Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 23

Portuguese authorities, the Estado Novo. The analysis of the state’s attempts
to shape the image of Portuguese colonialism in films has established that
those films that escaped censorship focused on the idealization of colonial
life, depicted modernization as resulting from colonization, and cultivated
portuguesismo while ignoring social realities and showing very little interest
in the living conditions of local populations (Piçarra ����). Just as filmmakers,
during the dictatorship, tried to correct the official view by means of diverse
cinematographic strategies aiming to circumvent censorship (Piçarra ����),
artists nowadays critically engage with representations of the colonial wars
and their remembrance in monuments and memorials.
Portuguese artists do not necessarily incorporate into their work the
suffering inflicted by Portuguese soldiers on local populations. They share
with the monuments emphasis on the suffering of the Portuguese soldiers.
Their approaches to victimhood, therefore, may be criticized as Eurocentric.
However, they are different from the approaches underlying the monuments.
First, works of art lack the pathos and solemn language characteristic of
the monuments. Artists are not searching for the meaning of the deaths of
the soldiers; on the contrary, they visualize precisely the lack of meaning,
the senselessness, and absurdity of these deaths and suffering. Secondly,
monuments focus on those soldiers who died during wars (Winter ����:��).
Works of art acknowledge that survival does not mean the absence of
suffering, as the quotation that opened this part indicates just as does the
following quotation from the same book (Antunes ����:���): “months upon
months of perplexity and suffering. […] maybe so many months of war had
transformed us into indecisive, useless creatures, into pitiful drunkards
waiting for the paleness of dawn, to later wait for afternoon and night in
the same disinterested surrender.” Elsewhere, Antunes (����:���) has his
protagonist hallucinate as follows:
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We weren’t mad dogs when we arrived here, I said to the lieutenant,
who was seething with anger and indignation, we weren’t mad
dogs before the censored letters, the attacks, the ambushes, the
mines, the lack of food and tobacco and cold drinks and matches
and water and coffins, before we were told that a Berliet truck was
worth more than a man and before we found out that the death of
a soldier merited just three lines in the newspaper.
Those who stayed at home—families, friends, and loved ones—also suffered
despite the lack of personal and physical involvement in the wars. They
suffered from being aware of the dangers the soldiers were exposed to and,
as the discussion that opened this article shows, also from the awareness of