2 - Álamo Oliveira, Até Hoje (Memórias de Cão)

Summary

Álamo Oliveira's Até Hoje (Memórias de Cão) [Until Today (Memoirs of a Dog)] is best described as a Bildungsroman, a novel that examines the spiritual, social and human development of a young man, in a process that eventually leads him to a fundamental change of direction in life. By the prominence of cognitive verbs such as saber and conhecer and their antonyms ignorar/ desconhecer – ‘João sabe da pátria o q.b. … Desconhecia Lisboa’ (10); ‘essa vontade perdida de o ser e saber’ (20), (to quote only two examples) – the novel's opening pages show that the protagonist seeks to achieve a better understanding of himself and his actions. His quest for knowledge focuses on two points: above all himself, for he used to see himself as following in the footsteps of Camões, the poet of the Portuguese national epic, a design already abandoned when the book begins; and his positioning vis-à-vis ‘a pátria’, the fatherland, a loaded term of the Estado Novo's official language which he adopts, rather than the more neutral ‘país’, homeland.

The novel's plot deals with the colonial war experience of the protagonist, João, a conscript from the Azores archipelago, drafted to serve in Portuguese Guinea in 1967, when the pro-independence war has been raging for at least four years. What distinguishes João's experience from the more usual types of war recollection in literature is that little or no significant military action ever occurs in the novel, and the protagonist's most traumatic memory of participation in the Guinean conflict is that of anxious wait and endless tedium. Images of his two-year tour of duty in Guinea (briefly in Bissau and Bissalanca, then in the Binta barracks) alternate with memories of his childhood and adolescence on ‘the island’ (Graciosa).

Of the three colonies where the Portuguese army fought against proindependence uprisings, Guinea was the most feared posting, because this equatorial territory had the highest number of military fatalities, the most widespread guerrilla insurrection and the most elevated incidence of tropical illnesses. Nevertheless, João is told that he should consider himself lucky because he has been drafted as ‘rendição individual’ (23) for a dead or wounded soldier, for which, it is superstitiously believed, the odds imply a lesser degree of danger.

Before examining the characteristics that demarcate this novel as a Bildungsroman, it is important to establish its narrative present.