Notebook of Colonial Memories Isabela Figueiredo

luso-asio-afro-brazilian studies & theory 4 Notebook of Colonial Memories Isabela Figueiredo Translated by Anna M. Klobucka and Phillip Rothwell Notebook of Colonial Memories Publication supported by a Gregory Rabassa Translation Grant from the Luso-American Foundation Notebook of Colonial Memories Isabela Figueiredo Translated by Anna M. Klobucka and Phillip Rothwell luso-asio-afro-brazilian studies & theory 4 Editor Victor K. Mendes, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Associate Editor Gina M. Reis, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Editorial Board Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University Anna M. Klobucka, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Pedro Meira Monteiro, Princeton University João Cezar de Castro Rocha, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro Phillip Rothwell, University of Oxford Miguel Tamen, Universidade de Lisboa Claire Williams, University of Oxford Cover design & typesetting Inês Sena, Lisbon Translation copyright © 2015 by Anna M. Klobucka and Phillip Rothwell Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Figueiredo, Isabela, 1963- [Caderno de memórias coloniais. English] Notebook of colonial memories / Isabela Figueiredo ; translated by Anna M. Klobucka and Phillip Rothwell. pages cm -- (Luso-Asio-Afro-Brazilian studies & theory ; 4) ISBN 978-0-9814580-3-8 1. Figueiredo, Isabela, 1963- 2. Portugal--Biography. I. Klobucka, Anna, 1961- II. Rothwell, Phillip, 1972- III. Title. CT1378.F54A3 2015 946.904’4092--dc23 [B] 2015008099 Table of Contents Introduction 7 Anna M. Klobucka and Phillip Rothwell Notebook of Colonial Memories 27 Introduction Anna M. Klobucka and Phillip Rothwell When Isabela Figueiredo’s Caderno de Memórias Coloniais (Notebook of Colonial Memories) was published in Portugal in late 2009, it was greeted by marked critical interest and popular acclaim. It was also con- troversial. Figueiredo’s literary memoir traced her growing up in the 1960s and 70s in Mozambique—then still a Portuguese colony. Its depiction of her “return” at the age of thirteen to Portugal, a country she had never seen, a few months after Mozambique’s independence, offered an uncom- monly candid and unsparing perspective on the realities of late Portu- guese colonialism in Africa. Her memoir is traumatically colored by the political climate surrounding the “repatriation” of hundreds of thousands of former colonial settlers, mainly from Angola and Mozambique. Com- posed of 43 autonomous short chapters, originally published as posts on Figueiredo’s blogs O Mundo Perfeito (The Perfect World) and its successor Mundo Novo (New World), the text comments on the author’s childhood in Mozambique’s colonial capital Lourenço Marques (now Maputo). It nar- rates her travel to Portugal, where her parents sent her into the care of rela- tives before joining her several years later. It offers powerful insights into her adolescent experience as a retornada (returnee) in her new homeland.1 Figueiredo, who since 1985 has worked as a high school teacher of Por- tuguese language and literature in Almada (across the Tagus estuary from Lisbon), was not a well-known writer in 2009. Her only previous work of fiction had been published in 1988, after its manuscript was awarded the 1 For additional information about the author of Notebook of Colonial Mem- ories and her own reflection on the text, see Gould. ISABELA FIGUEIREDO top prize in a literary competition. The fact that the author of Notebook of Colonial Memories did not belong to Portugal’s literary and cultural establishment reinforced the widespread perception of the narrative as an authentic and direct statement of witness and remembrance, although Figueiredo herself has forcefully insisted on her text’s literariness. In a 2012 blog post about Notebook, she compares her memoir, which fuses organi- cally autobiography and fiction, with works such as Marguerite Duras’sThe Lover and Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa. Figueiredo complains that, unlike Duras or Blixen, whose belonging to the refined sphere of “literature” is never questioned, she sometimes finds her Notebook shelved by book- stores in the history section, as a raw document of Portuguese colonialism and its aftermath (Figueiredo 2012). To recognize the literary ambition and merit of Figueiredo’s Notebook of Colonial Memories is not tantamount to denying the text’s testimonial value and political impact, especially in the context of twenty-first-century Portugal. The publication of Notebook received attentive and often enthusiastic reviews in most of the country’s major print media outlets, 8 from newspapers to cultural magazines. It also triggered an outpouring of reactions—in online forums, at book signings, in private messages or let- ters to the author—from the vast and diverse community of Portuguese retornados and their descendants. This gushing response—some of which Figueiredo chronicled in her blog—testified to Notebook striking a sensi- tive chord among its readership. The book has come to hold a unique place among the growing body of fictional and nonfictional writing and other cultural products concerned with the social memory and human impact of Portugal’s complicated and messy process of decolonization. Since the Carnation Revolution in 1974, which brought an end to one of the twentieth century’s longest-surviving dictatorships and simultane- ously to Europe’s most enduring colonialism, Portugal’s literary scene has been fundamental in the nation’s coming to terms with its imperial legacies. The 1960s and first half of the 1970s saw Portugal embroiled in colonial wars against independence movements in Africa that affected every one of its families. The dictatorship’s intransigence against the tide of history caused thousands of youths to be maimed and killed in the service of a state whose moral bankruptcy became increasingly obvious. Many of Portugal’s great post-1974 writers have depicted in varying ways how that experience of “los- ing” Africa informs and underpins what it means to be Portuguese today. NOTEBOOK OF COLONIAL MEMORIES The earlier works of writers like António Lobo Antunes and Lídia Jorge relate the experiences of Portuguese sent to Africa as part of the fight to cling on to the empire no matter what the cost. What was less prevalent until more recently were texts, like Notebook, that deal with the experiences of the retornados—those whose lives were entirely based in the former colonies and who were forced or opted to resettle in Portugal as the colonies gained independence. Yet, as Raquel Ribeiro points out, more than three decades after the Carnation Revolution, there has been a veritable boom in writing about that experience and, in particular, in dealing with what she identi- fies as the “stigma” of being a retornado in Portugal. Picture books, diaries, autobiographies, memoirs and fiction both feed into and feed on a nostalgia for what was left behind in Africa. They also assert the need for a recognition of the qualitatively different experience of the end of the empire to which they testify. Like Figueiredo, many of the over half a million Portuguese (by conservative estimates) who relocated to Portugal in the years following the independence of the colonies had little or no contact with their former metropolis, and were not universally welcomed there. They were considered to be direct competition for jobs at a time of political turmoil and economic 9 crisis. They were often branded as imperialists in a peculiar sophism that exonerated the “true” residents of mainland Portugal from any responsibility for five centuries of colonial rule overseas. Portugal’s imperial project was the longest and one of the most erratic in modern European history. In search for a sea route to India, Vasco da Gama made landfall in Mozambique in 1498. Thus began Portugal’s claims to imperial hegemony in southeastern Africa, claims that would repeatedly be chal- lenged by complex realities on the ground and by other European colonial powers. Portugal’s imperial pretensions in the region only came to a defini- tive end on June 25, 1975, when Mozambique became formally independent. Mozambique’s borders were a creation of nineteenth-century imperial diplomacy and brinkmanship. They were settled during the Scramble for Africa, an era when Portugal was considered a weak player on the imperial stage. Indeed, swathes of the colony, while technically Portuguese, were under the jurisdiction of concession companies, with little or no interest in long-term investment in Mozambique. A coup in Portugal in 1926 paved the way for the rise to power of António de Oliveira Salazar, one of the twentieth century’s most unlikely dictators. A professor of economics at the University of Coimbra, he was empowered by the military as the minister ISABELA FIGUEIREDO of finance in 1928 with a sweeping mandate to solve Portugal’s economic dysfunction. By 1932, he had become prime minister with a vision of Por- tugal’s imperial destiny that included a more efficient exploitation of the African colonies as a means of earning much needed foreign reserves and providing food for Portugal. Until the 1930s, few Portuguese migrated to Mozambique. Political opponents of the regime in Lisbon and convicts had been deported to the colony, but there had been little success in attempts systematically to settle Europeans. Salazar ended the concession company regime in Mozambique, reasserting Portuguese sovereignty. Initially, he discouraged settlement schemes that had operated to persuade white Portuguese to move to Africa, because he felt they were a drain on Lisbon’s resources. By the early 1940s, however, taking advantage of the economic opportunities of Portugal’s neutrality as the other European imperial powers were engaged in the Second World War, Salazar authorized major irrigation and engineering projects in Mozambique and began to subsidize the immigration of work- ers from Portugal. His plan was to replicate Portuguese rural society in the 10 colonies as a means of more easily benefiting from the natural resources Africa had to offer. In 1928, there were around 18,000 whites in Mozam- bique.

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