II - The Colonial War: Resistance and Catharsis

What poetry did we have when April came, and from where did it come? Let us pick up the end of one of the many threads crossed in the web of poetical writing — the one that leads to our colonial wars. We must stress the relative scarcity of those poetical voices that stood up against the war while it lasted. Poetry created as an explicit agent of resistance found a restricted circulation in photocopies, unobtrusive author's editions, and proscribed books.

After April 25, the necessary exorcizing of the ghosts of war resulted in an important mass of witnesses' statements. These, being subsequent to the events to which they referred, are set in a context of recuperation, augmentation, and rectification of the collective memory. But there can never be enough stress be laid upon the sacrifice of the few pioneers, whose discourse was governed by anger, revolt, despair and even fear.

Liberto Cruz's Jornal de Campanha, published in 1986, collects "fragments" written between May, 1962 and January, 1965; these are, in the words of essayist Eugénio Lisboa, like "a gunfire of text"— "sparse, quick, dry, lethal." There is indeed no complacency in these compositions of two or three verses of diaristic cut; indeed, there is a tangible disappointment at the lack of literary protest towards events in Africa: "Where are the writers of my Country/ Oh António Nobre, who nothing write about this war?" and display sometimes a devouring irony and sometimes a sibilant, almost painful distress.

Manuel Alegre, a former member of the expeditionary corps, exiled in Algiers, recorded in books like Praça da Canção and O Canto e as Armas the absurdity of war and the impotence of poetry in front of that absurdity; an example can be found in the following poem:

Fernando Assis Pacheco raged against the brittleness of his preferred "weapons" — poetry, books — balanced against irrational violence.

(Monólogo e Explicação, in Catalabanza)

José Correia Tavares succeeded in conveying painful images from the African conflict by expatiating over Christmas, a theme that in itself was dear to the authorities, thanks to which his small book Três Natais (1967) was not seized, although its poetic prose denounced with utmost vehemence the malignity of what was happening overseas at the time. Liberto Cruz elevates those texts to the category of "testimony of a generation who found out in war that pain and grief, death and suicide, were not simple and jaded figures of speech."

To the confidential whisper of repressed rage, to the clandestine or exiled echo of those who were against the war, the nationalistic right wing answered by sounding the alarm to rally the troops of the last remaining faithful:

António Almeida Matos compiled a poetic anthology of the colonial war, O Corpo da Pátria,(1961-1971), which contained poets from both the rearguard and frontline. Another anthology of "Poets from overseas" was published in 1973 under the title of "Vestido de Soldado", and coordinated by António Salvado.

It may seem strange that, since all the poets and writers that really mattered were united in a wide front of opposition to the dictatorship, the colonial war could have practically passed them by during the thirteen years it lasted. In Portugal, a peripheral nation closed to the world, whose population was closely controlled by a violent and powerful political police, we did not register, for instance, the movements of opinion that in the United States led to the end of the Vietnam War, or in France to the independence of Algeria. The writers were sensitive to the idea that solutions for the colonial question passed through the establishment of minimal conditions of internal democracy that would allow for it to be discussed. Their fight privileged restitution of rights, freedoms and guarantees to a people who had been deprived of them since 1926, the date marking the advent of Salazarism.

It must also be acknowledged that no poet — excepting, perhaps, Bação Leal, who was killed in the war, so that he had no time to write about anything else — used the conflict as the strongest thematic core of his work. War constituted a nightmare that was poetically digested in its horror as in its transitoriness by those who were physically involved or by those whose ethical position placed them on the same shores of alarm. The nightmare took a long time to pass, it left deep scars of despair in the pages that tell of it, but once the problems had ended, the poets were drafted to do other things: life claimed them for new and fascinating challenges, although those who had a part in the live events punctually recalled them, to prevent their being forgotten.

An exemplary case, on several counts, is that of Vergílio Alberto Vieira. His poetical work, begun under the influence of Eugénio de Andrada and later gaining particular hues by experimenting with variations of pure poetry, was "suspended" in his semantic and organizational orientation towards open space by a cathartic book of warlike contents — A Paixão das Armas (1983) — in which he gets rid of the bruises of hell, resorting to an implacably sarcastic vein that does not flinch in characterizing grotesque situations, and never forgetting the premonition of death on the horizon in several poems, a primordial obsession of any draftee thrown against his will into the bloodbath of combat: