6 - Manuel Alegre, Jornada de África

Summary

Unlike the novels studied in the previous chapters, which move between one of the colonial war settings (Angola, Guinea or Mozambique) and Portugal, Autópsia de Um Mar de Ruínas (1984) [Autopsy of a Sea of Ruins] is set solely in Angola. Its chapters focus alternately on the daily routine of a unit of Portuguese soldiers serving at the front in northern Angola and on the lives of the indigenous Angolans in a nearby enclosed village (sanzala). The stories of the Portuguese battalion and the people of the Angolan sanzala are presented in parallel, the Portuguese side of the plot unfolding in the oddnumbered chapters and the Angolan in the even-numbered ones.

It is never exactly clear who the narrator of each chapter is, and this ambiguity is maintained as an effective technique for widening the scope of the narrative. In the chapters relating to the Portuguese soldiers, the narrative voice shifts from the third to the first person and back to the third, sometimes even within the same paragraph. For example, the opening chapter begins through the eyes of the night sentry (‘sentinela’), who raises the alarm when he thinks that an enemy attack is about to occur. We read ‘pensou’ [‘he thought’] several times, and the subject of the internal focalisation is that soldier for the next three pages. Then, the first person appears – ‘pensei eu’ [‘I thought’] – in a sentence which deliberately cultivates the ambiguity by using the word ‘sentinel’ in its not strictly military sense, together with the unexpected ‘I’: ‘pensei eu, de sentinela ao medo do meu rosto’ (12). The reader is led to believe that this is simply a shift in focus, whereby he, the sentinel, becomes I, watching my own fear. But soon after, the subject of the internal focalisation becomes the captain, and afterwards an NCO. Each time the cogitative verb is repeated in the third person, and each time the reader follows a different character's point of view as if from inside his head. Between these, there appears a plural ‘o nosso olhar’ (16), which already seems to implicate the whole battalion.