The Retornados from the Portuguese Colonies in Africa

Memory, Narrative, and History

Elsa Peralta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367704100
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000440638
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Placed in the wider scope of post-war European decolonisation migrations, The Retornados from the Portuguese Colonies in Africa looks at the "Return" of the Portuguese nationals living in the African colonies when they became independent.

Using an interdisciplinary research agenda, the book presents a collection of research essays written by experts in the fields of anthropology, history, literature and the arts, that look at a wide range of memory narratives through which the Return—as well as the experiences of war, violence, loss and trauma—have been expressed, contested and internalised in the social realm. These narratives include testimonial accounts from the so-called retornados from Africa and their descendants, as well as works of fiction and public memory—novels, television series, artworks, films or social media—that have come to mediate the public understanding of this past. Through the dialogue between these different narrative modes, this book intends to explore the interplay between official memory, the lived experience and fiction, thus contributing to build an empirical basis to critically discuss the memory of the end of the Portuguese empire within postcolonial Europe.

This book will be of great interest to postgraduates, researchers and academics, most notably the ones working in the fields of postcolonial studies, cultural studies and memory studies.

Part I
Narratives of History and Memory

1 Traumatic Loss, Successful Integration. The Agitated and the Soothing Memory of the Return from Portugal's African Empire

Christoph Kalter

DOI: 10.4324/9781003146155-3

What are the meanings currently assigned to the departure, arrival, and reinsertion of the so-called retornados in Portugal? In this chapter, I will argue that two narratives, one of traumatic loss, the other of successful and almost miraculous integration, dominate representations in the public sphere and provide the backbone of what I shall call the agitated and the soothing memory of “the Return” from Portugal’s colonial empire. In a memorial boom of sorts since the early 2000s, both have become far more widespread and more visible than in the decades before. With regard to this memorial surge, I further contend that a “lack of history”—that is, a dearth of historical knowledge about the retornados in general and a want of historicising approaches to the memories of the Returnspecifically—hampers our understanding of these representations and their functions in at least two ways.

First, while they undoubtedly express crucial aspects of the retornado experience, the narratives of traumatic loss and successful integration that are today prevalent unfortunately also decontextualise, streamline, overshadow, and distort what were in reality more complex historical developments. Second, and this is the aspect my contribution will focus on, these narratives themselves have a long history that has largely been unacknowledged so far but that needs to be retrieved. In fact, while these patterned discourses now operate in a different context, the baselines of both the loss- and the integration-narrative still with us today first emerged between roughly 1975 and the mid-1980s. Recovering the history of these early public memories provides a window of critical reflection on the retornados’ place in postcolonial Portugal and Europe as well as on their current representations.

The following sections will flesh out these claims. The first section sketches the memory “mini-boom” that has propelled the retornados back into the public sphere since the early 2000s. This boom of memory comes with what I perceive as a “lack of history.” The subsequent sections will then draw a more detailed picture of the agitated and the soothing memories of the Return that dominate the current engagement with the retornados. In each of these sections, I will trace defining features of these present-day narratives of traumatic loss and successful integration back to their emergence in the 1970s and 1980s. Unearthing such “path-dependencies” helps understand the shape these narratives have taken, but this genealogical perspective does not imply that their meanings stayed exactly the same. While the ways in which politicians, journalists, scholars, and activists constructed the Return in the past continue to inform today’s understandings of it, the meanings and functions of a narrative in the public sphere change over time and according to historical context. The conclusion of this chapter will suggest some preliminary ideas on this relationship of continuity, change, and context.

The Recent Memory Boom: Two Stories, (Almost) No History

Whether built on the loss- or the integration-baseline, memories of the Return have starkly increased in quantity and in visibility over the course of the last decade or so. This is a new situation, and even quite a spectacular reversal. Although governments and government-influenced media after 1974 did not maybe devote as much attention to the migrants as their dramatic impact on the demographic and social structure of postcolonial Portugal would have warranted (Instituto Democracia e Liberdade 2015, 34, 46, 55, 61; Matos 2015; I. Lourenço 2018), in the first years of the young democracy, there was nonetheless a public debate about these migrants, and retornado arguably constituted a basic concept of political communication employed in newspapers, government documents, parliamentary debates, and coffeehouse conversations alike. From the mid-1980s, however, when the assimilation of the diverse people lumped together under this label seemed complete, through the late 1990s, when new perspectives on the colonial wars and their aftermath hesitantly emerged in Portugal (Antunes 2015; Campos 2017, 38–108), the retornados had become virtually invisible in public discourse (Lubkemann 2002).

Since the turn of the millennium, the tables have turned again. The retornado label, contested as it always was and continues to be (Kalter 2018), has clearly regained public visibility. The forceful return it has made is connected to the notion of memory. An impressive number of recent testimonies, novels, and journalistic accounts are aimed at a readership ready to spend money on a nostalgic depiction of the bygone African empire, on the sensationalist recalling of wartime horrors, on adventurous tales of flight from the colonies, or on the edifying accounts of retornados building a new life for themselves in post-revolutionary Portugal (for examples, see Fonseca 2009; Dacosta 2013a; Curado 2015; Canelas 2017). However, the resurgence of retornado memories also extends to more complex and challenging engagements with the settlers’ life in the colonies, their departure, and their integration into Portuguese society—the best-known examples of this “high literature” on the Return being the acclaimed novels by Isabela Figueiredo and Dulce Maria Cardoso (Figueiredo 2009; Cardoso 2011; see also Mendes 2017).

This range from the narratively more straightforward and more obviously commercially motivated writings, on the one hand, to more nuanced and auto-reflexive literary engagements, on the other, is mirrored in the realm of audiovisual media: on one end of the spectrum, there is the public television’s prime time series Depois do Adeus [After Saying Goodbye] (2013). Combining meticulous research and archival footage of historical events in 1975/1976 with a fictional plot built around the Mendonças, a highly likeable family of retornados from Angola, the show skilfully combines the loss-narrative with the integration-narrative in a way that resonated with many retornados, their descendants, and regular Portuguese viewers. At the same time, the makers of the series narratively use the somewhat “external” viewpoint of its retornado characters, who find themselves thrown into the confusion of Portugal’s “hot summer,” in order to lampoon the PREC-phase of the Carnation Revolution and to celebrate the “normalisation” that followed (chapter 11 in the volume; Menezes 2016). On the other end of the spectrum, there are commercially less successful documentary films such as Diana Andringa’s Dundo, Memória Colonial [Dundo, Colonial Memory], or Uma Vida Mais Simples [A Simpler Life] by Inês Alves. Avoiding stereotypical narratives and fictions of authenticity, they reflect not only on the idiosyncratic life stories of retornados, but also on the socially mediated and constructed character of memory itself, as well as its fallibility (Andringa 2009; Alves 2013).

In short, the recent resurgence of retornado memories has brought different voices to the public sphere. Not all of them are confined by the narrative protocol of traumatic loss or miraculous integration; instead, some explore the grey areas between and beyond both. Furthermore, academic analyses, prompted by and keeping pace with the upswing of retornado voices, have mushroomed in disciplines like anthropology, cultural studies, literary studies, and postcolonial studies. In December 2017, the first public conference on memories of the Return in Geneva, followed by a second one at the University of Lisbon in March 2018, showcased much of this recent work. These academic engagements with the phenomenon address increasingly diverse primary sources and use sophisticated analytical tools in order to make sense of them (see, for example, Peralta and Oliveira 2016). But while in some regards they present a “cold,” analytic perspective on memory, at the same time they also offer themselves as a “hot,” engaged contribution to public images of the retornados. As illustrated by the first exhibition on the topic, curated by anthropologist Elsa Peralta in 2015, memory analysts can thus also be memory makers (see Peralta and Oliveira 2016). They sometimes consciously claim this role: with regard to the Return, sociologist Sheila Khan (2016) recently advocated a duty of “postmemory as an act of civic courage” no less. That scholars with a background in postcolonial studies commit in such strong terms to making alternative memories visible must be understood in the double context of the national imperial my...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: The History and Memory of the Portuguese Return from Africa
• Part I Narratives of History and Memory
• Part II Literature and the Workings of Imagination
• Part III Media and Cultural Memory
• Part IV Rewritings and Artistic Appropriations
• Index