letters of our colonial past

10 of July - trip to Portugal

18 of August - trip to Greece

Carrying my backpack with excitement, a bit of anxiety and some concerns I flew to Portugal in

order to spend a bit more than a month with my blood family.

I had already told my parents why I was flying to Portugal. I wanted to carry conversations/

interviews with all of my blood family members to know more about them and how they were

crossed by their historical time and context.

Arrived at my parents house I start scrambling through their library and shelves in search for all the

books that would speak about portuguese history.

My parents are not anymore avid readers, so their library is an aggregation of several unread

books, thicker ones, as the ones we assume will hold all human knowledge, heavy covers and

simple titles “The Africa War - 1961 to 1974” in two volumes, “Dictionary of Portuguese Expansion”,

“The Great Book of the Portuguese” a book from 1990, that features our ex dictator as a statesman

and teacher

I dove then into the book that I remember read from “History of Portugal” from an old publishing

house specialized for the young audience “Verbo Juvenil”.

Oh so glorious and full of grandiose drawings displaying gargantuan boats reaching the brazilian

coast caring not slaves but modern propaganda for a young portuguese audience.

My old History and Geography school books brushed avoided at all costs talking about slavery,

invasions and colonization filing those acts as adventurous and heroic.

Wanted to remind me how I learned and made images of our past, before starting the interviews.

For interviews with my blood family (they were all born in the 50s in the same village that I was

also born), I designed an extensive qualitative questionnaire spanning from their childhood, young

and adult life. My focus was to have an open conversation, focusing on their emotional response

and reflection about their own memories. Sounds and smells were also asked in several moments.

“The smell of sweat mixed with the overused uniforms. When the soldiers were passing in through

the unpaved street. And the beautiful horses, shinning, well treated bigger than our house” - a

common image in my family’s childhood memories that was express with pleasure.

What they remember from primary school, atmosphere. What they remember learning about

Portugal as an empire and Portugual ex colonies.

They had to know mountains, rivers and railway system from Angola, Moçambique and Guiné.

Ask them if they still remember some of the names, they did.

How they knew that there was a Colonial War. When they realized that they were living in a

dictatorship. How they felt when they realized those events were happening. How my mother, as a

former primary teacher, taught portuguese history and those events.

Understanding how those events and consequences had impacted their views and ways of being.

Without imposing my ethical bias I was conducting our conversations through memories,

reflections and speculations building an intimate space where those impressions could flourish.

With my father and two uncles we dove into their army time, how it affected them before, during

and after. What was interrupted by and amplified by their army time.

My uncle Casimiro was mobilized to Guine from 73 to 74 as a cryptographer. My father and other

uncle stayed in Portugal being soldiers in the barracks.

All the interviews were recorded only with sound.

As well as those recording I was lucky and grateful to find the correspondence that my uncle

Casimiro exchanged with my aunt Eduarda for his entire time in the army, more than 300 letters

spanning from Portugal and Bafatá in Guiné.

I found as well six theatre plays that my father wrote with a friend in between the years of 68 and

75 and a newspaper (22 editions) that he edit and wrote for with a few young adults from the

village during the 72 and 75.

I scanned all of these documents and have them with me.

My interest in these valuable documents are that they might tell me more about their emotional and

self expression, how they felt their time and decided to record them. Not interested in big events

but more what and how they felt that was worth exposing with others.

I also visited three physical sites in Porto, Coimbra and Lisbon.

One was build in 2017, the others in 1940.

Those places are material reminder how we, in Portugal, deal and still express our memories. All of

those places are a glorification, a silent open wound or a past that we still don’t want to touch that

are kept neutral, floating above time and history, and there to be delighted in a sunny afternoon.

I would love to continue this research, transcribe the interviews, read all those scanned documents

and start analyzing them, with the aspiration to do something with them and be part of a must

needed discussion in our colonial past from my blood family perspective.

• with the support of IMPACT 21 research program