Portugal has had an influx of people from the former colonies in Africa for a long time. One of the episodes of De Afro-European shows Ikenna Azuike exploring the Cape Verdian community in Lisbon. Here David Sogge presents a novel by the Angolan-Portuguese author Aida Gomes.
Drawing on the author’s formative years in Portugal as a mulatta (her father was Portuguese, her mother an Angolan of Ovimbundu extraction) this book tells inter-linked stories of people adjusting to life in a poor Portuguese village 'Pousaflores' whose residents are anything but cosmopolitan. Action begins in 1976-78 and extends for roughly twenty years thereafter – but with numerous flashbacks to life in colonial Angola before 1975. Dramas of social non-acceptance, meagre parental love, racial discrimination and male chauvinism and female vulnerability take place in this ‘backward’ place.
Chiefly affected are three Angolan-born mulatta children fathered by the Portuguese ex-colonial patriarch Silvério, by three different Angolan women. Two of those women don’t figure in the book, but the third, Deodata, shows up later after she makes her way to Portugal unassisted to find her daughter. A further voice is that of Silvério’s sister, a conservative villager lacking schooling and social status.
The reader must cope with overlapping interspersed narrations by all six of these characters, whose identity may or may not be clearly given as the book proceeds along often dimly-lit pathways of the avantgarde. Some passages are internal monologues, sometimes dream-like. It is not a low-threshold, easy-to-read novel. Yet it successfully reveals social stresses and personal scars of colonizer and colonized in a grim and sometimes heartless post-colonial Portugal.
Aida Gomes, Os Pretos de Pous aflores (The Blacks of Pousaflores]. Lisbon: Publicações Dom Quixote, 2011.
