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Paper short abstract

This paper explores the enduring links between mental health and memory (collective and individual) through an analysis of silences, meaning, practice, and representation in Portugal after the end of the anti-colonial wars.

Paper long abstract

Portugal was engaged in three theatres of war in Africa from 1961 to 1974. Nearly one million men were mobilized to fight. Upon return, especially in the aftermath of the 1974 revolution and the rapid political changes taking place in Portugal, the experiences of these men and their families were silenced or left unacknowledged. The silence gave way to a renewed interest and reflection on the colonial period, its legacies, afterlives, and memories.

This paper considers the traumatic war experience to interrogate how silences are interconnected with the temporalities of care and illness trajectories in Portugal. I will explore the enduring links between mental health and memory (collective and individual) through an analysis of silences, meaning, practice, and representation after the end of the anti-colonial wars. The intersections between communal and individual processes of memory and remembrance allow us to explore the unsaid, the alluded to, and their different meanings within families and across generations. Drawing upon ethnographic research on the history of combat trauma in Portugal, I will interrogate how soldiers and their families articulate or silence memories of the anti-colonial wars. I will highlight the temporality of silence, secrecy, visibility, and openness and the interplay between imagined, and hoped for, futures and present realities. The narrative expression of war memories or its absence highlights concurrent, if contradictory and ambiguous, images – victim, warrior, hero (Sorensen 2015), villain, or perpetrator, that emerge with distinctive moral meanings and affective dimensions.