The Works of Sísifo: Memories and Identities of the Portuguese in Africa according to Fiction Films of the Twentieth Century

Resumo

The genealogy of Lusophony may be seen as an intersection of different memories, shaped through several temporal strata. The disparate senses of identity that are evoked by those memories are multiple and frequently opposite. The different narratives, that circulate on a given and identified cultural and linguistic space, always use the metaphor of the mirror, where people is seen through the dualities of ‘we/others’, ‘inside/outside’, ‘civilized/ wild’, etc. Far from being a schema only applied to the colonizer/colonized, this paper focuses on how Portuguese identities still live under several aporia in these post-colonial times. It’s inside these dynamic oppositions, mixing imagery, symbols and the reality that identities are built and rebuilt, nowadays under the strong influence of cultural industries that reflect, feed and transform our imagination. It is on this theoretical ground that we will try to understand two particular dimensions of the Portuguese colonial memories, which have left a deep and a long lasting trace in our colonial narratives, and also in colonialist and ‘retornados’ (returnees) identities.
Our study will focus on three movies made in Portugal during the 20th century. We conclude that the first and second examples (Chaimite and O Zé do Burro, respectively), compile an individual story and memory of the subjects and the groups which always serve the memories of the History of Portugal and of the Portuguese.
On the contrary, the film that we analyzed which was made post-April 25th, Tempestade da Terra, addresses the History, the individual story and the national memory that comprisesmultiple individual stories and diverse memories.
Finally, our study reveals the possibility of representing the reality of colonialism and postcolonialism in terms of the great diversity of relations between one side and the other.