Lusotropicalism in Literature

‘Returnees’ at Lisbon airport, 1975. (Author: Abreu Morais, “O Retornado” newspaper. Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo. PT/TT/SNI/ARQF/RP-003/350100)

Content warning: discussion of racism and colonial ideology

I’d heard this all my life. Go ahead, talk to me about the kind and gentle colonialism of the Portuguese... Yeah, why don’t you tell me that old wives’ tale. 

 This line, from journalist Isabela Figueiredo’s autobiographical work Caderno de Memórias Coloniais (Notebook of Colonial Memories), is in reference to the discrepancy between the created image of Portuguese colonialism and the reality of living it. The image of the Portuguese colonial project as ‘gentle’ comes from Gilberto Freyre’s idea of lusotropicalism. Figueiredo’s work, among others, aims to overturn this image, and expose the realities of living under Portuguese colonial power. 

 The ideology of lusotropicalism, theorised by Gilberto Freyre in his 1933 work Casa-Grande e Senzala (The Masters and the Slaves), underpinned the Portuguese colonial regime. This ideology, at its core, suggested that the Portuguese colonial regime was somehow morally ‘better’ than other regimes, this being due to its focus on miscigenação – miscegenation – or the biological mixing of different ethnic groups.  Freyre claimed that because the Portuguese colonisers supposedly embraced ethnic differences and encouraged mixing of ethnicities, their conception of colonialism was less severe than French and British regimes. Of course, this idea is not only deeply problematic, but also profoundly inaccurate, and since the liberation of Mozambique, writers and filmmakers have aimed to reframe Portuguese colonialism for what it was: a racist regime, just as morally reprehensible as all other forms of colonialism, which  encouraged societal divisions and the systematic oppression of non-white people. 

The Carnation Revolution (a Revolução dos Cravos) took place in April 1974, and Mozambique declared its independence from Portugal on 25th April of that year. It is striking to note how recent this date is; under fifty years ago, Mozambique was still under Portuguese colonial control. Since the country’s liberation, numerous works have spoken about the manifestation of the Estado Novo regime as it was in Mozambique, including O retorno (The Return) by Dulce Maria Cardoso, A Costa dos Murmúrios (The Murmuring Coast) directed by Margarida Cardoso, and Caderno das Memórias Coloniais by Isabela Figueiredo. 

 Dulce Maria Cardoso’s O Retorno deals directly with this moment of rupture itself. It follows Rui, a young Portuguese boy, in a family of retornados – the name given to Portuguese people forced back to Portugal after Mozambique became independent. The reader learns about the emphasis in the Portuguese education system on perpetuating colonial ideology; Cardoso writes: 

 The Motherland is surely like this hotel that even has a velvet-covered bench in the lift. Portugal is not a small country, that’s what was written on the map at school, Portugal is not a small country, it is an empire stretching from the Minho river to Timor.

 This line refers to one of the slogans of the Estado Novo – Portugal não é um país pequenho (Portugal is not a small country) – which refers to the fact that the Portuguese empire, with colonies all across the world, was all seen as a part of Portugal itself, rather than as separate entities, meaning that Portugal added up to be bigger than all its main rivals. In O Retorno, Rui’s father is a dissenter, one of the Portuguese who dared speak out against the colonial regime. As such, he presents a threat to the regime’s authority – Cardoso writes, ‘My father was rotting in a FRELIMO prison for having stated in public that Samora Machel was nothing but a lowly orderly.’ Through this, the reader sees what happens to those who do not conform to the established colonial status quo; they are silenced. 

 Dulce Maria Cardoso was herself a retornada, as was Isabela Figueiredo, author of Caderno de Memórias Coloniais. The autobiographical work consists of fragments of the author’s thoughts, ranging from moments of her life in colonial Mozambique to her enforced move to Portugal. Like Rui’s father, Figueiredo’s father was imprisoned for acting against the colonial regime. One of the most interesting elements of Figueiredo’s text is its intersectionality; she demonstrates how questions of equality in Mozambique were not simply a matter of the colour of someone’s skin. Figueiredo was born and raised in Mozambique, so this is all she had ever known; however, as a white person, she was born into a system of power and dominance that she could not understand as a child. She writes:

 Mozambique is this still image of a young girl in the sun, with her impeccably neat blond braids, facing the black child covered with dust, almost naked, hungry, in a silence in which neither knows what to say, looking at each other from the same side and from opposing sides of justice, of good and evil, of survival. 

 This demonstrates how the dominance of lusotropical ideology complicated the relations between people in Mozambique – the young Figueiredo does not understand why she is viewed differently to those around her of different ethnicities. This gives rise to a specific and inescapable form of guilt, guilt at forming a part of this system of racial hierarchisation, and yet a lack of ability to understand or alter it. 

 An exile like me is also a statue of guilt. And the guilt, the guilt, the guilt we let grow and twist up inside us like a colorless creeper binds us to silence, solitude, irresolvable exile. 

This brings us onto the idea of silence, an essential way of upholding the pretence that Portuguese colonialism is ‘gentle,’ as is demonstrated through the imprisonment of Rui’s and Figueiredo’s fathers. Writing, in the case of both Cardoso and Figueiredo, is a means of breaking this silence and exposing the regime’s realities; they use their privilege, encompassed in their whiteness, to enable them to speak out. Theorist Marianne Hirsch suggested in the 1990s that the memory of collective trauma does not disappear with the passage of time and generations, but rather that it changes, and ‘imagines where it cannot recall.’ The act of writing, then, is an essential means of reconfiguring Portuguese colonial ideology, concentrating on its realities rather than the falsifying image presented under lusotropicalism. Perhaps the end of O Retorno sums it up best: 

 In earlier days I would have written something, perhaps I’ll still write, in very large letters spread across the terrace so that he’ll see me, I was here.

I was here.