Let the paint flow, stop the bleeding: Letters from Angola by António Lobo Antunes

Abstract

In 1971, António Lobo Antunes is mobilized to fight in Africa. Therefore, he gets the course of the days in Lisbon interrupted: bereft of the company of his wife, bereft as well of his friends and family, leaves one life in suspension to start another one – but that is not life. The fragility caused by war and the banalization of death let him know another level of exception. From that place, he starts writing letters to Maria José, his wife, with an anxious writing that repeatedly returns to daily matters, which he aims to restore. Taking the reading of these brief moments – a fabric of everyday relations put together by correspondence–this paper aims to think this unique form of resistance offered by this letters written in times of exception: a resistance concerning the private, been, above all, words of common people, with no political nor military role, that keep the memory of traumatic events. We also aim to contribute to open historiographical problems derived from the persistence of a unique version of history for a matter that is not closed, from an overdue justice, considering the voices above the surface – to recover the memory from dictatorship times.