Letters from the War 61-74

Drawing on testimonies from veterans of the Portuguese Colonial War (1961–74), thematic bibliography, and with the complicity of Homer’s Odyssey and ChatGPT.

A son, in the present day, 2023, writes a letter to his father in 1972. A dialogue fifty years overdue. A son searching for his father as a twenty-year-old. An odyssey about the Portuguese Colonial War.

Drawing on his father’s mobilisation to Guinea-Bissau between ’72 and ’74, as well as on Joana Pontes’s research into thirteen years of correspondence between soldiers mobilised for the Colonial War and the families they left behind in Portugal, together with a broad thematic bibliography, this investigation into the wartime correspondence of the period reveals what remained between the lines and escaped the censorship of the Portuguese fascist regime — the gaps, subjectivities and silences of a war that, even today, remains locked away inside each of us.