Estilhaços da memória da guerra colonial em A varanda do frangipani e os Cus de Judas

Abstract

The study of the colonial war memory fictionalization in A Varanda do Frangipani (2009) and Os Cus de Judas (2010) is a part of a search for the constitution of the subject in contemporary society. These narratives represent the postcolonial subject marked by their experiences arising from the war in search for territorial emancipation in Mozambique and Angola respectively. As a theoretical contribution, we use the memory concepts of Ecléa Bosi (2004), Halbwachs (1990), Bergson (1999) and Hall (2003), Bonnici (2009), Pollak (1989), Le Goff (2003), Hutcheon (1991), among others, to develop topics that deal with the relationship between Literature, Post-colonialism and History. In both narratives, the experience of war is linguistically reconstructed through testimony and reminiscence reassessments of the past of the characters. The confrontation between the individual and the collective memory is realized in these works, and especially in A Varanda doFrangipani, the memory of the old is put on a supremacy level, as it is the mark of ancestry and collective. In Os Cus de Judas, the individual memory of the Portuguese soldier marked by the trauma of war is highlighted as well as the scars left by the experience. The study of the two novels individually is concluded with an analysis that aims to establish the specific representation of the colonized and the colonizer in the texts that make up the corpus of this work.