Memory’s ransom: silences, postmemory, cinema

Close to half a century after their end, the colonial wars Portugal waged in a desperate and doomed attempt to hold on to its African colonies in 1974 remain still largely unprocessed. This article examines the multiple silences surrounding the colonial wars and the 25th April Revolution in Portugal drawing from the concept of postmemory and the notion of a traumatic past whose wounds have never healed. It argues that silence in the end does nothing more than allow those open wounds to go on festering. The combined silence over the dictatorship and the colonial wars was never more than a mild palliative, yet another self-delusion the nation allowed itself as it attempted to put on its new European costume. The article focuses on two films, Inês de Medeiros’ Cartas a uma Ditadura (2006) and Ivo M. Ferreira’s Cartas da Guerra (2016), their differences and their similarities, singling out the work of postmemory evident in the scenes with Belmira Monteiro and her granddaughter in the former. --- Original in English.