Figurations of Racism in Lídia Jorge's A Costa dos Murmúrios

VI Congresso Nacional Associação Portuguesa de Literatura Comparada / 

X Colóquio de Outono Comemorativo das Vanguardas – Universidade do Minho 2009/2010 

Figurations of Racism in Lídia Jorge’s A Costa dos Murmúrios 

Adriana Alves de Paula Martins 

Universidade Católica Portuguesa/Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Cultura 

Literary texts have played a major role in the discussion of Portuguese identity 

after the April 1974 Revolution. More than celebrating the arrival of political freedom, 

after almost fifty years of dictatorship, many writers, such as José Saramago, António 

Lobo Antunes, Lídia Jorge, Teolinda Gersão, Almeida Faria and João de Melo, did not 

hesitate to revisit the national history to question the official representations of major 

historical events and to redimension them in symbolic terms. In this process, they 

addressed controversial and taboo issues that were neither openly discussed nor even 

silenced by official memory. This is what happens with Lídia Jorge’s A Costa dos 

Murmúrios (1988) that depicts, from a female perspective, the life of Portuguese army 

officers and their families in Mozambique at the end of the colonial war. My interest in 

the novel results from, among other aspects, Jorge’s intrepid discussion of the official 

rhetoric and the silence that misrepresented and/or omitted the reality of the conflict and 

the true nature of the Portuguese colonial enterprise on the basis of racial matters. My 

aim in this paper is, therefore, to examine how Lídia Jorge addresses the issue of racism 

in order to discuss how the literary text promotes the deconstruction of the colonial 

ideology inspired by Gilberto Freyre’s Luso-tropicalist ideas from the 1950s until the 

end of the colonial war in Mozambique. 

The issue of race requires careful handling, mainly when it is examined within 

the framework of the colonial war. Racism was definitely one of the major tenets of 

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empire. 1 Even if here I do not have the time and space to address how the matter was 

dealt with in the diverse imperial cycles, Portuguese colonization in Africa in the 20 th 

century went trough major phases. 2 

The first phase lasts from the end of the 19 th century, after the Berlin Conference 

and the British Ultimatum, when Portugal was forced to adopt a different policy 

towards Africa, until the first years after the Second World War. In other words, the 

insistence on the “empire of profit” policy 3 could question Portugal’s control of the 

colonies, which partially explains why Portuguese people living in the metropolis were 

stimulated to move to African colonies. In fact, it is during the “New State” period that 

thousands of Portuguese try a new life with their families in Africa, despite the difficult 

conditions that did not allow them to become as rich as they had always dreamt. 

The second phase lasts from the beginning of the 1950s until the end of the 

colonial war. The major change results from international political pressure on Salazar’s 

government so that a process of decolonization could be started, as it had already 

happened with many European empires. Salazar’s political move rested on a change of 

the colonies’ status. They stopped being considered “colonies”, and started to be called 

1 On this issue, see, among others, Alexandre (1999). 

2 By resting on Alexandre’s division (1999: 133), I refer to two phases bearing in mind the evolution of 

ideological theories based on racist premises within the framework of the Portuguese empire in the 20th 

century. It is worth pointing out that in his study Alexandre also covers the period that lasts from 1825 to 

1875. 

3 I am borrowing the expression “empire of profit” from Andrew Thompson, who proposed three 

conceptions to analyze the British empire: “an ‘empire of privilege’ (espoused by the aristocracy and 

landed gentry); an ‘empire of merit’ (espoused by the professional middle classes); and ‘an empire of 

profit’ (espoused by entrepreneurs)” (Thompson, 2005: 11). In Thompson’s point of view, the third 

category would be the least concerned with the ideals of the civilizing mission. I firmly believe that, as 

far as Portuguese colonialism is concerned, the first two categories are irrelevant since profit was (the 

main) concern of Portugal. 

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“provinces”. The “provinces” were, thus, considered part of the Portuguese overseas 

territory, but the nominal change, in fact, even after the reforms introduced by Adriano 

Moreira in 1961, did not result in an effective change in the status of colonized people 

who, since the 1930 Colonial Act, were divided into two major groups: the indigenous 

people (who did not enjoy any kind of civic rights and were submitted, among other 

aspects, to a regime of compulsory work), and the “assimilated”, who, in principle, were 

candidates to Portuguese citizenship, could attend schools attended by colonizers’ 

children and were entitled to have a job in the civil service if they satisfied some 

requirements, (for example, if they were able to prove they had assimilated European 

manners and mastered the Portuguese language Alexandre, 1999). 

The nominal and political change of status from colonies to provinces forced the 

regime to address racial issues in a different way. To the international community, it 

was necessary to project the idea that Portuguese people were not oppressors, but, on 

the contrary, that they were “tailored” to intercultural interactions and exchange, 

premise that was supposedly supported by the heritage left by the great deeds of 

Portuguese navigators in the XVI th century. This strategy move the regime to accept the 

once contested view of the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987) who 

believed that miscegenation was an asset for former colonized nations and that 

Portuguese colonizers considerably differed from other European colonizers who 

preferred not to have social ties with indigenous people since they were afraid of going 

native. 

Freyre’s theoretical arguments gave Salazar’s regime the pretext to consider the 

Portuguese presence in Africa harmless, and paved the way to a Portuguese “otherness” 

that has been interpreted from various perspectives and that has been evoked, even if in 

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Portuguese Africa. 



a diverse context, according to Ferreira (2007), to justify the specificity of Portuguese 

postcoloniality within the framework of hegemonic globalization. 4 Freyre’s ideas 

served the regime as a way of subtly (and, at least, officially) mitigating and erasing 

racism, making people believe that the Portuguese “provinces” were nothing more than 

an extension of the Portuguese territory. By depicting the context of the end of the 

colonial war in Mozambique, Lídia Jorge’s novel problematizes the public 

representation of the period not only confronting the official and unofficial versions of 

war developments, but also unveiling the masks of the imagined absence of racism in 

The division of the novel into two parts contributes to this confrontation, since 

the first part entitled “Os Gafanhotos” (“The Locusts”), has been interpreted by many 

literary critics as corresponding to the official version of national memory. This part of 

the narrative is framed by an epigraph written by Álvaro Sabino, whose name will be 

associated to an African journalist, who, as will be discussed later on, is an essential 

character to discussed racism. The interest of this part of the narrative rests on the 

depiction of a wedding ceremony in Mozambique, which introduces 

some of the major 

characters of the novel and the nature of their relationships. 

4 Despite acknowledging the specificity of Portuguese colonialism, Ferreira questions Freyre’s 

ideas as another version of Luso-tropicalism when she analyzes Santos’s discussion of postcolonialism in 

the time-space of official Portuguese language (2002: 16). According to her, in order to explain the 

“calibanization” of the Portuguese colonizer, Santos confers on the latter what Ferreira calls an 

“empowering condition of alterity” (Ferreira, 2007: 29) that ends by raising the problematic issue of the 

absence of racism: 

“Admittedly utopian, Santos’s thought is found upon a densely substantial yet poetic 

appropriation of the historical denigration of Portugal as an imperial country by those commanding the 

process of modern, late imperialism from beginning to end. (...) To have been a subaltern colonizer, 

simultaneously Prospero and Caliban, of peoples who were consequently less fixed even if more intensely 

ascribed a colonized status proposes a theoretically empowering condition of alterity. It would seem 

enviable for postcolonial ends, if the exceptionality of Portuguese colonialism thereby implied did not 

convoke the phantasm of that better known version, namely, the absence of racism”. (Ferreira, 2007: 29- 

30) 

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The bride arrived from the metropolis the day before the wedding ceremony to 

marry an army officer who is fighting in the colonial war. The ceremony takes place in 

the Stella Maris Hotel, a formerly prestigious hotel, which, due to the war, was 

occupied by the families of combatants. As Margarida Ribeiro (2004) pointed out, the 

space of the hotel reproduce the life styles of the metropolis, which highlight the 

patriarchal model that ruled life in Portugal. The described atmosphere is quite artificial, 

for everyone’s behaviour seems to be a performance, as if everyone were playing an 

appointed role. 

In the novel, the issue of racism is approached through the description of black 

people working in the hotel, who clearly occupy subaltern positions: a black servant, 

described as “extraordinarily black”, but wearing an immaculate white uniform, and 

who carries a sword that will be used to slice the cake, an orchestra player who stands 

out due to his swollen cheeks among the other white players. Black people’s inferior 

position is also evident outside the hotel and it is worth drawing attention to the episode 

when the couple leaves the Stella Maris during the weeding party and goes to the sea 

shore. After observing some birds and becoming dirty, the groom derogatively 

addresses a black young man who worked in a bar and calls him “black”. The young 

man does not seem upset at all and behaves in an exaggerated submissive way as if he 

were a kind of slave, expected to do whatever it was necessary to please his master. 

The characterization of black people assumes even more importance when the 

hotel’s atmosphere is disturbed by screams and by the rhythmic noise of black people 

running in the streets, similar to the noise produced by herds of animals. In order to 

discover what was happening, the hotel’s inhabitants gather, at dawn, on the terrace 

where the wedding party took place and start to see several drowned people. Their 

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bodies are being collected in big dumpers usually used to transport dirt as if their bodies 

were carcasses of dead animals. No one is concerned about the loss of lives, but instead 

with the spectacle for which there was not any explanation yet. The spectacular 

character of the collection of corpses is reinforced by the collective question posed by 

the inhabitants of the Stella Maris: why were they collected so fast? This question, in its 

turn, opens the way for the discussion of the representation of the event by the local 

media. It is suggested that, since there was no press record, it did not exist. It is at this 

moment that the local newspaper – the Hinterland – is first referred to in the narrative, 

and it is characterised in a rather cynical and mysterious way, as if that particular 

periodical did not count. 

It is Jaime Forza Leal, the groom’s superior, who has a big scar in his chest and 

who epitomizes the anachronistic figure of a past war hero, who first advances with an 

explanation for the phenomenon. He argues that black people found recipients of 

alcohol in the harbour and believed they were white wine, having, thus, drunk the 

liquid. The “blacks” are, therefore, portrayed, as stupid people and no solidarity is 

manifested. The blacks’ stupidity is reinforced by the discussion of the colonial 

situation. Blacks are portrayed as reproducing indiscriminately, what should be 

prevented from happening through methods that were presented as either radical 

(“compulsive sterilization”) or subtle (“persuasive sterilization” that consisted in 

exchanging a radio for a “voluntary” castration; Jorge, 1988: 25). The “subtlety” of the 

aforementioned methods stresses the white people’s evident belief in the blacks’ inferior 

condition. What is curious is the fact that the blacks’ subaltern position ends by being 

associated with the metropolis’s peripheral position towards Europe. Consider the 

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critical opinion of the wounded parachutist who had already defended that the bodies 

should not have been removed so fast: 

“África Austral? Que África Austral? Moçambique está para a África 

Austral como a Península Ibérica está para a Europa – estão ambas como a 

bainha está para as calças”. 

“E a culpa? E a culpa?” – (...). 

“Deles, da qualidade dos blacks que nos calharam em sorte! – (...). “Se 

tivéssemos tido uns blacks fortes, tesos, aguerridos, nós, os colonizadores, 

teríamos saído da nossa fraqueza. Eles é que são os culpados, e se lhes 

parecemos fortes é porque eles mesmos são extremamente fracos. Só temos de 

os recriminar...” (Jorge, 1988: 28) 

The excerpt suggests that the type of colonization implemented by the 

Portuguese resulted from the poor “quality” of colonized people, who were considered 

very weak. What the parachutist subtly suggests is that the “white man’s burden” in the 

case of the Portuguese colonial enterprise is intensified by the natives’ nature. It is not 

due to Portuguese administrative inability that, colonies were under developed. On the 

one hand, this comment reveals how the Portuguese saw themselves as occupying 

Europe’s margins, being the “other” of rival European colonial enterprises and, on the 

other hand, how they tended to blame the colonised peoples for foreign negative 

representations. 5 

5 

On the semi-peripheral position of Portugal and its relation to Portuguese colonialism, see Santos (2001 

and 2002) and Ribeiro (2004). 

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General indifference towards this “accident” changes when there is a rumour 

that the body of a white man was found among the black. This rumour spreads as a 

wave of locusts spreads around, creating a sort of unreal atmosphere under which the 

unexpected death of the groom will take place. The latter is connected with the 

appearance of a journalist who worked for the aforementioned Hinterland, and who 

wanted access to the terrace of the Stella Maris in order to cover the white man’s death 

from above. But he is prevented from doing his work by Forza Leal, who is helped by 

the groom. The episode of the officer’s death closes the narrative of “The Locusts”. It is 

this last death which becomes more important than the deaths of several black and are 

one white man; the death of the groom represents the death of a white man, of a bold 

and fearless officer, who committed suicide. This death disturbs the whole 

representation of the wedding party, on its performative aspect, on the reasons pointed 

out to explain the massive death of black men and, on the colonial enterprise itself, 

hypothesis that will be considered even more plausible in the second part of the novel, 

which assumes a critical tone as far as “The Locusts” is concerned. 

The second part of the novel, as has already been widely discussed by literary 

critics subverts the representation of life in Mozambique when the attention is focused 

on an older Evita’s comments on the narrative of “The Locusts”. With the men’s 

departure to the north of the country to participate in a decisive mission against revolted 

people, the depiction of life in the backstage of the Stella Maris Hotel as well as in 

Helena de Tróia’s house reveals the artificial and manipulated nature of “The Locusts”. 

It is worth pointing out that the second part of the novel discusses how Evita learned 

about Africa and from Africa, mainly when she decides to act by trying to denounce the 

crime underlying the deaths of many blacks who had been poisoned, contrary to the 

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version displayed in “The Locusts”. This learning process is closely dependent on her 

relationship with Helena and with the journalist. 

Helena’s relevance to Evita’s loss of innocence rests on the revelation and 

subversion of a patriarchal model that oppressed women and placed them in the margins 

of a system that rested on physical and psychological violence, despite the apparent 

atmosphere of harmony among the couples of white officers represented in the first part 

of the novel. But it is Helena who shows Evita the classified photos of atrocious 

violence against the natives, perpetrated by the Portuguese army. It is also Helena who, 

by proposing Evita a homosexual relationship, somehow makes her approach the 

journalist, also in sexual terms. This, Evita becomes his lover. It is interesting to 

observe that, before getting sexually involved with the journalist, Evita had a casual 

relationship with a stranger she met at the Moulin Rouge, but this episode is not really 

relevant in the narrative. However, since the journalist was a mulatto, her involvement 

with him represents a major infraction not only to her marriage, but also to the whole 

colonial edifice. Álvaro Sabino in his “Coluna Involuntária” eventually denounces the 

violent exploitation of Africa by Europe, subverting the harmonious aura that informed 

“The Locusts”. The publication of the material in the Hinterland coincides with the 

return of the officers to the Stella Maris. The description of their reactions in the hotel, 

being as if they remained in the forest waiting for the enemy, deconstructs the official 

speech of the General, and confirms the violence towards the Africans exposed in the 

classified photos that are burnt by Forza Leal and the groom. What both men did not 

expect was that, despite what had been previously suggested, when the first bodies of 

black men appeared, that is, that an event did not exist if it had not been registered, 

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Sabino had, even by means of a figurative language, already inscribed the evils of 

colonialism in his column. 

The second part of A Costa dos Murmúrios does not differ from the first as far as 

the examples of flagrant racist acts are concerned. The “mainatos” continue being 

characterized as ignorant and incapable, being many times depicted as if they were 

puppets without a soul. The revolutionary aspect of the second part of the novel lies in 

Evita’s attempt to denounce what was hidden either by censorship or by a strict code of 

moral rules that prevented people from expressing everything that displeased the 

regime, including its racist premises. It is not gratuitous the fact that Eva Lopo, a young 

metropolitan woman does not do so by herself. By giving the mestizo’s journalist a 

chance to have his voice heard mainly through Eva Lopo’s comments on “The Locusts” 

and the recollections of his column in the Hinterland, by making him survive after the 

Russian roulette episode with the groom, Lídia Jorge stimulates the reader to question 

Portuguese people’s anti-racist self-image which still nowadays informs the specificity 

of the Portuguese coloniality and postcoloniality as a result of the influence of Freyre’s 

Luso-Tropicalist ideas and their manipulation with political and ideological aims. 

In fact, A Costa dos Murmúrios paves the way for the discussion on racism in a 

postcolonial Portugal. It is worth making a final reference to the film adaptation of 

Jorge’s novel, also entitled “A Costa dos Murmúrios”. It was directed by Margarida 

Cardoso, and appeared in 2004. In the film, Álvaro Sabino, contrary to what happens in 

the book, is a white man, which makes the spectator who read the novel reconsider the 

way the issue of racism is examined in symbolic terms. If in the novel Evita’s betrayal 

of her husband with a mulatto not only challenges the patriarchal principles of the 

Portuguese society, Sabino’s miscigenated condition stresses the woman’s “sin”, since 

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she was, on the one hand, blamed for adultery and, on the other, for relating to the 

colonial other. However, Cardoso’s option for the composition of a white Sabino seems 

to be even more daring since Sabino, despite being as white as a European, was first of 

all a colonized man who was treated as an inferior being. This aspect highlights how the 

apparent “calibanized” condition of the Portuguese Prospero was deceptive and false, 

since a white man who was born in Africa and who lived as an African (think of 

Sabino’s several partners and children and of his love for Africa) was considered as 

subaltern as if he were non-white. Moreover, it is worth stressing that Sabino’s survival 

after the episode of the Russian roulette, no matter the composition of the character and 

the colour of his skin, not only weakens the macho’s hurt feelings after the 

acknowledgment of his wife’s betrayal, and that, in principle, conferred on him the right 

to punish and even kill the lovers, but also represents a blow against the lie of the 

empire. It is necessary to take into account that Sabino, despite being subjected to 

censorship in his work, knew about the real motives of the mysterious deaths, was 

pretty aware of the unofficial side of war developments, and was able to survive a war 

hero, as it has already been suggested. 

Jorge refines her discussion of racism in O Vento Assobiando nas Gruas many 

years after the publication of A Costa dos Murmúrios. By focussing on the ambiguous 

relationships of Portuguese people and Cape Verdean immigrants in a postcolonial 

Portugal, Jorge brings the colonial racist ghosts back and deconstructs once more the 

belief stemming from Freyre’s Luso-tropicalist ideas that the Portuguese are not racist. 

But this is an issue to be discussed in another paper. 

Works Cited 

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Alexandre, Valentim (1999), “O Império e a Ideia de Raça (Séculos XIX e 

XX)”, in Jorge Vala (org.), Novos Racismos. Perspectivas Comparativas, pp. 133-144. 

Cardoso, Margarida (2004), “A Costa dos Murmúrios”, Lisboa, Atalanta Filmes. 

Ferreira, Ana Paula (2007). “Specificity without Exceptionalism: Towards a 

Critical Lusophone Postcoloniality”, in Paulo de Medeiros (ed.), Postcolonial Theory 

and Lusophone Literatures (Utrecht Portuguese Studies Series 1), pp. 21-40. 

Jorge, Lídia (1988). A Costa dos Murmúrios, Lisboa, Publicações Dom Quixote. 

-- (2002). O Vento Assobiando nas Gruas, Lisboa, Publicações Dom Quixote. 

Medeiros, Paulo de (ed.) (2007), Postcolonial Theory and Lusophone 

Literatures (Utrecht Portuguese Studies Series 1), Utrecht, Portuguese Studies Center. 

Ramalho, Maria Irene e Ribeiro, António de Sousa (eds.) (2001), Entre ser e 

Estar. Raízes, Percursos e Discursos da Identidade, Porto, Afrontamento. 

Ribeiro, Margarida Calafate (2004), Uma História de Regressos. Império, 

Guerra Colonial e Pós-Colonialismo, Porto, Afrontamento. 

Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (2001), “Entre Próspero e Caliban: Colonialismo, 

Pós-Colonialismo e Inter-Identidade”, in Maria Irene Ramalho e António de Sousa 

Ribeiro (eds.). Entre ser e Estar. Raízes, Percursos e Discursos da Identidade, pp. 23- 

85. 

-- (2002). “Between Prospero and Caliban: Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and 

Inter-identity”. Luso-Brazilian Review, vol. 39, nº 2 (Winter), pp. 9-43. 

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Thompson, Andrew (2005), The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of 

Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Harlow, Pearson/Longman. 

Vala, Jorge (org.) (1999), Valentim Alexandre et al., Novos Racismos. 

Perspectivas Comparativas. Oeiras, Celta Editora. 

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Figurations of Racism in Lídia Jorge's A Costa dos Murmúrios

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