Memórias da guerra colonial na ficção de Lídia Jorge e Lobo Antunes

Abstract

The aim of the present dissertation is to understand how fictionalization of the Portuguese colonial war memory occurs in the novels Os Cus de Judas e A costa dos Murmúrios and the strategies used by the authors to express this memory in literary terms.These narratives, atesting the collapse of the old colonialist utopia spread by the portuguese nation s narrative, propose a re-evaluation of outdated national values as well as the rhetoric of Salazar s regime, which affected profoundly these writer s lives. In both narratives, the war experience is reconstructed through the characters testimonials and re-evaluation of their past reminiscences, what gives them a confessional profile. Dismounting the traditional historical narrative by the relativization of widely accepted truths, fiction intends to fill the gaps of the official historical record, seen as a discourse comiited with the dominant classes. The confrontation between the character s individual memory and the legitimized nation's memory, has a libertarian dimension about the past, as it interrupts the dominant logic of the present. The study of the refered novels individualy is concluded with a comparative analisys which stablish similarities and possible discrepancies between their representation of the colonial war memories