Introduction

Summary

Os escritores têm duas atitudes face à memória do futuro: a preocupação pela sua vida póstuma ou a tarefa de legar à posteridade as suas reflexões.

Joana Ruas (A Guerra Colonial e a Memória do Futuro).

Recent studies of post-revolutionary Portuguese literature have highlighted how it conveys the country's gathering sense of a new identity from the mid-1970s onwards. Deprived of an imperial dimension, which for centuries informed its imagination, and recently rescued from its long isolation by its acceptance into the European forum, Portuguese society now grapples with a need to redefine itself in its new, postcolonial situation. Convincingly scrutinising Portuguese mythology, Eduardo Lourenço (2000: 35–6) has repeatedly pointed out that it was Os Lusíadas that first erected the Portuguese maritime venture into the founding myth of the nation's identity. And given that it was Portuguese literature that first shaped, indeed created, the sense of an imperial identity which prevailed until 1974, it should come as no surprise that the ongoing reappraisal of the country's self-image should likewise be ‘perceived and constructed’ by contemporary literature.

Surveying Portuguese essay writing for an Anglo-American public, Onésimo Teotónio Almeida identifies ‘Portugal and the path of Portuguese cultural history vis-à-vis Central and Northern Europe’ as ‘almost an obsession in Iberian essay writing for the last two centuries’ (1997: 131). The same obsession with Portugal's role in the European Union and in the European Parliament, and with Lisbon's and Oporto's mandates as cultural capitals of Europe, in 1994 and 2001 respectively, is everywhere obvious to visitors to Portugal, in the country's newspapers and news bulletins as in its political slogans and billboards.

Nevertheless, although clearly present in Portugal's official discourse, this preoccupation with defining a new European identity is much less palpable in Portuguese literature. Post-revolutionary Portuguese novelists have paid attention to many subjects not previously common in Portuguese fiction, but they have not generated many novels with a European theme or setting. This is especially revealing in a culture in which ‘fictional narrative’ has always played a crucial role ‘as the privileged, if not exclusive, instrument for anamnesis’ (Medeiros, 2000: 203).

Instead, much of the Portuguese fiction published after the historic break of April 1974 refers not to Europe, but to Africa, especially to the now independent countries of Angola and Mozambique.