Project

The experience of Portugal in the colonial war (1961-74) left its aesthetical mark in narrative, leading to more than one hundred of novels on the topic, and in poetry, where there was an extensive and not delimited production, which this project helped to organize. There was a lack of attention, systematization and analysis of these poems of authors that were and were not involved in the war conflict, and written both during and after the conflict, as both direct memory and a post-traumatic elaboration.

This project aimed to bring together the first exhaustive collection of every sort of poetic material, not just as war poetry in the western, and particularly Portuguese panorama, but also as a valuable subjective testimony to one of the most significant episodes in Portuguese twentieth-century history, an event that changed the very identity of Portugal. The project proposed to assemble a database of a large archive of the colonial war poetic memory and combined it with the organization of the Antologia da Memória Poética da Guerra Colonial, launched in 2011. This project was open to collaboration.