6 - Spectrality as Decolonial Narrative Device for Colonial Experience in António Lobo Antunes's O Esplendor de Portugal

Summary

The previous chapter sought to unpack the ways in which Isabela Figueiredo's memoir, Caderno de Memórias Coloniais, engages with colonial discourse in pre-independence Mozambique and how the colonial past is historicized in the contemporary Portuguese public sphere. An integral part of her critical engagement, I argued, concerns her deployment of spectrality in order to understand the underpinnings of colonial power and to destabilize dominant historical narratives, such as that of Portuguese colonial exceptionalism. Few Portuguese writers, though, have explored the depths of Portugal's colonial past in a more spectral fashion than António Lobo Antunes. His vast body of fiction dedicated to the topic and to his own experience as a medical doctor of the Portuguese armed forces in Angola during the war for independence, presents a plethora of voices that speak from a past that is often repressed at both individual and collective levels.

The earliest of his novels to receive critical acclaim, Os Cus de Judas [South of Nowhere] (1979), his second, has been regarded as a semiautobiographical account of Antunes's life up to that point, four years after decolonization. The narrator, in a stream of consciousness conversation with the reader, reflects on his childhood, sexual experiences in both Portugal and Angola, and his own imperial interpellation which leads him to witness the atrocities of Empire. His memory is articulated by the images and voices of the past, from the mutilated body of a screaming conscript to the musings of a military dentist. Drawing on Derrida, Patrícia Vieira points out the evocation of specters in Os Cus de Judas as akin to ‘an archive, with which they also share the injunction to remember: a law, a story, a debt’ (‘Specters’ 342). In this sense, the narrator's specters, each speaking their own archive and composing the archive of the narrator, become part of larger national and postcolonial archives under revision.

Antunes's 1988 novel, As Naus [The Return of the Caravels] shifts from his personal trajectory to that of the Portuguese imperial narrative. In one of Antunes's few literary experiments with the fantastic, the novel follows the postcolonial trek back to the metropolis of Portugal's most famed early modern explorers. These include Vasco da Gama, Pedro Álvares Cabral, Bartolomeu Dias, and Diogo Cão. As historical figures, these men have become signifiers of Portuguese imperial lore.