The Divided Mind: New Perspectives on Colonial Representations in Isabela Figueiredo’s Caderno de Memórias Coloniais

The idea of a mild Portuguese process of colonization in Africa, reiterated by many academic and social milieus, is described in Caderno de Memórias Coloniais as an “old wives tale” (Figueiredo 131).² In this paper, I propose a discussion on the representation of colonial history in Isabela Figueiredo’s book through the analysis of transculturation processes. I argue that the narrator challenges the Portuguese colonial memory by adding a divergent perspective to the historical archive. This occurs through her self-placement in a liminal space that lies between cultures, national boundaries and identities.

I use the term double consciousness to refer to a split within the protagonist, who is conflicted between being faithful to her Portuguese roots and (re)telling the truth about the colonization of Mozambique.³ This question of truthfulness is explored in relation to the literary genre of the book, which puts at stake emotional and political implications for the understanding of history. This paper’s main goals are to contribute to the deconstruction of the links between identity, nation and citizenship in a postcolonial context, and to provoke awareness of the validity of different versions of history that are created by social regimes of remembering and forgetting.

Caderno de Memórias Coloniais is a first person account of Figueiredo’s recollections of life in colonial Mozambique under the Portuguese dictatorship. The writer, born to Portuguese parents in Maputo (former Lourenço Marques) in 1963, moved to Lisbon in 1975 as one of many returnees who fled to Portugal following the fall of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974. Being too young to participate in colonial oppression, instead the author acts as witness. She crudely describes and interprets the everyday life in the former colony, the atrocities of the colonial war, the massacres that plagued the regime’s collapse and the aftermath of the traumatic decolonization process of the former colony.

I find the adjective transcultural appropriate to describe how the Mozambican and Portuguese cultures cohabitate within the mind of the narrator. The term transculturation was coined by Fernando Ortiz to refer to “[…] the turbulent and unpredictable process resulting from the interaction among cultures in contact […] which potentiates, in spite of unequal power relations, the emergence of new cultural forms” (qtd. in Cheadle and Pelletier xi). More recently, Roland Walter defines transculturation as “a critical paradigm enabling us to trace the ways that transmission occurs within and between different cultures” (idem 27). I argue that the narrator is in this contact zone, occupying the position of mediator between the two cultures. This in-betweenness is visible in many ways. She lies between two homelands: Portugal, the land of her inherited roots and country of citizenship but which she does not see until she is nearly thirteenth, and Mozambique, the place of her birth and childhood, but, lacking a natural claim to the land, a place to which she never fully belongs. When describing her last images of Maputo before taking the plane to Portugal, the narrator says: “I wouldn’t return to that place, which, being my land, did not belong to me” (Figueiredo 87). In another passage, referring to the adult moment when she wrote those words, the storyteller states: “I am here, but I’m still there. In fact, I can only speak using the words border, transition, stained, dual formed therein” (107). This double standard is also perceptible in her overlapped feelings for her dead father: “When we love and we are violated at the same time, and we cannot escape, we deal from the same distance with love and hate” (117). Furthermore, this split is the result of a (then) young girl’s inability to understand the unequal power relations at work in the former colony based on socially constructed distance of races. Her curiosity of the black children, and desire to join them in play could not be pursued because they lived in separate worlds: “Life in the colony was impossible. One was either colonizer or colonized, we could not be anything intermediate […] without a price...