Hilary Owen

Making War on the Isle of Love

Non, ou a Va Gloria de Mandar was released in 1990 by Madragoa Films as an international collaboration between Portuguese, Spanish, and French production companies and won a special jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Marking a distinctive turn toward Portuguese historical topics in Manoel de Oliveira’s vast filmography, and dedicated to his grandchildren, it combines a variety of different film and other visual genres, including war and buddy movies, historical epic, fantasy, literary adaptation, and national myth. It became famous, at the time, for being one of the most expensive Portuguese films ever made. Yet, despite its large budget, epic scale, and high production values, it does not subscribe to the type of pedagogical national agendas that gave birth to the Hollywood epic as a genre. Rather, it functions as a mock epic with a serious counternationalist, and ultimately antiwar, message. To this end, as we will see, Oliveira draws heavily and conspicuously on canonical national sources in Portuguese literature and art, but his cinematic treatment of them is far from reverential. Taking as it does a highly critical long view of national Portuguese destiny as a kind of recurrent fatalism that culminates in the disaster of the African Colonial Wars in the 1970s, it comes as no surprise that the film proved a controversial, highly debated work in Portugal, clearly disturbing the standard patriotic expectations of epic audiences. My intention here is to explore the constructions of race and sexuality that underpin Oliveira’s process of productive irreverence in Non.

The Colonial Wars in Contemporary Portuguese Fiction (review)

Th is volume by Isabel Moutinho provides detailed close readings of six novels which take the Portuguese Colonial Wars in Africa (1961-74) as their theme. Th e book is divided into three sections grouped under the broad heading of Memory: “Th e Traumatic Memory” covers António Lobo Antunes’ Os Cus de Judas, and Álamo Oliveira’s Até Hoje (Memórias de Cão). Part Two, devoted to “Th e Personal Memory,” switches attention from male to female-authored texts focusing on Wanda Ramos’s Percursos, and Lídia Jorge’s A Costa dos Murmúrios. Th e third section “Th e Collective Memory” discusses João de Melo’s Autópsia de um Mar de Ruinas and Manuel Alegre’s Jornada de África. Th is division into three parts invites productive comparative readings between the works in each section, as well as across the work as a whole. Th e chapter on Lobo Antunes looks specifi cally at the writer’s depiction of displacement and the use of gaps and silences alongside other narratological symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Th e 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 Th ree on Wanda Ramos’s Percursos. Th e detailed analysis of the novel’s chronological disruption, and its signifi cance for the non-closure of feminine identity, is a particularly strong element in this chapter. Th e reading of Lídia Jorge faces perhaps the most diffi cult 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 metafi ction, 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 shift ing 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. Th e fi nal 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. Th us 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.”

Engendering the Aesthetics of Solidarity in Lina Magaias Dumba Nengue

Este artigo analisa Dumba Nengue, a colecção de histórias editada por Lima Magaia em 1987, no contexto da guerra Renarno/Frelimo em Moçambique. Seguindo as teorias de testemunho do crítico George Yúdice pensadas no contexto latino-americano, analiso aqui a maneira como Magaia utiliza uma estética narrativa de solidariedade para construir uma imagem da nação frelimiana, baseada nos ideais da aldeia comunal, família e lar, ligados nesta instância pela experiência de sofrimento em comum e pela necessidade de defender o “corpo” comunal da aldeia/nação. Dentro deste contexto, a figura materna exemplificada pela persona de Lina Magaia, desempenha um papel ético, social e metonímico, disseminando o poder da subjectividade e da fala, para interpelar o povo num novo conjunto nacional depois da mode do Presidente Samora Machel, em 1986.