When children of war fight for the past: mediations of the Portuguese colonial war memories

Resumo

This essay discusses how Maria José Lobo Antunes, a “child of the Portuguese Colonial War”, besides reflecting on how the conflict has been renegotiated in Portugal’s public narrative so far, proposes a diverse process of mediation of the event through an ethnography of war. My aim is to demonstrate how her ethnography constitutes an alternative and tentative memory mapping project of the conflict (Murphy, 2019), through which Antunes challenges the collective amnesia related to the controversial event and fights against oblivion, the ultimate enemy to defeat in search for healing and reconciliation.