I was Here: The Post-Colonial Bildungsroman of Dulce Maria Cardoso

Published in 2011, O retorno, by Dulce Maria Cardoso, provides a fictional reenactment of the end of the Portuguese empire in Africa, the ensuing process of decolonization and the dramatic saga of the retornados who, in the aftermath of the democratic revolution, returned to a homeland which for many was but a barely imagined mirage. By evoking the first-hand testimony of an adolescent narrator, the author has sought to reconstruct the dramatic circumstances surrounding the return of a family settled in Angola, as well as the painful process of identity annihilation and subsequent ontological reinvention that its members had to undergo in the metropolis. By drawing on the motifs and fictional devices that shape the classical Bildungsroman, Cardoso's novel provides a postcolonial gloss on such narrative tradition while disrupting its conventional anthropological optimism. Therefore, in O retorno, learning implies, above all, counteracting historical amnesia and surviving loss.