The subaltern pasts of the Portuguese colonial war and the liberation struggles: memories in search of a homeland

Abstract

The colonial war and the liberation struggles produced continuous violence that was bodily marked, as deprivation and suffering, in many of those who fought it. Whether we speak of traumatic memories resulting from the routine on the fronts, physical disabilities acquired in the work of arms, the marks of incarceration or the mere solitude of experiences that societies do not welcome, we often find a radical disjunction between the war lived as a personal and intersubjective memory, and the war mobilised as part of a hegemonic representation of the past. This chapter considers two dominant forms of memorialisation of the war/struggle in the public space of the countries that emerged from it: the “politics of silence”, in Portugal, and the “politics of exaltation of the struggle”, in the countries that freed themselves from colonial domination. It convokes testimonial interviews from four countries with personal histories marked by the sufferings of the war: Portugal, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. From them, the chapter analyses how the wounded memories of this past (re)signify the horizons of memory which underpin the national representations of the different contexts.