end Jornada de África gathers Lusophone pace again, by contrasting Portuguese dread of collective oblivion and Angolan confidence in collective, literary remembrance. It does so also by means of a further literary quotation, from Agostinho Neto, wherein the Angolan author and politician claims: ‘Nós somos uma encruzilhada de civilizações e ambientes culturais’ (220).76 Perhaps the lesson that Jornada de África suggests we should draw is that the memory of the colonial war will best be kept alive in the literature not only of Portugal but also of the (now independent) African countries whose official language is Portuguese, so that once bitterly opposed political enemies will in the future be able to find a common ground that transcends their past political differences. This will be achieved by the various literatures that inextricably share the common linguistic and cultural heritage once imposed by colonialism, which both sides may one day come to see as a mutual source of cultural enrichment.

76

[We are a crossroads of civilisations and cultural environments]

CONCLUSION In this study I have investigated the ways in which six contemporary Portuguese writers, in novels published in the ten years between 1979 and 1989, recover the memory of the colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea, and give it literary expression. All six novels are retrospective accounts based on the protagonists’ memory of their involvement in the war, either directly or, in the case of female protagonists, one step removed. Invariably, these reconstructions of the experience of war reveal two conflicting impulses: one to rescue the memory of the war experience, so shattering and momentous for the protagonists of the novels, from historical oblivion; the other to come to terms with that very memory and thus to some extent lay it to rest. This conflict between preserving the traumatic memory of war and consigning it to oblivion exists with considerable intensity in all the novels, but the drive to keep the memory alive appears as dominant. In Os Cus de Judas, the memory of the horror of the war is still so vivid and powerful that it is highly improbable that the narrator will ever overcome its haunting recurrence. Not only is the narrator unlikely to forget, it actually enrages him that the other members of society refuse to talk about the subject of the war. In Até Hoje, the pendulum swings almost equally in both directions, at least ostensibly: the protagonist has meticulously recorded his experiences at war, as if intent upon not forgetting any of the details, but he declares himself eager to forget, so that he can re-establish some normality in his life. Of the two novels with female protagonists, Percursos deals principally with the recovery of the general memory of colonial life in Angola, with the specific memory of the war period somewhat blurred in its association with the personal trauma of the disintegration of a marriage. Nevertheless, the narrator clearly wants to preserve the memory of the oppressiveness of the colonial condition, particularly as a reminder for a Portuguese society seen during her childhood and adolescence as arrogant and all too ready to ignore colonial reality. The reflective pages of Percursos are the most intensely preoccupied with the complexities inherent in resorting to personal memory for the reconstruction of the past in literature or other artistic forms. As for A Costa dos Murmúrios, it is the very difficulty of remembering, or, more cynically, the difficulty of choosing what to remember and what to forget, that provides the framework for the novel. The desire to ‘forget’ (indeed, more accurately, to conceal) the ugly side of the colonial conflict is presented in



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parodic interplay with the desire to ‘remember’ (in fact, to reveal) the most sinister memories of the cruelty of war. The novel may appear ambiguous, but its ambiguity is to a large extent parodic and derives mainly from its using as a literary device certain ‘failings’ of memory that the contemporary political regime employed as propaganda tools. It is in the novels grouped under the heading ‘collective memory’ that the desire not to allow the experience of the colonial war to be forgotten is most forcefully voiced. In both Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas and Jornada de África there are protestations that these soldiers are destined to be forgotten, because the society to which they belong will choose to forget them. They are the losers of a war which they see as impossible to win, and they are painfully aware that a society lulled by patriotic rhetoric and enamoured of a glorious, epic past will want to bury their memory and the memory of their ultimate defeat. These are therefore the novels that set out most consciously to urge the reading public not to let the colonial war fall into collective amnesia. It is their express intention to function as an instrument for keeping alive the country’s memory of the colonial war. The protagonists of these novels all recall their direct or indirect participation in the war as an experience which has utterly transformed their personal identity, has opened their eyes to new realities and has determined the course of the lives of those who return to Portugal. More importantly, for all of them the colonial war has been an experience that has radically changed their social and political identity. All the protagonists of these novels are young at the time of their involvement in the war and, with the exception of NCO Sebastião in Jornada de África, who was already politically active before his recruitment, for them the conflict creates the occasion for serious political thinking. One of the most striking features of these novels is precisely that the protagonists are shown in a process of change, as they juxtapose memories of the official language of the regime and of the social and political values it conveyed with the radically different reality they encounter in an Africa rebelling against colonialism and those same values. For the protagonists of these novels, their involvement in the war brings a distressing awareness of having been let down by their government and above all duped by its rhetoric. Thus the conflict becomes a moment of traumatic epiphany too: the horror of the war on the one hand, and their (limited) encounter with the civilian populations of the colonies on the other, suddenly reveal the extent of the deception of the government’s official discourse. Hence these novels all engage in a deconstruction of the patriotic and imperialist rhetoric of the regime and the pillars that sustain it: the Catholic Church’s discourse on the civilising mission of colonialism, which serves the interests of the regime, denounced especially in Os Cus de Judas and Até Hoje; the inflated exhortations to patriotism and military heroism, exposed in A Costa dos Murmúrios;

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even the canonical texts of the Portuguese imperial venture, read uncritically and out of context, which the regime has carefully promoted, as revealed in Até Hoje, Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas and most extensively Jornada de África. The corollary of the dismantling of the regime’s discourse in these novels is the revelation of the silencing of any other discourse which does not support the official one. This may be that of would-be dissidents, as in Até Hoje, Percursos, Jornada de África and Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas, or that of any adverse television, radio or press reporting, particularly in Os Cus de Judas, A Costa dos Murmúrios and Autópsia. The novels record the same silencing effect on various groups: on the marginalised, island community, perceived as a ‘white Africa’, in Até Hoje; on women, especially the doubly colonised ones living under the authority of colonial men, in Percursos; on the military themselves, whose letters are censored and who are not allowed to speak the truth about the war (Os Cus, Até Hoje, Autópsia); even on education, which both A Costa dos Murmúrios and Jornada de África denounce. Percursos, furthermore, though it does not deconstruct the language of the regime as such, unveils the boastful threats of the real colonials instead, another discourse partly silenced by the regime, that of the proponents of an independent Angola under white rule. Concomitant with this dismantling of the regime’s rhetoric, there is an insistent preoccupation with related questions of authenticity in all these novels. In the case of A Costa dos Murmúrios, the problem could be formulated in slightly different terms: the protagonist ironically accepts the coexistence of conflicting truth-claims, pretending that they are all equally valid. This is in keeping with the postmodernist stance which the novel very clearly adopts, as it ‘installs and then subverts’ (to use Linda Hutcheon’s words) contradictory interpretations of reality. In the other novels, however, rather than a matter of contradictory truth-claims, for each protagonist there is a real sense of self-doubt, arising from the old personal and social identity having been so profoundly disrupted that what prevails now is simply a sense of rupture and Otherness. From this feeling of simultaneously having been wrenched from the old self and seen through the rhetoric that fostered it derives a painful perception of lack of authenticity. It is in the analysis of this sense of rupture and loss of identity that the tools of postcolonial thought prove most useful. While it would be methodologically inappropriate to treat these novels of the colonial war as postcolonial texts proper (except for Percursos), they do reveal areas of unexpected coincidence between the altered world view of these protagonists from the colonising metropolis and the vision of reality now more commonly expressed in the postcolonial fiction of the former colonised. First of all, the protagonists of these novels experience profound feelings of displacement when they are sent to war in Africa (for the narrator of



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Percursos such feelings come, conversely, when she is sent to Portugal). That disorienting, wrenching sense of displacement can be both physical (most acutely expressed by the narrators of Os Cus de Judas, Até Hoje and Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas) and cultural (disturbingly so for the protagonist of Percursos, whereas for Eva Lopo it becomes a question of a very uncomfortable, heightened lucidity, which leaves her in a sort of cultural wasteland). But that sense of displacement simultaneously intensifies these protagonists’ awareness of the displacement that colonialism has imposed on the African populations they encounter. Although historically the Africans’ experience of dislocation was no doubt much more drastic (through enslavement, transportation or simply enforced removal into sanzalas for political reasons), the fact that these characters too now experience the shock of enforced displacement allows an incipient empathy with the colonial Other to develop in them. Such a sympathetic response, minimal as it still is in Os Cus de Judas, in Até Hoje and in Jornada de África, is quite a strong element in Percursos, A Costa dos Murmúrios and Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas. Curiously, the same incipient empathy with the Other also leads some of the narrators of these novels to include, to some extent, the reverse side of their stories, i.e. the Africans’ own view of the colonial situation. In Os Cus de Judas, there is an attempt to recognise the validity of the alternative, oral type of African history. Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas gives equal weight to the memory of the war by certain members of the Portuguese army and the view of the same war by some members of the Angolan community living in the sanzala, and even by some of the guerrilla fighters, making it rather problematic to accept the novel’s choice to speak for the Africans. In both Percursos and A Costa dos Murmúrios, the female protagonists reveal a deep capacity to perceive the African Other as a fellow human being, which stems perhaps from a common feeling of oppression: for the Africans at the hands of the colonisers, for the women at the hands of a patriarchal society. Jornada de África expresses such empathy not only through the inclusion of the point of view of one particular guerrilla fighter, but also through the attention it pays to the literatures of various African countries. In Até Hoje, the protagonist has no occasion to test old prejudices about the Africans, but he becomes aware of his own marginalisation as an islander Other. Following Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin’s initial, very influential view of the term postcolonial as covering ‘all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day’ (1989: 2), it is tempting to include novels such as the ones here studied in a broad definition of postcolonial literature. It is in this line of thought, for example, that  See the full title of Isabel Allegro de Magalhães’s previously mentioned article, ‘The Last Big Voyage out: Oblivion and Discontent at the Dawn of Portuguese Postcolonial Literature’. (Emphasis added.) There the term seems to be used in its temporal sense,

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Carlos J.F. Jorge includes both titles by Portuguese authors and by authors from Portuguese-speaking African countries in his survey of the Portuguese literary year of 1997 (1998: 50–2). He defends his choice coherently on the basis of contiguity of experiences, a thesis which I also accept – to some degree, particularly when taking into consideration Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s definition of a Portuguese ‘situated postcolonialism’. Nevertheless, while highlighting the importance of some postcolonial themes in the Portuguese narratives of the colonial wars here studied and agreeing that ‘the crisis of colonialism’ affects both the once colonised and the former ‘agents of colonialism’ (During, 1985: 370), I cannot include these novels in any technical definition of postcolonial literature proper. This is not because I share Benita Parry’s view that there is an ‘implacable enmity between native and invader’ (1987: 32), which would preclude any approximation between both even in literary analysis. I do, however, believe that the process of decolonisation, connected as it is above all with war, corresponds to a forceful breach of social and political links between a former colonising country and its former colonies, the violence of which should not be played down by overemphasising similarities of experience. However, my reasons for not considering these novels postcolonial are not of an ideological, but of a literary nature. My position is much closer to Gareth Griffiths’s later redefinition of the postcolonial, when he points out that ‘post-coloniality of a text depends not on any simple qualification of theme or subject matter, but on the degree to which it displays post-colonial discursive features’ (1990: 154). The Portuguese novels of the colonial war that constitute the focus of this study (and many others not here included) do display features which are common in postcolonial literary texts. These include a concern with authenticity and inauthenticity of experience; expression of feelings of Otherness and doubleness; a willingness to consider alternative views of the world (specifically, to begin validating an alternative, oral type of history); and a reappraisal of the narrators’ value system induced by disturbing feelings of displacement. But these are not sufficient to allow me to consider these novels postcolonial. Essentially, these novels are sombre and pessimistic in mood; they share none of the euphoric, self-confident exuberance of truly postcolonial fiction. None of them shows what Leela Gandhi calls ‘the urge for historical self-invention’ of postcolonial literature (1998: 4). In them, the mother country is seen as a place of entrapment; to designate the period after the end of the Portuguese colonial era. Other critics have not hesitated to consider these novels postcolonial.  The only exception, in my view, is A Costa dos Murmúrios, in which, as Ellen Sapega points out, ‘Eva Lopo demonstrates that she has succeeded in separating the past from the present and, as such, the novel’s overall narrative structure registers the protagonist’s acquisition of a new sense of space’ (1997: 182), that is to say, she has achieved a sense of reterritorialisation within a Portugal without its previous African dimension.



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there is never a feeling of liberation or excitement at the construction of new nationhood, as there would be in genuine postcolonial vein. These are narratives of the end of an era, not of a new beginning – not yet. The fundamental difference, as I see it, lies in the role that memory plays in these novels. In postcolonial fiction, there is often ‘a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present’ (Bhabha, 1994: 63). This is also true of the novels here studied. But postcoloniality implies an attitude of ‘self-willed historical amnesia’ (Gandhi, 1998: 7), a desire (on the part of the once colonised) to forget that the humiliation of colonial domination ever took place. This is not the case in the Portuguese novels of the colonial war. Even when their narrators claim to want to forget their role in their country’s colonial war, the impulse that drives them most strongly is in fact to rescue that episode from historical oblivion. Ultimately, these novels register the memory of the colonial war for a reading public who, the narrators fear, might otherwise forget that irreversible historical event. For the protagonists the war has been a defining experience which has altered their lives forever, and which is now seared in their memory, even if they claim that they would like to forget it. Above all they preserve the memory of the way in which their involvement in the war becomes a turning point in their view of their national identity. In similar circumstances, having in mind the cultural havoc caused by the First World War, and the personal devastation of emotional breakdown, T.S. Eliot wrote: ‘After such knowledge, what forgiveness’ (1940: ‘Gerontion’, line 33). The memory that these novels call forth is of the narrators’ juxtaposing past and present in order to come to terms, principally, with their personal and national histories as (willing or unwilling) agents of imperial domination. In exploring the various issues relating to the literary expression of the memory of the colonial war in these six novels, this study has thus showed that their most recurrent preoccupation is with the dismantling of the official rhetoric of empire and misguided patriotism. They all delve into the ideological implications of the discourse of empire, as they remember it when confronted with the reality of war and colonialism. The memory which haunts the protagonists of these novels involves the physical and psychological violence of the colonial war itself, the hypocrisy of the Estado Novo’s colonial project (revealing the falsity of the myth of a benevolent colonialism) and above all the regime’s politics of forgetting, which several of them continue to see perpetuated in post-revolutionary times.  Curiously, the two novels which have a more positive outlook, A Costa dos Murmúrios and Jornada de África, are the two more clearly postmodern ones. The intersections between postmodernism and postcolonialism are of course many and acknowledged by theorists in both fields. Jornada de África does envisage a future for the Portuguese language which is both optimistic and not devoid of a neo-imperial overtone.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary sources Novels analysed Alegre, Manuel. 1989. Jornada de África: Romance de Amor e Morte do Alferes Sebastião. 2nd edn. Lisboa: Dom Quixote. Antunes, António Lobo. 1986. Os Cus de Judas. 14th edn. Lisboa: Dom Quixote. ——. 1983. South of Nowhere. Trans. Elizabeth Howe. London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Random House. Jorge, Lídia. 1988. A Costa dos Murmúrios. 5th edn. Lisboa: Dom Quixote. ——. 1995. The Murmuring Coast. Trans. Natália Costa and Ronald W. Sousa. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Melo, João de. 1992. Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas. 4th edn. Lisboa: Dom Quixote. Oliveira, Álamo. 1988. Até Hoje (Memórias de Cão). [Angra do Heroismo, Açores]: Signo. Ramos, Wanda. 1980. Percursos (do Luachimo ao Luena). Lisboa: Presença. Other primary texts cited Aguiar, Cristóvão de. 1999. Relação de Bordo (1964–1988). Porto: Campo das Letras. Alegre, Manuel. 1974. O Canto e as Armas. Coimbra: Centelha. ——. 1975. A Praça da Canção. Coimbra: Centelha. ——. 1992. Com que Pena. Lisboa: Dom Quixote. ——. 1998. Senhora das Tempestades. Lisboa: Dom Quixote. Antunes, António Lobo. 1979. Memória de Elefante. Lisboa: Dom Quixote. Aragon, Louis. 1969. Je n’ai jamais appris à écrire ou les incipit. Genève: Skira – Les Sentiers de la création. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1958. Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée. Paris: Gallimard. ——. 1959. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Trans. James Kirkup. Cleveland: World. ——. 1982. Memórias de Uma Menina Bem-Comportada. Trans. Maria João Remy Freire. 2nd edn. Amadora: Bertrand.

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INDEX Note: As the geographical names Africa and Portugal appear throughout, and as colonial war, the roles of memory and forgetting, the disintegration of national and personal identity and cultural dislocation are constant topics, they have not been indexed, except in a few instances of particularly focused analysis. Neither have individual poems nor the characters in the novels been indexed. Abel, Elizabethâ•… 55, 56, 69 n.43 Abreu, Graçaâ•… 88 n.47 A Criação do Mundoâ•… 138 n.43 A Costa dos Murmúriosâ•… 7, 8, 11, 75–96, 139, 144, 148–53 atrocities inâ•… 7, 77 n.8, 79–80, 82 censorship inâ•… 91, 96 heroism, concepts of, inâ•… 89–92, 93, 95 language ofâ•… 92 magic realism inâ•… 75 miscegenation inâ•… 88–9 mulatto, the, as ‘in-between’â•… 88, 93 narrative techniques ofâ•… 77–8, 84, 85–6, 87 ‘Os Gafanhotos’â•… 75–96 post-imperial character of 152–3 postmodernist aspects of 75–7, 93–5, 150–2, 152 n.3 sadism inâ•… 91, 93, 139 suicide inâ•… 93 wedding reception inâ•… 78–9, 80 Aeneasâ•… 115 Afamado, Pedroâ•… 126 n.12 A Guerra Colonial e a Memória do Futuroâ•… 1 A Guerra Colonial: Realidade e Ficção 5 n.10 A Guerra Colonial e o Romance Português: Agonia e Catarseâ•… 5 Albuquerque, Mouzinho deâ•… 93 Alcoforado, Marianaâ•… 128 Alcácer-Quibirâ•… 8, 122, 123, 124, 128, 131, 137, 141

Alegre, Manuelâ•… 7, 19 n.16, 110 n.33, 122–47 Almeida, Miguel Vale deâ•… 25 n.40, 135 and n.37 Almeida, Onésimo Teotónioâ•… 1 n.2, 2, 25 n.40 A Memória de Ver Matar e Morrerâ•… 140 Análise da Vida Mental Portuguesaâ•… 130 n.24 Andrade, Costaâ•… 136 Andrade, Manuel deâ•… 136 Andresen, Sophia de Mello Breynerâ•… 145 Angola 2, 7, 8, 15–35, 55–72, 99–121, 122–47, 148 Cassambaâ•… 56, 58, 68, 69 Calambataâ•… 109, 11l Dundoâ•… 55 Gago Coutinhoâ•… 22 Landscape ofâ•… 28, 34 n.67, 108 Luachimo Riverâ•… 55 Luandaâ•… 16, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 29, 56, 124, 125, 142, 145 Luena Riverâ•… 55 Lusoâ•… 55 Nambuangongoâ•… 143 n.64 N’Zambi (deity)â•… 100, 101, 104, 108, 110 Píriâ•… 107 sanzala (Black compound)â•… 99, 102, 107, 115, 117, 126 and n.12, 151 Antunes, António Loboâ•… 3, 8, 15–35, 138 and n.47, 139 Aragon, Louisâ•… 65 Ashcroft, Billâ•… 11, 32, 151

172

INDEX

Até Hoje (Memórias de Cão)â•… 7, 11, 36–52, 126, 139, 148, 149, 150, 151 Bildungsroman, character of aâ•… 44, 51 homosexuality inâ•… 7, 38 n.8, 39 n.10, 48–50, 49 n.42 narrative technique ofâ•… 37, 38, 44 postcolonial aspects ofâ•… 150–2 post-imperial character ofâ•… 3, 153 Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínasâ•… 8, 11 and n.18, 99–121, 126, 140, 144 n.16, 145, 149, 150, 151 atrocities inâ•… 107, 112–13, 116 Angolan storytelling, asâ•… 103, 118 dialogism inâ•… 109–10 heteronymity inâ•… 132–3 intertextuality inâ•… 109–11, 119–20 language ofâ•… 103, 105–6 narrative technique ofâ•… 7, 8, 99–103, 104, 121 post-imperialist character ofâ•… 12, 153 postmodernist aspects ofâ•… 150–2 rape in 102–3, 104, 119 Azoresâ•… 36, 41, 101 Graciosaâ•… 36, 38, 40, 42, 44, 45 Bachelard, Gastonâ•… 67 and n.37 Bakhtin, M. M.â•… 95 n.75, 105, 106, 107 and n.27, 109 and n.31, 120, 127 n.16, 129, 130 Bandeira, Manuelâ•… 129 Baudrillard, Jeanâ•… 94 Beauvoir, Simone deâ•… 63–4, 69 n.43, 71, 74 Bergson, Henriâ•… 32, 42 n.17, 67 and n.37 and n.38 Bhabha, Homiâ•… 61, 118 and n.59 Bildungsromanâ•… 36–9, 44, 51, 72; (female protagonist)â•… 55–6, 63 Bocage, Manuel Maria Barbosa duâ•… 145 Boehmer, Ellekeâ•… 9, 11 Bonnet, Henriâ•… 42, 43 Bosley, Keithâ•… 144 n.68 Brazilâ•… 129, 136 Brosman, Catharine Savageâ•… 64 Cabral, Amílcarâ•… 11, 118 and n.58 Caeiro, Albertoâ•… 114 (see also Pessoa, Fernando) Caetano, Marcelloâ•… 18 n.10, 76 Camões, Luís deâ•… 36, 47, 89, 100, 110 and n.36, 111, 128, 130, 133, 134,

136, 138, 142 and n.59 and n.60, 144, 145, 146 Camus, Albertâ•… 129 n.22 Carvalho, Mário deâ•… 143 n.64 Cerejeira, Manuel Gonçalves, Cardinal 17, 18 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel deâ•… 129 n.22 Ceutaâ•… 127 Char, Renéâ•… 122, 123 Chodorow, Nancyâ•… 69 n.43 Chrisman, Lauraâ•… 119 and n.60 Ciceroâ•… 46 Cirurgião, Antónioâ•… 114 Clarke, Margaret Anneâ•… 32 Cláudio, Márioâ•… 76 Compagnon, Antoineâ•… 75 n.2, 94 and n.71, 95 n.2 Conrado, Júlioâ•… 40 Coimbraâ•… 124, 128, 141 Couto, Miaâ•… 136 n.37 CPGâ•… 125 and n.10 CPLPâ•… 135 Crónica de Dom João Iâ•… 111, 112 n.41, 139 n.49 Cubaâ•… 146 Dalle armi ai garofaniâ•… 5 Deslandes, Venâncioâ•… 128 Diamang Companyâ•… 56, 62, 69, 70 Diary 1â•… 64 Dias, Eduardo Mayoneâ•… 6 n.10 Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilkeâ•… 122, 123, 130 Diop (Diopp), Davidâ•… 146, 147 Don Quijoteâ•… 108 and n.29 Dostoevsky, Fyodorâ•… 129 n.22 During, Simonâ•… 9 n.14, 152 Durrell, Lawrenceâ•… 65 Eakin, Paul Johnâ•… 86 Eco, Umbertoâ•… 76 n.4, 137 EEC (European Forum, European Union) 2, 6 Eliot, T. S.â•… 153 Estado Novo (see Portugal) Esty, Joshua D.â•… 92 n.66 Ethiopiaâ•… 84 Euripidesâ•… 129 n.22 Fallaise, Elizabethâ•… 69 n.43, 74



INDEX

Fanon, Frantzâ•… 11 n.18, 73, 83 n.30, 89, 117 n.55 Ferraz, Carlos Valeâ•… 126, 127 n.14 Ferreira, Ana Paulaâ•… 79 n.13, 93 n.70, 95 First World Warâ•… 19, 47 Foucault, Michelâ•… 80 Francophonieâ•… 135 FRELIMOâ•… 81 n.24 Freyre, Gilbertoâ•… 25 and n.40 Fussell, Paulâ•… 47, 52 Galvão, Henriqueâ•… 125 Gandhi, Leelaâ•… 118 n.59, 152, 153 Garcia, José Martinsâ•… 126, 140 Genette, Gérardâ•… 7 n.10, 46 n.32, 110, 130 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang vonâ•… 44 n.21 Gonçalves, Olgaâ•… 2 n.4, 112 n.41 Gorra, Michaelâ•… 71 Greimas, Algirdas Julienâ•… 50 and n.47 Griffiths, Garethâ•… 10, 32, 151, 152 Guilleragues, Vicomte deâ•… 128 n.17 Guinea (Guinea-Bissau)â•… 7, 36–52, 90, 99, 148 Bintaâ•… 36–52, 139 Bissalanca 36 Bissauâ•… 36, 49 Geba River 49 Gungunhana (Emperor of Mozambique) 93 Hannibal (Carthaginian general)â•… 124 Harrison, Robert Pogueâ•… 41, 48 Hasdrubal (Carthaginian general)â•… 124 Hélder, Herbertoâ•… 122, 137 Hirsch, Mariannaâ•… 55, 56, 69 n.43 História Trágico-Marítimaâ•… 145 Holy Grailâ•… 143 Horaceâ•… 52 Hutcheon, Lindaâ•… 10 n.16, 76 n.6, 77, 78, 94, 106 n.25, 150 Innes, C. L.â•… 83 Irigaray, Luceâ•… 69 n.43 Jacobus, Maryâ•… 49 Jacinto, Antónioâ•… 136 Je n’ai jamais appris à écrire ou les incipitâ•… 65 John I (Dom João I) (King of Portugal) 111 and n.40, 112 n.41

173

Jorge, Carlos J. F.â•… 152 Jorge, Lídiaâ•… 7, 75–99, 139, 144, 148–53 Jornada de áfricaâ•… 7, 8, 122–47, 149, 150, 151 atrocities inâ•… 144 and n.69 chronotope ofâ•… 127 cultural memory inâ•… 122–47 epic character ofâ•… 129, 133–4, 136–41, 142 ‘inside-out’ reality inâ•… 133 intertextuality inâ•… 123–4, 129–30, 137, 138–41, 142, 145 language ofâ•… 123, 130, 133–5, 136, 137 narrative techniques ofâ•… 124, 125, 129, 131–2, 137, 140 post-imperial character ofâ•… 12, 137, 152–3 postmodernist aspects ofâ•… 150–2 Jornada de áfrica (by Jerónimo de Mendonça)â•… 8, 122, 123, 128 Jost, Françoisâ•… 38 and n.7 Kaufman, Helenaâ•… 78, 82 n.26, 86 and n.42, 87 n.43 Khrushchev, Nikitaâ•… 146 Kristeva, Juliaâ•… 79 n.14, 109, 129, 130 Ksar-al-Kebir (see Alcácer-Quibir) Labovitz, Estherâ•… 55 La Condition postmoderneâ•… 76 n.7 Laranjeira, Piresâ•… 118 n.58 Langland, Elizabethâ•… 55, 56, 69 n.43 Lawson, Alanâ•… 60, 62 Lecture politique du roman ‘La Jalousie’ 83 n.28 Leenhardt, Jacquesâ•… 80, 83 n.28, 83 n.31 Lejeune, Philippeâ•… 55 n.2, 65 n.34 Les Damnés de la Terreâ•… 11 n.18 Lettres Portugaisesâ•… 128 L’Existentialisme et la sagesse des nations 71 Lisbonâ•… 8, 15–35, 36, 37, 38, 49, 56, 72, 124, 125 Cruz Quebrada (pier)â•… 25–6 Praia das Maçãsâ•… 17 Livro do Desassossego por Bernardo Soaresâ•… 135 n.37 Londonâ•… 33, 124, 125 Lopes, Ana Cristina M.â•… 37 n.5 Lopes, Aníbal São Joséâ•… 124, 128

174

INDEX

Lopes, Fernãoâ•… 111, 112 and n.41 Lourenço, Eduardoâ•… 1, 2, 3 and n.6, 77, 133, 134 Lubbock, Percyâ•… 46 n.32 Lugar de Massacreâ•… 126, 140 Lusophony (Lusofonia)â•… 135 and n.36, 141, 147 Luuanda: Estoriasâ•… 141 n.57 Lyotard, Jean-Françoisâ•… 76 n.7, 96 Macondes (see Mozambique) MacQueen, Norrie 81 n.24, 92 n. 65 McAllester, Maryâ•… 66 n.37 McHale, Brianâ•… 95 n.75 Magalhães, Isabel Allegro deâ•… 1 n.2 and n.3, 31 n.59, 73 n.54, 94, 95 n.72, 115 n.49, 116, 151 n.1 Mallarmé, Stéphaneâ•… 129 n.22 Margarido, Alfredoâ•… 135, 136 n.37 Marques, A.H. de Oliveiraâ•… 45 n.24 Medeiros, Paulo deâ•… 3, 4 n.8, 6, 12, 78, 102, 146 Melo, João deâ•… 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11 n.18, 31 n.59, 99–121, 140 145 Memmi, Albertâ•… 9, 74 Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangéeâ•… 63–4, 74 Memória de Elefanteâ•… 139 Mendonça, Jerónimo deâ•… 122, 123, 128, 130 Mensagemâ•… 111, 114, 131, 134, 135, 137 n.41 Mexicoâ•… 124, 125 Miller, Juneâ•… 64 Morão, Paula 55 Moser, Gerald M. 119 Moutinho, Isabelâ•… 10 n.16, 63 Mozambiqueâ•… 2, 7, 8, 75–96, 99, 148 atrocities in (at Wiryiamu, Juwua, Mucumbura)â•… 92 and n.65 Beiraâ•… 75–96 Cabo Delgadoâ•… 81 Macondes (ethnic group in)â•… 80, 81 n.24 Muedaâ•… 81, 82, 83, 88, 90 MPLAâ•… 23, 103 n.18, 125 and n.10, 126, 140 NATOâ•… 146 Negreiros, Almadaâ•… 132 n.27 Négritude literatureâ•… 11, 118

Neto, Agostinhoâ•… 11, 122, 125, 136, 147 Nin, Anaïsâ•… 64, 65 Nó Cegoâ•… 126, 127 n.14 Nyatetu-Waigwa, Wangari waâ•… 72 Nós, os do Makulusuâ•… 66, 141 O Ano de Morte de Ricardo Reisâ•… 132, 133 O Canto a as Armasâ•… 138 n.41 O Labirinto da Saudadeâ•… 6 Oliveira, Álamoâ•… 7, 8, 11, 36–52, 139 Ondjakiâ•… 135 n.34 Orientalismâ•… 11 Ornelas, Joséâ•… 86 n.42 Orr, Bridgetâ•… 59 and n.15 Os Anos da Guerraâ•… 3, 4 Os Cus de Judasâ•… 3, 11, 15–35, 39, 126, 138 and n.47, 148–53 alcoholism in 7, 15 narrative technique ofâ•… 21, 23 n.30, 32 post-imperialist character ofâ•… 12, 152–3 postmodernist aspects ofâ•… 150–2 post-traumatic stress disorder inâ•… 33– 5, 34 n.67 rape inâ•… 23 Os Lusíadasâ•… 1, 28, 47, 89, 100, 110, 111, 134, 138, 142 n.59 and n.60 Osterhammel, Jürgenâ•… 59, 60, 71 Othelloâ•… 130 Other, the African as 21, 31 n.59, 59, 105, 126, 151 Colonial Portuguese asâ•… 73 Islander asâ•… 37, 48 Metropolitan Portuguese asâ•… 58, 64, 72, 107, 151 the self asâ•… 58, 59, 64, 65–6, 70–4 Owen, Hilaryâ•… 60 Padrões manuelinosâ•… 26 PAIGCâ•… 36 n.3, 125 and n.10 PALOPâ•… 125 Parisâ•… 27, 33 Parry, Benitaâ•… 152 Percursos (Do Luechimo ao Luena)â•… 7, 8, 11, 55–74, 140, 148, 150, 151 atrocities inâ•… 59–60 Bildungsroman, character ofâ•… 55, 56, 66, 72





INDEX

feminism inâ•… 7 language ofâ•… 57, 58, 59 marriage, failure of, inâ•… 56, 58, 63, 72, 73 narrative technique ofâ•… 8, 57, 65, 66–8 post-imperial character ofâ•… 152–3 postmodernist aspects ofâ•… 11, 150–2 water, imagery of, inâ•… 65 n.32 women as the colonisedâ•… 61, 62, 74, 150 Peregrinaçamâ•… 120 n.61 Peres, Phyllisâ•… 23 n.31, 24 n.36, 120 n.61 Pessanha, Camiloâ•… 137 Pessoa, Fernandoâ•… 111, 113, 114, 115, 120, 130 and n.24, 131, 133, 134, 135 and n.37, 144 and n.68, 145 his heteronymityâ•… 114, 120, 130 ‘Fifth Empire’, his notion ofâ•… 131, 135 Peterson, Kirsten Holstâ•… 61 PIDEâ•… 20, 23, 24, 124, 141 Pirandello, Luigiâ•… 129 n.22 Portugal, decolonisation, process ofâ•… 2, 3, 5, 6, 10 and n.16, 136, 152 national identity ofâ•… 1–12, 141 democratic revolution (1974)â•… 2, 8, 9, 24 Estado Novoâ•… 12, 18, 25 n.40, 27, 30, 36, 41, 45 and n.24, 46, 48, 76,79, 85, 89, 90, 117, 135 n.37, 153 and Catholic Churchâ•… 17–18, 43, 44, 47, 48, 149 and censorshipâ•… 34, 92, 95, 113, 144 and heroism, concepts ofâ•… 45 and n.24, 76, 89–91 and patriotism, rhetoric ofâ•… 12, 36, 46, 47, 48, 76, 78, 82, 87, 88 and n.47 imperial past ofâ•… 2, 7, 8, 41, 111, 112, 129, 131, 133–4, 137, 138, 150, 153 novels, post-revolutionary, of the colonial warsâ•… 1–12, 73, 150–2 post-imperial character ofâ•… 153 postmodernist aspects ofâ•… 150–2, 152 n.2, 143 n.3 role of memory inâ•… 153 (and see individual novels)

175

Pouillon, Jeanâ•… 101 n.14 Pound, Ezraâ•… 129 n.22 Pratt, Mary Louiseâ•… 9, 10 and n.15 Prince, Geraldâ•… 101 n.14 Proust, Marcelâ•… 18, 19, 31, 42 and n.17, 43, 67 Quental, Antero deâ•… 137 Quintais, Luísâ•… 34 n.67 Ramos, Wandaâ•… 7, 55–74, 140 Reis, Carlosâ•… 37 and n.5, 110 and n.32 Reis, Ricardo (see also Pessoa, Fernando) 132, 133 Rembrandtâ•… 21 Ribas, Oscarâ•… 104 Ribeiro, Jorgeâ•… 45 n.26, 77 n.9, 81 n.24 Ribeiro, Margarida [Calafate]â•… 1 n.2, 6, 25 n.40, 30 n.56, 99 n.3, 124, 129 n.21, 138 n.44, 139 n.47, 141, 145 n.72 Ricardou, Jeanâ•… 145 n.72 Rilke, Rainer Mariaâ•… 122, 123, 130, 134, 137 Rimbaud, Arthurâ•… 65, 129 n.22 Robertson, Davidâ•… 16 Robles, NCOâ•… 128 Rocha, Claraâ•… 123, 124 Rorty, Richardâ•… 92 Rosowski, Susan 55 Rothwell, Phillip 60 Ruas, Joanaâ•… 1, 4 Rutherford, Annaâ•… 61 Sá-Carneiro, Mário deâ•… 137 Sadlier, Darlene J.â•… 130 Said, Edwardâ•… 10 Salazar, António de Oliveiraâ•… 6, 10, 18 and n.10, 20, 30, 34, 44, 68 and n.40, 69, 76, 79, 81, 88 n.47, 90, 92, 93, 95, 105, 110, 111, 112, 125, 128, 133, 153 Santa Maria (ship)â•… 125 Santos, Boaventura de Sousaâ•… 6, 10, 11, 12, 25 n.40, 30 n.55, 45, 59, 60 and n.17, 88 and n.45, 89 n.51 and n.52, 152 Santos, Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa 65 n.32, 85 n.39, 86 n.42, 89 n.51, 91 n.64 Sapega, Ellen W.â•… 1 n.2, 152 n.2 Saramago, Joséâ•… 2 n.4, 132, 133

176

INDEX

Saussure, Ferdinand deâ•… 91 n.62 Scholar, Nancyâ•… 64 Sebastian (Dom Sebastião) (King of Portugal)â•… 114, 122, 123, 128, 130, 131, 137 Second World Warâ•… 19 Seixo, Maria-Alziraâ•… 23, 24 n.36, 33, 34, 76, 94 Selden, Ramanâ•… 76 n.6 Shakespeare, Williamâ•… 129 n.22 Shohat, Ellaâ•… 11 n.7 Simões, Manuelâ•… 5, 84 n.34, 86 n.42 Smith, Roch Charlesâ•… 67 n.38, 71 Sophoclesâ•… 129 n.22 Sousa, Ronald W.â•… 89 n.52, 95 n.73, 131 Spivak, Gayatri Chakrovortyâ•… 62 n.25 Spínola, Antónioâ•… 128 Spurr, Davidâ•… 48, 83 n.28 Stockholmâ•… 20 Stanze, Franzâ•… 86 Suárez, José I. 131 n.25 Suleiman, Susan Rubinâ•… 43, 50, 51 Teixeira, Rui de Azevedoâ•… 5 and n.10, 76, 78 n.10, 83 and n.33, 85, 86 n.42, 124, 125 n.11, 126 n.12, 128, 138 n.43 The Empire Writes Backâ•… 10 The Lusiads (see Os Lusíadas) The Name of the Roseâ•… 76 n.4 Theocritusâ•… 40

The Rhetoric of Empireâ•… 83 n.28 Tiffin, Chrisâ•… 60, 62 Tiffin, Helenâ•… 10, 32, 106, 151 Tocata para Dois Clarinsâ•… 76 Todorov, Tzvetanâ•… 107, 109 Tolstoy, Leoâ•… 129 n.22 Torga, Miguelâ•… 138 n.43 Ulyssesâ•… 115, 143 Uma História de Regressos: Império, Gerra Colonial e Pós-Colonialismoâ•… 1 n.2, 6 UNâ•… 146 Utne, Margaridaâ•… 2 n.4 Vargo, Edwardâ•… 31 n.59 Vecchi, Robertoâ•… 5, 6, 123 n.4, 124 Vergilâ•… 89, 142 n.60 Vieira, José Luandino (usually known as Luandino)â•… 66 and n.36, 136, 140, 141 Vieira, Patríciaâ•… 78, 85 n.40, 93 n.69 and n.70, 146 Vietnam Warâ•… 38 n.8 Villar, Carmenâ•… 39, 49 n.42 Wesseling, H. L.â•… 12 n.20 Widdowson, Peterâ•… 76 n.6 Wilde, Alanâ•… 94 Williams, Patrickâ•… 119 n.60