WHERE ARE THE HOUSE KEYS?

FISSURES AND (MIS)ENCOUNTERS OF THOSE WHO RETURN

Abstract

As the Revolução dos Cravos marked political transformations and historical processes triggered by the struggles for liberation and independence of the ex-colonies, other ways of narrating the limit experience of those who returned, stressing the Portuguese colonial project, became public since in the 1970s as counter-narratives of official discourse. Among the novels, Os cus de Judas, by António Lobo Antunes, insistently raises the question of why there is war? In Caderno de Memórias Coloniais, Isabela Figueiredo deepens the issue by pointing to the ruin of the empire, of this fracture that becomes personal and collective, between memories, traumas and shared (photographic) images. More recently, A Visão das Plantas (2021), by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, came to light to further shake any idea that the colonial project would have been “soft” – to retake Figueiredo. It is Captain Celestino, returned, who lives in the abandoned family house to dedicate himself to the care of the plants. At the end of the days, the ruin of Celestino’s body, until his death, his dedication to that space of cultivation, living in the old house, somehow approach the apartment occupied by the narrator-protagonist of the novel by Lobo Antunes and the house of grandmother where the narrator of Caderno de Memórias Coloniais went to live when she left Angola. This work aims to elaborate some reflections about these characters who return to Portugal and the spaces they (not) start to occupy, whether in the isolation of an apartment, in a house with the grandmother and her chickens or the house with dark furniture for so long empty, last abode of the old captain.