The Murmuring Coast

by Lidia Jorge

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set during the colonial war in Mozambique (1964-74); published in Portuguese (as A Costa dos Murmúrios) in 1988, in English in 1995.

SYNOPSIS

The novel opens with the short story “The Locusts,” which centers on the wedding reception of Evita and Luis Alex in wartime Mozambique, There follows an extended commentary by Eva Lopo, the former Evita, on the short story. She evokes in greater detail events experienced 20 years previously and, in the process, questions the focus adopted in “The Locusts.”

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

The Novel in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

Women after the Revolution

For More Information

Lídia Jorge was born in 1946, in the Algarve, a region of Portugal that would provide the setting for her two first novels. After graduating from the University of Lisbon, Jorge spent two intervals in Africa, first in Angola in 1969-70 and then in Mozambique in 1972-74. Her literary career started auspiciously in 1980 with the publication of her first novel, the highly acclaimed O Dia dos Prodígios (The Day of Wonders). To date, her body of works consists of ten titles, including a collection of short stories and a play about the early-twentieth-century Republican feminist Adelaide Cabete, A Maçon, (1977; The Free Mason). Her novels, some of which adopt a collective point of view, some of which use a more intimate narrative voice, present a complex, multifaceted picture of contemporary Portugal, one that conveys variations between urban and rural realities, between different generations, and indeed between male and female experiences. In keeping with her interest in exploring a plurality of voices and perspectives, The Murmuring Coast juxtaposes a male-authored tale with its revision by a female commentator.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

Women during the New State

For over 40 years, Portugal lived under a dictatorial regime, António Salazar’s “New State,” which would last from 1932 until reestablishment of democracy by the Carnations Revolution in 1974. The New State’s ideology coalesced around the interlinked notions of “Deus, Pátria, Família” (God, Country, Family). As suggested by the slogan, the regime enlisted religion both to support traditional family values and to legitimize Salazar’s nationalistic empire-building project in Africa.

Salazar’s conservative outlook—he was a seminary-educated bachelor from a rural background—had a particularly adverse effect on women. The progressive Republican Constitution of the 1910s was replaced by the New State’s 1933 constitution, which significantly reduced the rights of women. For instance, whereas the 1910 constitution made divorce available to men and women on equal footing, the new constitution outlawed

divorce for all women married within the Church, that is, for the overwhelming majority of the female population. Salazar’s repressive expectations of women, to be dutiful, dependent wives and mothers, were furthermore encoded in law, which, under the guise of equality, in effect subordinated women to men. Indeed, the 1933 Constitution (in)famously stated that everyone was equal before the law “except, as regards women, the differences resulting from their nature or from the interest of the family” (Guimaráes, p. 19). In 1939, a new legal code declared that a husband could force his wife to return to the marriage if she had left him. Married women were curtailed in other ways too: until 1969, they could not get a passport to leave Portugal without their husband’s permission, for instance. In sum, while valued as mothers, women were all too often confined to domesticity.

How did the female population react? From the late 1950s onwards, there was an ever-increasing gap between the progressive outlook of a minority of the more urban, middle-class, educated women on the one hand, and the limited expectations of rural and/or lower-class women on the other. It is certainly no coincidence that the 1972 release of an explosive new work, New Portuguese Letters, advocating women’s rights, was written by three women who attended university in the late 1950s. It is a work (by Maria Velho da Costa, Maria Isabel Barreno, and Maria Teresa Horta) that vividly captures the ignorance and oppression in which Salazar’s regime maintained the uneducated masses, particularly women. Historically speaking, the silent majority’s acceptance of traditional roles is tellingly encapsulated in the widespread popularity of “Casamentos de Sto António,” or mass wedding ceremonies in honor of patron saint Anthony. These ceremonies took place yearly between 1958 and 1973, thanks to joint sponsorship by the government and the local business community, with eligibility being based on the bride’s poverty and her virginity. In The Murmuring Coast, Salazar’s active pursuit of pro-family policies, and concomitant indoctrination of women at the expense of their individual freedom, is relentlessly ridiculed. While “The Locusts” depicts as its central theme a traditional wedding, Lídia Jorge undermines its fairy-tale aura through the use of irony: not only is the protagonist Eva Lopo not a virgin, but she far from lives happily ever after with Luís Alex. In fact, his suicide brings the love story to an abrupt end, before she can bear him any children.

The dominant discourses of Portuguese colonialism

Salazar’s nationalistic empire-building project in Africa had its roots at the turn of the century, when European powers engaging in a scramble for control of Africa were required to provide proof of effective occupation of their colonies. The consolidation of the Portuguese empire was undoubtedly central to the regime’s rhetoric, which endeavored to construct an image of Portugal as a renewed world player.

At home, the dictatorship reappropriated the nation’s cultural heritage to legitimize its expansionist politics in Africa. Fernando Pessoa’s Mensagem (1934; Message , also in WLAIT 5: Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Their Times), for example, was used and abused to justify colonial ideology, which subordinated the economic, social, and political interests of the colonies to those of the metropolis. A key text, Mensagem formulates the myth of a new empire led by the Portuguese. School children were made to learn by heart the patriotic poems of Mensagem, a fact ridiculed in The Murmuring Coast, where some of Pessoa’s most famous lines are deliberately misquoted. This happens most notably in a two-page description of the hotel’s receptionist, the black Bernardo, who is perceived as a symbol of the civilizing mission bestowed upon the Portuguese by divine decree: “It was there in the last port, that

WOMEN’S TRAJECTORY FROM REPUBLIC TO NEW STATE: QUALIFIED FREEDOM TO CONFINEMENT

Bernardo had been found …. The road had been difficult but worthwhile” (Jorge The Murmuring Coast, p. 84). The cracks in this civilizing mission are succinctly exposed when Bernardo is poisoned by methylated spirits, which, like countless other “uncivilized” blacks, he had mistaken for white wine.

Abroad, Salazar’s colonial discourse was equally shrewd. In the aftermath of World War II, when England lost India, “the Jewel in the Crown,” Portugal adjusted policies in its own empire. In 1951, for example, Portugal renamed its colonies “Overseas Provinces.” Policymakers aimed to demonstrate to the outside world that African possessions such as Angola and Mozambique constituted an integral part of the national territory.

Colonial war in Mozambique

Throughout the 1960s, Portugal became involved in deeply damaging colonial wars in Africa. Rebellion broke out in Angola in early 1961, and by 1964 armed struggle had spread to Mozambique. The Portuguese government mounted intensive military campaigns, but the rebels continued to engage in heavy fighting throughout the decade and into the 1970s. It is thought that at the height of the war, Portuguese involvement was such that “a quarter of all men of military age were in uniform” (MacQueen, p. 76).

In the case of Mozambique, the liberation movement, FRELIMO (Frente de Libertacao Mocambicana) suffered two serious, albeit temporary, setbacks. The first took place in February 1969, when FRELIMO’s president, Eduardo Mondlane, was assassinated by a parcel bomb sent to his office. The second occurred when its liberated zones in the northern provinces were partially recaptured by the colonial army following a massive Portuguese campaign from May to August 1970. Led by Portugal’s General Kaúlza de Arriaga, the campaign involved about 30,000 ground troops. By comparison, FRELIMO at the time claimed a total of about 10,000 fighters (MacQueen, p. 48).

These historical facts are echoed in the closing chapter of The Murmuring Coast, when a nameless Portuguese general announces the unqualified success of a Portuguese offensive in a press conference. It “had struck the principal enemy sanctuaries, captured weapons, ammunition, supplies, dismantled cultures by fire and bombardment” (Murmuring Coast, p. 243). The assassination of FRELIMO’s president, Mondlane, is explicitly mentioned in the general’s parting words: “The general recalled the bomb that had recently exploded in Mondlane’s face” (Murmuring Coast, p. 249). This was adduced as a further proof that a definitive Portuguese victory was within sight. The novel, however, undermines the Portuguese general’s grandiloquent discourse, by juxtaposing on either side of it a string of details that graphically illustrate the reality of the war: drunken men, a large-scale need for washing (both literal and metaphorical), and the

PORTUGUESE EXPANSIONISM AND THE MURMURING COAST

The dominant discourses of Portuguese expansionism are parodied and relentlessly ridiculed in The Murmuring Coast in an episode in which a blind captain travels through Portuguese Africa to deliver a lecture pompously entitled “Portugal D’aquém e D’além Mar e Eterno” (Portugal Within and Beyond Its Borders Is Eternal). The lecture reproduces all the cliches of the Establishment regarding the sacred integrity of the overseas provinces. The captain’s blindness may indeed be a thinly veiled reference to the metaphorical “blindness” of Salazar, who in 1968 had been left disabled by a stroke, but who misguidedly continued to believe himself in charge of the nation until his death in 1970. Simultaneously, the lecturing captain may also act as an oblique reference to Marcelo Caetano who, upon assuming the mantle of leadership from Salazar, undertook a week-long tour of the colonies in April 1969 (in contrast to Salazar, who never set foot in Africa). Regrettably, Caetano’s tour only strengthened his resolve to pursue his predecessor’s policies on colonial war.

scathing perspective of Evita’s husband—“It was a goddamned hell” (Murmuring Coast, p. 250).

In any case, the temporary military success of the Portuguese quickly evaporated. Not only did FRELIMO regain Cabo Delgado and Niassa, it was also able to maintain “an enlarged presence in Tete” (MacQueen, p. 47). The Portuguese responded by stepping up violence: “the colonial security forces adopted terrorist tactics learnt [second-hand] from Vietnam to burn down villages and round up peasants in security compounds” (Birmingham, p. 178). This culminated in the Wiriamu massacre in December 1972, an event alluded to in the novel as a horror waiting to happen in the wings of history, alongside others: “that will be the smell that will rise from Wiriamu, Juwau, Mucumbura” (Murmuring Coast, p. 265). Historians usually foreground Wiriamu as the one exemplary war atrocity perpetrated by the Portuguese on civilians, perhaps because it came to international attention fairly promptly through a report in The Times on July 10, 1973.

In fact, the reports of missionaries, on which The Times article was based, testify to repeated massacres on the part of the Portuguese army.

The first report states that at about 2 p.m. on Saturday 16 December jets bombed the hamlets of Wiriyamu and Juwau. In the neighbouring village of Chawola the people saw the bombs dropping and the smoke rising and gathered in the centre of their village, terrified. They intended to flee but soldiers arrived and forced them to line up. They were told to clap their hands, and as they did so the troops opened fire. The bodies were then covered with straw and burnt, during which time a few survivors managed to slip away.

The second part of the report fills in what happened at the other two settlements. After the bombing, commandos arrived by helicopter, and proceeded to ransack Wiriyamu and Juwau and kill the inhabitants, exhibiting gross brutality—kicking children to death, beating people, burning them alive, tearing an unborn child from the womb, and raping young girls.

(International, p. 19)

Furthermore, other reports of similar incidents continued to surface: “Portuguese soldiers kill another 19 innocent in Dak” “Women and children burnt and killed by the commandos in Mucumbura” and “Massacre in the chiefdom of Chief Gandali” (International, pp. 33, 34, 41).

In other words, by listing Wiriamu alongside that of several lesser-known massacres, Jorge succeeds in avoiding the historical textbook practice of discussing one representative war atrocity, which often results in the overshadowing of countless others. Moreover, the novel’s central episode consists of a lengthy disclosure of hundreds of horrific secret photographs, which inscribe the violence inflicted on local populations by the Portuguese army, in a series of fictional campaigns endowed with grotesquely fictional names (such as Crazy Tiger, Ferocious Wolf, and so forth). The photographs do not depict any one historically documented massacre. Yet, despite their fictional status, they undoubtedly foreshadow the violence of each and every subsequent war killing, Wiriamu included.

The novel’s divergence from the “truth” as depicted by historical analyses arguably makes the full-scale horror and human cost of the tragedy of war more immediate. But Jorge’s preference for the fictional over the analytical mode can also be partly explained as a reaction to an essential feature of the New State: several decades of censorship. Indeed, for many years, every single newspaper published both in the metropolis and in the overseas colonies had to carry the stamp “visto pela censura” (seen by the censors). This ensured that the media was largely unable to voice political dissent, especially in connection with the colonial wars. The strategies of avoidance and cover-up used by the regime in connection with the war are wryly exposed to a devastating effect in the “The Locusts,” where euphemisms are repeatedly used to deny that a war is taking place at all: “besides, this wasn’t really a war but merely a rebellion being carried out by savages” (Murmuring Coast, p. 6). In such a climate, the Wiriamu massacre was promptly denied by official governmental sources and was not discussed in the Portuguese press of the time, nor were other breaches of human rights. Later, the official inquiry was shelved by Kaúlza de Arriaga, the very general implicated in the violence.

Yet, despite the stepping up of violence and succession of war atrocities, the Portuguese army did not manage to regain overall control of Mozambique. As a result, the officers’ morale slowly disintegrated as the unwinnable war went on and on without definitive result.

The Novel in Focus

Plot summary

The Murmuring Coast opens with the short story “The Locusts,” a highly stylized account of reality, whose veracity is later thrown into question by Eva’s account. Several loosely connected events that in fact occurred over a period of two and a half months (as Eva Lopo subsequently discloses) are brought into focus through the wedding reception of Evita and Luis Alex, a Portuguese mathematician-turned-soldier. The wedding, which takes place in the Hotel Stella Maris, on a terrace overlooking the Indian Ocean, becomes a focal point around which all other action converges.

The tale starts with a fairy-tale framing of the newlyweds as they kiss, but immediately draws attention to the constructed nature of the event itself by introducing a photographer who makes the couple adopt several poses while he searches for the best angle to capture them on camera. The newlyweds leave in a car loaned to them by Luis Alex’s superior in the army, initially introduced as simply “a hero.” The couple subsequently returns to make love in the bathroom.

In the morning everyone congregates again on the terrace, but this time encounters a very different spectacle: that of countless black dead bodies washed ashore by the tide. The explanation for this puzzling fact is provided by the groom’s superior, Jaime Forza Leal: the blacks mistook methylated spirits for white wine and, after consuming it, they died. As the blame for the deaths is squarely attributed to the blacks themselves, the initial stir soon dissolves.

The newlyweds, who have remained almost blissfully removed from the commotion, return to the terrace at nightfall, dancing to imaginary music. By this point, imagined visions of reality are shown to be more real to the gathered community than reality itself. As the lights switch on, everything turns green, thanks to an invasion of locusts. The locusts, which give the short story its title, illustrate how events are unavoidably colored or filtered, according to the lens used. In the story, the locusts cancel out all the red objects in the terrace, before obscuring everything. Red is the color of blood, violence, and war, while in Portugal green stands for hope, so the locusts might imply on a symbolic level the end of war and Portuguese victory. Yet such interpretation is thrown into doubt as the story draws to a close, to such an extent that it becomes difficult not to bear in mind instead the powerful symbolism of the locusts as a biblical curse.

Indeed, what follows is the rumor of a white body amongst those of the blacks, which prompts the arrival of a journalist. Luís Alex volunteers to deal with the intruder and a shot is heard. In an unexpected final twist, however, the tale ends with the appearance of the dead body of Luís Alex himself, who has committed suicide. Despite increasingly disturbing events culminating in the groom’s suicide, the steadfast belief in a hidden harmony among the Portuguese, the driving force that holds the community and the story together, remains overtly unchallenged. Thus, even Luis Alex’s untimely demise becomes transformed through poetic vision into a transcendental truth of ineffable beauty: “Everybody, including Evita, understood that an excess sense of harmony, happiness, and beauty can provoke suicide more than any other state of mind” (Murmuring Coast, p. 33).

If on one level language creates a cohesive, albeit increasingly ludicrous and incongruous vision of reality, an all-pervasive irony simultaneously renders the text unstable and deconstructs it. What is ultimately questioned is the patriarchal ideology of Salazar, a colonial-style ideology that poisons both marriages and the local population in the name of a greater cause. As such, the colonized point of view (be it that of blacks or women), although repeatedly silenced, cannot be indefinitely suppressed and is re-inscribed through highly symbolic details. In the tale, this is perhaps best encapsulated by the five-man band playing at the wedding, where the white lead man, intent on imitating a black voice, sings the highly meaningful lyrics “Please get out of here tonight,” unwittingly articulating the perspective of the colonized.

Likewise, Eva Lopo’s memory of events is instrumental in voicing an alternative point of view. In her lengthy commentary after reading the short story, a commentary that occupies the bulk of the novel, the events providing the “raw material” for the highly selective account of “The Locust” come to the fore. From the start, Eva (and by extension her creator, Lidia Jorge) challenges the belief in unity, universal harmony, and underlying pattern, dismissing it as a Renaissance and Enlightenment myth. In so doing, she calls into question the viability of a grand narrative modeled on earlier master narratives, such as the epic poem on the Portuguese discoveries, The Lusiads (also in WLAIT 5: Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Their Times). Although in the course of her conversation Eva repeatedly tells the author of “The Locusts” that he was right to leave out a number of episodes, so as not to upset the overall coherence of his story, she gradually brings out omissions to such a devastating effect that her own disjointed picture displaces the original version.

Eva’s oral account, which eschews rhetoric, gradually erodes any manmade illusions of order, control, or knowledge. In Chapter 2, the rhetoric of heroism is unmasked as a megalomaniac fallacy in a reference to the enormous war scar of Jaime Forza Leal, the ridiculously macho superior of Luis Alex: “when the Captain walked by in his transparent shirt, I thought I was looking at the last man of the century to see himself in his scar” (Murmuring Coast, p. 59). Instead, Eva focuses on the numerous women left behind in the Hotel Stella Maris, and their own private “fights” while their husbands are away on a “sacred” war mission. Furthermore, the two main war episodes that emerge from her narrative prove to be barbaric acts carried out against unsuspecting civilians.

The first consists of the above-mentioned death of countless blacks, following widespread consumption of methylated spirits mistaken for white wine. The conspiracy of silence surrounding countless casualties makes Eva, armed with incriminating evidence, seek out a mulatto journalist, Alvaro Sabino. But the latter drags his heels, and it is not until the death of a white pianist that newspapers take up the story. Against the backdrop of these absurd deaths, another type of violence is foregrounded through the hundreds of secret photographs shown to Evita by Helena, Forza Leal’s wife, which provide disturbing evidence of the Portuguese army’s killing of civilians.

The violence captured by the camera and orally confirmed by Góis, the invalid colleague of Luis Alex, is such that it shakes to its roots Evita’s sense of identity, not to mention her relationship with her husband and the world at large. The chapters that follow question various dominant discourses, with Eva resolutely positioning herself as a dissident voice. She remembers a former history professor at the University of Lisbon and his dogmatic intransigence, as he verbally shot down any alternative points of view. Next comes a description of the previously mentioned lecture “Portugal Within and Beyond Its Borders Is Eternal,” delivered by a blind captain. The wisdom he embodies is ironically challenged when he is prevented from making a proper conclusion by the sudden invasion of locusts. Finally, in the closing chapter, upon the return of soldiers from the front, the general gives a press conference, confidently predicting a Portuguese victory. The prediction is, however, questioned by Luis Alex, who states that: “It was a bluff” (Murmuring Coast, p. 250). In other words, megalomanic discourses of power and control are unmasked as grotesque delusions.

Meanwhile, yearning for like-minded souls, Eva spends most of her free time with her two potential allies: Helena and the journalist Alvaro Sabino, who becomes her lover. But although both appear to be against the dominant order, their behavior ultimately reinscribes the status quo. Helena remains subservient to her cruel husband, and Sabino departs for Europe, actions that prompt Eva into distancing herself from both of them.

As the novel draws to a close, the damage and mutilation caused by Salazar’s imperial ideology and war policies are shown to be extensive and responsible for the almost schizophrenic split created within the main characters. Eva Lopo repeatedly dissociates herself from her former name (“I was Evita”), showing that her two selves are not interchangeable. As for Luis Alex, whose nickname, like Evita’s name, undergoes transformation as he changes from mathematician (Evariste Galois) to would-be hero (Luis Galex), we also witness the collapse of his sense of identity. On return from the front, his masculinity has been undermined at its core, to such an extent that he does not have sexual relations with Evita again, in sharp contrast with his sexual power in the short story. Once Luis Alex has lost faith in a heroic war, the only possible solution for him is death. Significantly, serious doubt is cast as to whether he commits a heroic suicide, as portrayed in “The Locusts,” or as is retrospectively claimed by the journalist. According to Eva, at the end of the novel, Luis Alex prosaically loses his life in a car accident. Her version of events implies that his death was certainly not prompted by “an excess sense of harmony, happiness, and beauty,” as suggested in the short story, but precisely by its opposite, because his belief in a unifying system has been shattered.

The problematization of history

The Murmuring Coast displays affinities with many other post-revolutionary works of fiction in its questioning of the traditional mode of writing history. Throughout the narrative, Eva Lopo is intent not so much on setting the record straight, since she in fact doubts whether it is ever possible to reach one definitive version of events, but on fleshing out the ghost story provided by the “The Locusts,” thus offering at least an alternative version.

Eva provides this version in two ways. The first is by repeatedly drawing attention to the importance that traditional historiography places on the printed text (and/or images) to the exclusion, it is implied, of less coherent or reliable oral accounts such as her own. In that connection, her initial reaction to the disclosure of the gruesome photographs is extremely revealing. She wishes their destruction, for without tangible evidence, it would be as if nothing had happened.

Ah, Library of Alexandria, so often set ablaze, how I admire you (said Eva Lopo)! The sublime knowledge of your yellowing, burned papyrus, transformed into curls of smoke, has written miles and miles of unawareness throughout the centuries.

(Murmuring Coast, p. 132)

Yet, by the end of the novel, her very recalling and inscription of the scene in which Forza Leal and Luis Alex burn the incriminating photographs shows that Eva resolutely refuses to

collude with their suppression of evidence, even though she realizes the fragility of her testimony.

Eva uncovers a further shortcoming of traditional historiography as she questions its artificial construction of a linear narrative, which depends on a potentially arbitrary selection of material. In fact, as a history student at the University of Lisbon, she had already revealed herself to be weary of manmade versions of history, with their reductive, linear view of time, which privileges the point of view of the dominant order. Her own concept of history highlights simultaneity: “in my concept of History there is room for the influence of invisible muscles” (Murmuring Coast, p. 203). Her own narrative details how, for instance, the public uproar over the death of the white pianist achieves press coverage, while the simultaneous miscarriage of one of the wives, who not only loses her child, but also ruptures her sphincter muscle in the process, elicits attention only from the other women in the Stella Maris.

By juxtaposing events in this way, Eva is drawing attention to the fact that historical accounts are fictional constructs; they organize, include, and exclude with an unspoken ideological bias. Her own narrative is an effort to offer an alternative point of view. By recovering the wound of the wife who miscarries from oblivion, Eva provides an ironic counterpoint to the “heroic” war scar of Forza Leal, firmly rein-scribing not only women’s roles into mainstream accounts, but also a woman-centered representation of reality. This culminates in the closing pages of the novel, where she provocatively contrasts her version of Luis Alex’s death with both that of the journalist and that of the male narrator of “The Locusts,” by reiterating “There was in fact a slight difference” (Murmuring Coast, p. 267). In her version of events, Luis Alex meets an inglorious end.

Eva’s commentary can in many ways be equated to a counter-odyssey, insofar as it challenges predominantly male ways of writing history. In the Odyssey, the Greek hero Odysseus (credited in Portuguese mythology with the founding of the capital of Portugal’s kingdom, Lisbon), journeys home to Ithaca from the Trojan war to recover his house and his own kingdom. Unlike him, Eva does not return 20 years later to her exact point of origin. But what she can and does do is challenge the Greek epic’s stance and concomitant proclamation of the heroism of war, which the general so uncritically endorsed: “Let each man march to the front line, whether he dies or whether he lives. Thus do war and battle kiss and whisper” [murmur in the original] (Murmuring Coast, p. 248). It is precisely because she does not collude with the prevailing patriarchal ideology, which ultimately can only afford the kiss of death, as demonstrated by Luis Alex’s abrupt demise, that Eva survives the memory of the traumatic events in which she is involved. Her transgressive laughter in the closing lines of the novel signals her wry awareness of both the need to displace false memories and mutilating ideologies and, simultaneously, of the transient nature of all points of view: “the sounds separate themselves from the words, and of the sounds only murmurs remain, the final stage before erasure, said Eva Lopo, laughing. Handing back, annulling ’The Locusts’” (Murmuring Coast, p. 274).

Sources and literary context

After the Carnations Revolution of April 1974, Portugal witnessed a proliferation of writers intent on re-examining its recent history. Postrevolutionary fiction usually betrays the influence of postmodernist ideas and, as such, often rejects conventional representation, privileging instead fragmented and/or multiple voices as well as subjective points of view, which articulate alternative truths. One of the major distinguishing features of the postrevolutionary period is the monumental increase in women’s fictional output. A notable precursor in the new trend was the appearance in 1972 of the New Portuguese Letters (also in WLAIT 5: Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Their Times), which marked a watershed, both by challenging more conventional modes of writing fiction and by paving the way for subsequent female-authored texts.

As far as the re-examination of colonial war was concerned, the trend started with Lobo Antunes’s damning account of the war in Angola, in South of Nowhere (1979; also in WLAIT 5: Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Their Times). There followed female accounts such as Wanda Ramos’s Percursos (1980; Journeys) and Joana Ruas’s Corpo Colonial (1981; Colonial Body), as well as other male-authored texts such as Joao de Melo’s Au-topsia de um Mar em Ruinas (1984; Post-Mortem of a Sea in Ruins). Numerous other authors bring the more general issue of colonial war into their novels. An interesting example is to be found in Teolinda Gersao’s Paisagem com Mulher e Mar ao Fundo (1982; Landscape with Woman and Sea in the Background), a work of fiction primarily concerned with challenging patriarchal discourse (in which dictator Oliveira Salazar features under the ominous guise of his initials O. S.).

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

The Portuguese revolution, decolonization, and democracy

The Carnations Revolution in April 1974 was a military coup by the MFA (Movimento Forças Armadas), a movement led in Lisbon by the young captains who had fought in Africa. Following the re-establishment of democracy in Portugal, decolonization took place fairly swiftly, with all the African countries achieving their independence by the end of 1975. The final footnote to the end of Portugal colonialism occurred in 1999 when control of Macau reverted to China.

A byproduct of the return to democracy and ensuing African decolonization was the demobilisation of the troops and the simultaneous return of some half million Portuguese nationals (known as retornados) from the ex-empire. Their reabsorption into mainstream Portuguese society presented a considerable challenge and, in this connection, literature undoubtedly had an important role to play, helping to articulate experiences and cement the healing process.

From the late 1970s onward, Portugal’s external policy became increasingly concerned with its links to Europe, a move that culminated in 1986 with Portuguese entry into the EEC (European Economic Community), at the same time as Spain. By then, Portuguese internal politics, which until the early 1980s had been characterized by a succession of minority governments, was achieving greater stability. Indeed, the leader of the center-right party PSD (Partido Social-Democrata), Cavaco e Silva, who had been in power since the end of 1985 in a minority government, was reelected as prime minister in July 1987 with an overall majority in parliament. Significantly, the previous year, in 1986, the socialist Mário Soares was elected president, a fact widely interpreted by political commentators as an illustration of the country’s endemic fear, following decades of an authoritarian regime, of giving too much power to a single political group. Only in the mid-1990s would there be for the first time a president and a prime minister of the same political persuasion.

Meanwhile, in Mozambique, fighting continued in the aftermath of the April Revolution until a cease-fire was finally negotiated and took effect from September 1974. The agreement stipulated that the country would become independent the following year, on June 25, 1975, when FRELIMO took power. But, far from ensuring political stability, independence led to renewed conflict as the country became embroiled in a prolonged and damaging civil war, which was to last until the early 1990s, leaving the country economically and structurally devastated.

Women after the Revolution

The Revolution brought about many significant changes for women, not least of all the right to equality, enshrined in the new constitution of 1976. Women were at last allowed to join the diplomatic service or pursue a career as magistrates (but interestingly, not as members of the armed forces until a decade later, in 1987). A further symbolic barrier was broken when in 1979 a woman, Maria de Lurdes Pintassilgo, briefly held the office of prime minister. But to this day, women’s representation in the Portuguese parliament and local politics remains one of the lowest in Europe.

Furthermore, in the most backward, often illiterate sectors of society, women were and are still frequently perceived to be second-class citizens. Since 1975, the Comissão para a Condigão Feminina, renamed Comissão para Igualdade dos Direitos da Mulher (the Women’s Equal Rights Commission) in the early 1990S, has mounted a commendable effort to eradicate all forms of discrimination against women, fighting illiteracy and sexist stereotyping of women in advertising and school manuals. Also the commission has campaigned against problems such as prostitution (a theme tackled by Jorge in 1984 in Notícia da Cidade Silvestre (Echoes from the Wild City) and wife-battering (a theme developed in one of Jorge’s most haunting short stories, “Marido,” published in Husband and Other Stories (1997).

Reviews

The publication of The Murmuring Coast in 1988 was greeted with widespread acclaim. By then, Jorge had already been hailed as one of the most promising postrevolutionary writers, and her preceding three novels had received recognition for their thematic virtuosity and stylistic innovations in the form of several literary prizes: O Dia dos Prodígios (1980; The Day of Wonders) was awarded the Ricardo Malheiros prize; O Cais das Merendas (1982; Picnic Quay) and Notícia da Cidade Silvestre (1984; Echoes from the Wild City) both received the Cidade Lisboa prize. The Murmuring Coast has been unanimously considered Lídia Jorge’s most remarkable work to date. It quickly achieved the status of a canonical work of fiction, selling over 50,000 copies in under one year, followed by numerous reprints (by 1992, the date of the publication of her next novel, it had been reprinted seven times) and translation into several languages. Like its predecessor, Lobo Antunes’s seminal novel, South of Nowhere, The Murmuring Coast was praised in the first instance for its powerful exorcism and revision of the traumatic effects of the colonial war. The attention of more recent scholars has since broadened to focus on the novel’s far-reaching reflections on issues such as personal and collective identity, memory, history, language and representation itself. Indeed The Murmuring Coast is both a war novel and much more. In the words of a distinguished Portuguese reviewer at the time of publication, “Is The Murmuring Coast a bitter, nihilistic novel? Most certainly not.… The Murmuring Coast is above all else a magnificently planned and written work … recreating once more, out of the crushing denunciation of imperialism, colonialism, war, oppression, violence, sexism, the fragile, paradoxical dignity of human existence” (Santos, p. 67).

—Claudia Pazos-Alonso

For More Information

Birmingham, David. A Concise History of Portugal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Ferreira, Ana Paula. “Lídia Jorge’s A Costa dos Mur-múrios: History and the Postmodern She-Wolf.” RHM 45 (1992): 268-278.

Guimarães, Elina. Portuguese Women: Past and Present. Lisbon: Comissão de condicao feminina, 1978.

International Defense and Aid Fund. Terror in Tete: A Documentary Report of Portuguese Atrocities in Tete District, Mozambique 1971-72. London: International Defense and Aid Fund, 1973.

Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies 2 (1999).

Jorge, Lídia. The Murmuring Coast. Trans. Natália Costa, and Ronald W. Sousa. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

Kaufman, Helena, and Anna Klobucka, eds. After the Revolution: Twenty Years of Portuguese Literature. London: Associated University Presses, 1997.

MacQueen, Norrie. The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa: Metropolitan Revolution and the Dissolution of the Empire. London: Longman, 1997.

Sadlier, Darlene. The Question of How: Women Writers and the New Portuguese Literature. New York: Greenwood, 1989.

Santos, Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa. “Bondoso Caos: A Costa dos Murmúrios de Lídia Jorge.” Colóquio-Letras 107 (1989): 64-67.

Vicente, Ana. As Mulheres em Portugal na Transicão do Milénio. Lisbon: Multinova, 1998.