Quatro Paredes Tombadas

The road comes from the center of the village: from the café, the post office, the other café further down, the church and the cemetery. It comes from the right, from below, and begins to trace an inverted esse between the ladder of green fields, houses, corrals and greenhouses that make up the rest of the landscape of this house. The first bend to the right is also a small bridge over a stream, with a small metal protection. This high balcony, with dark green wrought iron railings in parallel lines with subtle motifs, invites contemplation. At night, the street lighting reveals the road as a blue-gray path lit by equidistant circles of light. In the background, the outlines of hills and dots of light that mark distant villages appear to be reflections of the starry sky. On a clear day, to the right, toward the center of the village, but higher and farther away, an almost mirage, Aveiro.

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In my family's recent history, this landscape is the impossible vanishing point, where everything comes from and where everything converges, like in those haunting Escher paintings. It's the landscape of my ancestors: the landscape of my paternal grandparents' old house in the village of Rocas do Vouga, now inherited by my parents, the rural house built by my grandparents in the mid-sixties of the last century and transformed into my parents' holiday home by the renovation in the nineties. My grandparents, who lived in Rocas do Vouga all their lives, are now buried in the village cemetery, in front of the church, with a view of the mountains. I, on the other hand, am a perpetual stranger to the land where I lived for the first year of my life, and where I've returned for regular and fleeting visits ever since.

 

In those 365 days between November 1977 and November 1978, my parents must have spent enough hours sitting on that balcony for the landscape to take root in my subconscious. I imagine them absent-mindedly following the movement of cars and people, listening to the sounds of the neighboring fields and the animals my grandparents kept around the house (cows, chickens, pigs). I also imagine them thinking about their lives: what they had left behind in Mozambique and the great unknown that was their future. Between July 14, 1977 and November 26, 1978, they lived months in limbo in that house, and a large part of who I am is the product of the journey that took them from Lourenço Marques-Maputo to Rocas do Vouga and those 17 months: the end of a difficult pregnancy, the complicated coexistence of grandparents, parents and grandchild in the house in Rocas in the months after my birth, and the slow process of healing the wounds caused by leaving colonial Mozambique and arriving in this small village.

 

Then we lived a very different life in the suburbs of Lisbon with my maternal grandparents, who returned from Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, a few months after moving to Forte da Casa. Over time, the stories of Mozambique and Rhodesia took on mythic proportions. Today, I think of these stories and the very particular colonial Africa of my parents and grandparents as a painting by Rousseau, innocent and full of bright colors, but not particularly faithful to reality. For as long as I can remember, I've wanted to understand what kind of legacy I received from living all those years in southern Africa under colonial regimes. What do they take with them and what do they bring back later from their colonial experiences? And in what ways does it manifest itself beyond the colorful and innocent stories I've heard countless times over the years?

 

Rocas do Vouga is where everything begins and ends. This is where my father left when he was seventeen, in 1965, and where he returned twelve years later, newly married and about to become a father. My mother was born in Mozambique, but her parents left from similar places to Rocas do Vouga. And after her first years in the Mozambican capital, her childhood and adolescence in the Rhodesian capital, and the beginning of her adult life again in Lourenço Marques, five months pregnant and married for three years, it is this village that welcomes her after 26 years of living in a white, colonial Africa, but also a deeply urban one. And it is in this landscape that time stands still for a long moment.

 

In Rocas do Vouga, I immerse myself in this moment like a detective in search of this complex colonial legacy. My parents' memories of those months in limbo appear side by side with images of everyday life in this village today. The mystery is this illusory colonial heritage that I, like so many other Portuguese, have received. Rocas do Vouga searches for this heritage by returning to the place where it all begins and ends, by listening to the stories of my parents' troubled colonial return, but also to other, contrasting stories of the inhabitants of this village, by inscribing these same stories in this landscape, by still searching for the ancestral habits that my father and grandparents took with them to Africa, and by trying to understand the impact of the colonial experience on these former settlers and on the daily life of this village in 2023.

 

 

João Paulo Oliveira