Published in December 2024, this second volume of Memories of the Colonial Warwith the Colibri brand, is, without a doubt, a model of memorialism in a poor literature in this genre. Coming to life in a publishing house that over the years has been characterized both by the publication of doctoral theses and other works of an academic nature, and by the edition of books that – as is the case – not being academic works, constitute an enormous contribution to ensuring that History and Memory are not lost in this era of the crumbling of the past and, not infrequently, the temptation of revisionism, by investing in this edition Colibri shows that the focus on true documents of culture is not always doomed to failure.
But this book by Nuno Roque da Silveira, a former combatant in the Colonial War, on the Angolan front, in addition to being, as he says in his brief introduction, a gesture that aims to appease the voracity of time (many are veterans that the whirlwind of life has already taken, preventing them from equally making their contribution), aims to be another account of the war, even though, as in the 2007 volume, the images of ferocity are not at stake. of the conflict, but rather the memory of what it was like to live and meet the people of Lunda (the Lunda of diamonds), the northern part of Angola that had Diamang, the Diamantes de Angola company, its vital center. The question, therefore, is this: it is a book that is a testimony of life, but also an exploration of a time that, being that of the memoirist’s youth, is rescued for a present that the younger generations, because they ignore it, cannot even imagine.
Nuno Roque da Silveira, in this particular, shows himself, then, as an excellent memoirist, that is, someone who, having the experience of combat and, after that, the experience of having another look at the Angolan reality, transports today’s reader (whether this reader is a possible ex-combatant or someone who, born after the 25th of April 74, did not have to look at his life feeling the horizon threatened by war) to a time that, in space-time What defines it is not only the time of Diamang, but the time when, for Zemba, Macondo, the war demanded the blood of many who were not, like the author, lucky enough to survive.
In that sense, this book is also the payment of a debt of gratitude. And, despite what has been said, I want to emphasize that, in addition to countless delicious pages about daily life in Diamang (the memory of the lepers who approached the memoirist, one carrying eggs stored in a basket, and another who crawled on his knees and offered Nuno Roque “a smile the size of the world”), what is most impressive in this book is the way in which the memoir narrative is put together, making up a coherent and extremely well-structured whole. engendered river of memories: a river with tributaries, it is true – that is, chapters and some digressions within these chapters – but whose flow is masterfully controlled by a voice that, diving into the journey to the past, knows that Luxilo is more than a name, a deserved resort and an emblem after suffering in combat.
A memoirist, unlike the autobiographer who manipulates and wants to make the narrative reach the best portrait of himself, does not aim to make himself known in his best version. By definition, the memoirist is someone who knows that what he tells cannot be shielded against the human, and therefore imperfect, facets of those who live humanly. Memoirs, or the literature of the “I” – which includes autobiography, diary, letter and the memoir genre – in these pages the speech itself in the 1st person plural neutralizes any temptation of protagonism on the part of the narrator. Expressions such as “our comrades”, “our commander”, “Our captain Adriano Sanches”, “we had passed through Dundo”, as well as the immersion of the voice in the images of what we could see as a chronicle of customs (pp.44-45 and the tour through the year 1963, before going to war, and the issues of housing in Portugal in a time of industrialization), this wisely balances with the summoning of memory through other texts that give the memorialistic text a specular dimension: speculative, on the one hand, mirroring on the other. I’m talking about the epigraphs that Nuno Roque da Silveira, wisely, summons as, from chapter to chapter, the memory unravels. These epigraphs are not a sample of any erudition out of time (the author is, we know, an astute reader and a man of extensive culture and who speaks with the experience of someone who is 85 years old), but rather a way of providing the story with a kind of background, or background music that better transports us through time.
There are many passages in which, accompanied by epigraphs from poets – Gastão Cruz, Sebastião da Gama, Luís Filipe Maçarico, Mário Quintana; from a fiction writer (Agustina); or epigraphs where proverbs, colloquial sayings, sentences resound – the memory unravels and crosses the first person into the plural of the speech, or, expanding the scope of the immense photographs that subtitle the memory of the words, intertwines the past with the present: “It’s the end of June and we’re getting ready to go on vacation to Lourenço Marques, where I left my parents’ house when I was thirteen. It will be an encounter with a past and I’ll be not only with them, but also with the my older brother, named Sertório, and I will finally meet my sister-in-law Lígia and Nuno Sérgio, my first nephew […]” (p.298). And if returning to the old Lourenço Marques was, for the memoirist, a “reckoning with the past”, the truth is that this book – which can equally be read as an adventure novel, or as a character or formation novel (in such a way that the idea that there is an “I” in the process of self-knowledge, overcoming strange rites of passage) is consolidated for the reader – is, in its entirety, a way of getting things right, the Portuguese of today, you count with those who fought the Colonial War – our Vietnam – and were not always respected and cherished by those who, in this time of memory, love war because they were never in it, never fought nor suffered from the death of blood brothers, nor from the longing for their homeland and family.
There are countless pages of intense description of the places, people, habits and customs in this Diamang, which was almost a continent. There are many passages in which, immersed in the memorialistic gaze, the smell of Africa, Niassa or Odemira and Falé (chambers of arms) the past becomes a perfect past tense… The wealth of documents that lend verisimilitude and truth to the story, this is what the reader can easily guess from the detail with which Nuno Roque da Silveira narrates from the most intimate to the smallest event. A thesis emerges from much that is said here: “Day-to-day life with these soldiers taught me to better understand human beings in their most diverse idiosyncrasies, allowing me in my future professional life to easily detect who was in front of me”, reads, on pages 426. Thesis and life motto?
This book has a subtitle: In Lunda da Diamang and Quiocosbut there could be another one that, I believe, Nuno Roque da Silveira, would not disdain: “a treatise on human coexistence”, since, in the end, the Colonial War was, for those who fought it, going to hell and coming back alive, getting to know paradise – that state of soul of someone who, in Lunda discovered himself and understood time as a total reality: “No one will come to close the scars / of our dusk Neither happy / nor unhappy will be our bones”, wrote Gastão Cross. In other words: memorialism made a memorial of the life of an entire generation: those of the 1960s.
Professor, poet and literary critic
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