The Colonial Wars in Contemporary Portuguese Fiction (review)

This volume by Isabel Moutinho provides detailed close readings of six novels which take the Portuguese Colonial Wars in Africa (1961-74) as their theme. The book is divided into three sections grouped under the broad heading of Memory: "The Traumatic Memory" covers António Lobo Antunes' Os Cus de Judas, and Álamo Oliveira's Até Hoje (Memórias de Cão). Part Two, devoted to "The Personal Memory," switches attention from male to female-authored texts focusing on Wanda Ramos's Percursos, and Lídia Jorge's A Costa dos Murmúrios. The third section "The Collective Memory" discusses João de Melo's Autópsia de um Mar de Ruinas and Manuel Alegre's Jornada de África. This division into three parts invites productive comparative readings between the works in each section, as well as across the work as a whole.

The chapter on Lobo Antunes looks specifically at the writer's depiction of displacement and the use of gaps and silences alongside other narratological symptoms of post-traumatic stress. The analysis of Álamo Oliveira deploys Proustian concepts of "voluntary and involuntary memory" to trace the novel's construction as a Bildungsroman or apprenticeship novel in the context of the Colonial War experience. Leading on from this, liberal feminist re-readings of the Bildungsroman genre provide the theoretical approach to Chapter Three on Wanda Ramos's Percursos. The detailed analysis of the novel's chronological disruption, and its significance for the non-closure of feminine identity, is a particularly strong element in this chapter. The reading of Lídia Jorge faces perhaps the most difficult task in terms of identifying a genuinely original perspective given that this novel has received such a large amount of critical attention to date, much of it feminist and gender-related. Moutinho's approach reliably, if a little predictably, focuses on the text's double perspective and its deconstruction of dominant national myths. She thus discusses the text in relation to Linda Hutcheon's historiographic metafiction, pointing to Jorge's ironic and parodic fragmentation of Portugal's imperial History posited in terms of Lyotard's "Grandes Narratives."

Chapter Five on João de Melo emphasizes the shifting polyphonic voices of the novel in terms of their construction of a collective war memory. Drawing on Bakhtinian theories of dialogism, this section pays particular attention to the vexed question of the novel's "authenticist" inclusion of "Angolanized" African voices in Portuguese. The final chapter argues for Manuel Alegre's Jornada de África, as a kind of new national epic, drawing on Roberto Vecchi's concept of an "inside-out" epic. Thus Moutinho takes Alegre's use of poetic intertexuality and pastiche from the sixteenth, seventeenth and twentieth centuries, particularly his reworkings of Camões and Sebastianic myth, to demonstrate how the cornerstones of national cultural memory are reorientated in the direction of a new post-imperial literature of "lusofonia."

Moutinho's critical approach relies predominantly on structuralist, formalist and narratological frameworks of close reading, whilst also drawing more selectively on Memory Studies and postcolonialism. The insights provided by the narratological close reading of the texts are certainly to be commended. It would, however, have been interesting to see a clearer integration of this textual exegesis with the use made of postcolonial theory, regarding which the author seems rather ambivalent. On the one hand postcolonialism is rightly challenged in so far as it risks privileging the post- (or incipiently neo-) imperial perspective of the ex-colonizer, if the historical power differentials separating colonizer and colonized are not sufficiently emphasized. On the other hand, many aspects of postcolonial theory, including some seminal texts on lusophone culture by Sousa Santos, Medeiros, Vecchi and Vale de Almeida, are drawn upon by way of situating the book's structuralist and formalist readings in historically and culturally specific terms.

An unavoidable challenge that this volume faces is, as the author acknowledges, the fact that four of its six chapters cover texts also discussed in Margarida Calafate Ribeiro's excellent, book-length...