On the Apparent Absence of Colonialism in Miguel Gomes�s Film �About� the Waning Days of Portuguese Colonialism: A Brief Note on Tabu

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Readers of Jane Austen have for many years remarked upon the blinding absence of the Napoleonic Wars from her work.  She wrote her novels during or just after the period of the Napoleonic Wars (which start in 1803 and end at Waterloo in 1815).  These conflicts (and the French revolution from which they sprang) absolutely convulsed the world.  The old map of Europe was torn to shreds; suddenly we had Confederations of the Rhine and Grand Duchies of Warsaw.  The French army waged war from Portugal to Russia.  Sweden declared war on Britain(and Sweden never declares war on anybody).  These were events of such importance that one imagines they must have absolutely consumed the Europeans of Austen�s time.

But if you read Austen�s novels, you�d be forgiven for thinking that a proto-World War was not in fact being waged just across the English Channel.  The dashing young men of Austen�s Regency seem more intent on wooing and maintaining their estates than on bombarding Copenhagen or getting blown to pieces in Spain.  The Napoleonic Wars become conspicuous by their very absence from Austen�s work.

Austen, seen hear studiously ignoring the Napoleonic Wars.

A similar effect is at play in Portuguese director Miguel Gomes�s much-lauded 2012 film, Tabu.  The film is divided into two halves: (A) a largely �realistic� depiction of an old woman coming to the end of her life in modern-Lisbon and (B) a largely silent reminiscence about that woman�s youth in Mozambique (at the time called Portuguese East Africa) in the fifties and sixties (think Guy Maddin meets Claire Denis).  Now, I�m not a Marxist; I don�t call for raging didacticism in my works of art.  I think art should be judged first and foremost on aesthetic merit and I think that history can be used to furnish material for works of art.  That said, it is still somewhat troubling that Gomes has made a film set during the end of Portuguese colonialism that somehow manages to leave out� colonialism.  Tabu�s Mozambican scenes swirl around an adulterous young wife and her handsome lover.  We see the day-to-day life of rich Portuguese farmers, waited on by their African servants, we see their decadent parties and their nostalgia for Europe, and we follow the adulterous couple on their trysts.

 

What we don�t see is the brutality and viciousness of the Portuguese colonial regime in Mozambique, nor do we see the oppressiveness of Portugal�s fascistic Salazar regime and its secret police, the PIDE, both in the metropole and abroad.  We don�t see how colonial racism warps the minds and souls of all involved, black and white and all shades in between (as we would, for instance, in Mozambican writer Luis Bernardo Honwana�s visceral and devastating novella, We Killed Mangy Dog, published in 1964 shortly after the events depicted in Gomes�s film).  No, we don�t see any of these things; almost all we see are oblivious white people trysting.  Now, that�s not to say that the colonial element is lacking entirely; all of these actions are carried out under the gaze of the subject Africans, and they seem even more trivial and decadent when contrasted with the suffering of Mozambique�s black population.  Or so I should assume, anyway.  Because we never actually see this suffering.  We don�t see the brutality that would lead to the Mozambican uprising against Portuguese rule at the same time that similar independence movements were beginning in Angola and Guinea-Bissau.  Portugal was the last European power to give up its African colonies, and the fight that the colonial regime waged for them throughout the sixties and into the early seventies was exceptionally horrific.  How does one make a film about Portuguese Mozambique without discussing the horror of what the Portuguese were doing in Mozambique?

 Again, I don�t think Gomes was under any obligation to make a catalogue of colonial horrors.  There is nothing inherently wrong with making a film about the life of the Portuguese colonists, and even one that focuses on something other than colonialism (after all, these were human beings, there was far more to their lives than just the one key political issue that we look at from a historical perspective).  But without this important historical element, Gomes�s story seems lacking; there is a void at its heart.  History would not have harmed the love story at the center of Tabu; rather, it would have enriched it.