5 - Lídia Jorge, A Costa dos Murmúrios

Summary

Lídia Jorge's A Costa dos Murmúrios [The Murmuring Coast, ‘The Coast of Whispers’] differs from other colonial war novels in that the narrative focuses not on war service, but on the experiences of a woman living in Beira, Mozambique's second city, as the wife of an army officer, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The book begins with a short narrative, ‘Os Gafanhotos’ [The Locusts], which tells in its thirty pages events similar to those re-examined and elaborated in the larger narrative, ‘A Costa dos Murmúrios’, that follows it. The short story's setting is the wedding reception of Evita and her groom at the Portuguese officers’ mess in Beira. It reduces the time span of all the events remembered in the novel to that particular afternoon and evening. The fictional author of the short story is a character in the main narrative: here he is the interlocutor of the protagonist (Eva Lopo), whom he has come to ask what she thinks of his story. The narrative present of the novel proper is one afternoon twenty years later, during which Eva Lopo reviews her memories of the events narrated in the short story, in order to give its author her assessment of it.

‘Os Gafanhotos’ reads like a disconcertingly romantic story, with various touches of magical realism. If it were not set before television existed in Beira (as one of the characters points out), it could easily be read as the script for a soap opera. It could also appropriately carry a cinematographic title such as ‘The Discreet Charm of Colonialism’ or ‘White Mischief’, so glamorous and carefree is the colonial army society it portrays.

A Costa dos Murmúrios is a postmodernist novel, even though Portuguese literature was once considered untouched by postmodernism: in it postmodernism was ‘the unicorn of the century! … this unicorn everybody talks about without ever having seen it’ (quoted in Seixo, 1991: 303). Written in 1988, A Costa dos Murmúrios revisits the past, that of the colonial war in Mozambique, by trying to remember some truth about it, at the same time as it resists that past with tremendous irony.