Margarida Calafate Ribeiro

Africa in the feminine: Portuguese Women and the Colonial War (pp.7-29)
This paper seeks to delineate the general lines that, in the historical, political, sociological and literary critical discourse, have led to a consideration of the war as a not exclusively male phenomenon. Concerning the Portuguese situation, the author seeks to interpret the “supporting role” that has always been reserved for women in public and private, and analyze in greater detail the perhaps unprecedented situation of the Portuguese women who accompanied their husbands on military missions to Africa during the period of the Colonial War.

Maria Manuela Cruzeiro

Women and the Colonial War: An excessively loud silence (pp.31-41)
The aim of this paper is to expose the different layers of silence that have enabled Portuguese society to evade the inevitable encounter with the greatest tragedy of its contemporary history: the Colonial War. The strategy of concealment, which frequently swings between repression and denial, touches both its direct participants (the mobilized military) and the established institutions, as well as, especially, its most ignored victims: women. Naturally excluded from the machinery of war, though deeply involved in its devastating effects, the women’s silence renders this traumatic moment of our recent history doubly absurd and incomprehensible.

Helena Neves

Love in a time of war: The (im)possible (in)communicability of the Colonial War (pp.43-63)
The period of the Colonial War (1961-1974) produced deep demographic, economic, social and cultural changes in Portugal. But if what is measurable is currently more or less visible, there is another dimension that remains practically unstudied: intersubjective experiences, emotions and love relationships during the time of the war. This paper presents an empirical survey of this problematic which needs to be further analyzed.

Maria Manuel Lisboa

"To the end of the world": Love, resentment and war in Hélia Correia (pp.65-83)
Hélia Correia’s play O rancor: Exercício sobre Helena is the basis for a textual analysis of both classical and modern understandings of the role of women in the context of war. In Hélia Correia’s contemporary version, women reproduce and highlight some of the signs already present in Greek tragedy and epic poetry in what concerns the problematic of female sexuality and passion, as countervailing forces to the male warlike instinct, which they eventually overthrow. The reading presented here focuses on different aspects of the juxtaposition of the sexes in the context of war: namely, the dynamic between mother and daughter as agents of female solidarity in confrontation with the male warlike imperative; the mother-son relationship as inscribed in the filial oedipal dilemma of choice between the warrior father and the atavistically loved mother; the question of maternity/paternity and of the voluntary or refused sacrifice of sons and daughters to the interests of war; and the problem of the passional representation of the enemy as an object of desire and figuration of the ideal of the beloved.

Roberto Vecchi

Non-coincidences of women authors. Fragments of a not-only-about-love discourse in the literature of the Colonial War (pp.85-100)
If war is primarily the territory of the androcentric, the traumatic experience of war and its representation by the feminine eye insert themselves in a peripheral margin, a border of dislocation of the traumatic experience itself. From this point of view, the feminine becomes a “witnessing eye” par excellence, the surviving, residual possibility of the impossibility of fully bearing witness to the traumatic event. This dislocation reveals the non coincidence between experience and image, characteristic of the testimony, in which feminine logos and memory become trenchant carriers of another logos, a counter-memory. The novels of Wanda Ramos and Lídia Jorge are also resituated in the tragic problematic of the testimonial aporia, showing how a critical reflection on the modern tragic enables a more inclusive view of a problematic literature – because of its struggle with history – such as that of the Colonial War.

Ana de Medeiros

Rewriting History: Lídia Jorge’s A Costa dos Murmúrios and Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia (pp.101-115)
Within the general theme of the incompatibility between private and public life, this paper focuses on a series of elements that are common to both texts to be analyzed here and that partly explain their subversive quality, in a political and historical sense: the idea of dominant representations of woman as false representations, the restoring of the past of female self-representation, and the recognition of the need of representing the differences among women. Lynn Hunt’s work on the French Revolution provides the theoretical basis for the beginning of this analysis.

Laura Cavalcante Padilha

Two views and a war (pp.117-128)
Starting from a reading of the poetical works Sangue negro (2001) and É nosso o solo sagrado da terra (1978), by Noémia de Sousa and Alda Espírito Santo, respectively, this paper seeks to capture two African views on the war, following simultaneously an ethnic and a gender perspective. It discusses the double gesture of naming the conflict; the changing, in the discoursive universe, of the reference system imposed by colonialism and, as a consequence, the staging of the interiority of new female historical subjects.