5 - Imperial Cryptonomy: Colonial Specters and Portuguese Exceptionalism in Isabela Figueiredo's Caderno de Memórias Coloniais

Summary

The end of formal colonialism in Lusophone African nations (Angola, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe) ushered in numerous political, societal, and cultural shifts on a transnational spectrum. Portuguese decolonization, following more than a decade of counter-insurgency in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique, and the eventual fall of the right-wing Estado Novo regime, led to the migration of over half a million former colonists to the metropolis. Those who did not see a future outside of the colonial system of power, or feared political turmoil in the postcolony, arrived in Portugal in 1974 and 1975 to find a metropolis also at the beginning of political reconstruction following the Carnation Revolution that ended the Estado Novo. The process of repatriation began with the political designation of former colonists as retornados [returnees], a paradox because many were born in the colonies and had never set foot in Portugal. Angola and Mozambique had been the largest settler colonies of the Portuguese overseas empire. Subsequently, they accounted for the vast majority of retornados, even before they became internationally recognized sovereign nations.

Following their large-scale arrival in Portugal, the term retornado quickly became imbued with social stigma stemming from imperial notions of nationhood and colonial otherness. The depth of this stigma is central in much literary production by or about retornados, reflecting on the interrelated events and periods of colonial settlement, decolonization, and nation-(re)building in Lusophone Africa and Portugal. The introspective and erratic retornado narrators of António Lobo Antunes's O Esplendor de Portugal [The Splendor of Portugal] (1997) comment, often extensively, on their social standing in post-imperial Portugal, as individuals of compromised whiteness.

On the other hand, the retornados were also perceived by metropolitans as petit bourgeois colonial parasites, as former colonist Isabela Figueiredo recalls:

Quando chegámos a Portugal fomos muito maltratados. Eu era criança e fui muito maltratada pelos meus colegas, pelos meus familiares. Diziam que o meu pai e a minha mãe eram ladrões, que tínhamos tido pretos para nos lavarem os pezinhos e o rabinho. E que merecíamos ter perdido tudo. (Coelho non. pag.)

[When we arrived in Portugal we were mistreated. As a child I was mistreated by classmates and relatives. They would say that my mother and father were thieves, that we had blacks to wash our feet and behinds. And that we deserved to lose everything.]