Memórias de um regresso anunciado

Abstract

Ryszard Kapuscinski, Polish journalist, called to witness and report on the “air bridge” of the Portuguese colonial empire in Luanda in 1975, publishes Mais um dia de vida, Angola 1975 ([1976] 2015), a narration of the first movements of the displaced people of Angola and the first steps towards decolonization, from the journalistic point of view of someone foreign to the Portuguese colonial plot. It is a “single document” and an “account of a journey through a city that only existed for three months: Luanda between the Portuguese exodus and the proclamation of independence by MPLA” (Kapuscinski 7). More than 40 years after April 25, Dulce Maria Cardoso, in the fictional work O retorno (2012), presents young Rui, in the same last days of Luanda in transit to a homeland that he does not recognize as his own, where the problem of identity is central. In an analysis of the works of Kapuscinski and Cardoso, from the perspective of the concepts of memory and “desmemory”, the relationship between his-tory and literature is questioned and the repercussions this may have on the understanding of the still painful and controversial colonial past in contemporary times.