NARRATIVE AND MEMORY IN A NOITE DAS MULHERES CANTORAS, BY LÍDIA JORGE
narrativa; memory; identity; return.
This paper aims to study the novel “A noite das mulheres cantoras”, by the Portuguese writer Lídia Jorge. In the narrative that narrates the creation and end of the band ApósCalipso in the late 1980s, we observe that when telling about her life and the other four members of this musical project, the narrator Solange de Matos dialogues with the recent history of Portugal, especially with the question of the return of settlers who live in Africa and return to the country between 1974 and 1979 with the independence of the former colonies. In the narrative we are guided by Solange who, after more than twenty years, feels the need to report the events of her youth, to disenchant the version of the past presented by Gisela Batista, the maestrina, on a television program. The reader thus has access, to the interpretation about the past, to a narrative organized to unmask Gisela and to atone for her involvement in Madalena's death. With Solange's account, we have access to an intimate perspective of the return, which contemplates a “reality” that the narrative created by the State ignores. Thus, with the help of theorists such as Benjamin (1987; 2018) and Gabnebin (2018) to analyze this narrator who reports small events, who narrates moved by the desire to not let anything get lost, and who intends to testifying about a time, a people. In order to study the construction of this narrative about the memory of a period, we used theorists such as Pollak (1989;1992) and Halbwachs (2203) and their teachings on individual and collective memory, as well as how these influence the construction of identity narratives.