The retornados: trauma and displacement in post-revolution Portugal

• Autor(a) principal: David, Isabel
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.5/29179
• topic: Retornados; Trauma; Displacement; Colonialism, Portugal.

The aim of this article is to shed light on the traumatic experiences of the retornados and their strategies to cope with loss and displacement, by focusing on the cases of retornados from Angola and Mozambique, the territories that hosted the largest percentage (94%) of Portuguese settlers. Retornados is the word used to refer to the white Portuguese living in the African colonies who were repatriated to Portugal in the months leading to their independences, between the Spring and Autumn of 1975. Their exact numbers are unknown, varying between 500,000 and one million. 40% of them had been born in the colonies. The fi ndings of this paper are based on semi-structured interviews conducted with six retornados, all with different professional and personal trajectories. The paper argues that the Portuguese case presents unique features that place it in a special category in the context of traumatic memory and displacement literature. First, by blurring the distinction between victim and oppressor – when colonists become the victims of a political power that used them as agents of an imperialistic power project. Second, by showing how the post-revolution Portuguese elites chose not to use the retornados to further the country’s foreign policy goals, but rather forgot them, to further those goals, namely European Economic Community membership. Third, by demonstrating that the plight of the retornados has not been used for the sake of domestic political purposes in forty-one years of democracy.