Remembering empire/forgetting the colonies: accretions of memory and the limits of commemoration in a Lisbon neighborhood.

This essay presents a critical overview of memory sites found in the Belem neighborhood of Lisbon, which has long been a privileged space for the construction of monuments to the nation's five centuries of overseas expansion. In 1960, a replica of the 1940 Exposition of the Portuguese World's imposing Monument to the Discoveries was erected there and, more recently, a monument commemorating the soldiers who died fighting in the colonial wars of the 1960s and 1970s was added to this site. While the Monument to the Discoveries recalls the Estado Novo's imperial ethos, relying on an aesthetic that sought to suppress contestatory responses to the government's colonial policies, the latter monument invites more nuanced interpretations and points to contradictions and ambiguities that were previously hidden in the Salazarist rhetoric of national unity.

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The Belem neighborhood on the western edge of Portugal's capital is arguably one of the best-known public sites in the greater Lisbon area. Local, national and international visitors to this urban space regularly make use of Belem's gardens and walkways that extend along the mouth of the Tagus River and are framed by numerous national monuments. Dating from a variety of historical epochs, these monuments, almost without exception, commemorate Portugal's maritime grandeur and recall the nation's centuries-long history of imperial ambitions. Largely associated with the Portuguese voyages of discovery, many of which were launched from this site, Belem has evolved since the late nineteenth century as a privileged space designed to house or display material representations of Portugal's five centuries of overseas expansion. Filled with buildings and sculptures that "administer the presence of the past in the present," Belem is a place where "memory crystallizes and secretes itself." (1) As a prime example of a site of national memory (a lieu de memoire) in which, or onto which, successive generations have sought to inscribe symbolic reminders of collective experience, Belem presently constitutes an urban area where successive versions of official, state-sanctioned memories of Portugal's imperial project have been conflated with material remains. In the following overview of the monuments erected there and of commemorative acts that have been staged in this space, I approach the site as a palimpsest of official Portuguese collective memory. (2) After a brief description of the monuments that have accumulated in Belem and a summary of some of the most relevant activities leading to their conception, I reflect on the contradictory responses generated by one of the most recent additions to this site--a monument to the soldiers who lost their lives in Portugal's colonial wars of the 1960s and 1970s.

As a place where nationalism and commemoration have long been intertwined, Belem offers an excellent starting place for a discussion on the active role played by successive Portuguese governments in the shaping of collective memory in Portugal since the late nineteenth century. At first glance, the monuments found in this area exhibit a certain coherence of meaning, in the sense that they are clearly dedicated to commemorating the Portuguese discoveries or celebrating the empire. The stories that these monuments tell of Portugal's relationship to its past vary, nonetheless, in accordance with the period in which they were constructed. As is to be expected, the meaning ascribed to several of these monuments has also changed over time. Most recently, the addition of the Monumento aos Combatentes do Ultramar has added a new dimension to this site's distinction as a privileged space for recalling Portugal's overseas expansion. As we will see, the polemics surrounding Belem's most recent addition not only attest to the generalized lack of agreement regarding the most appropriate way to commemorate the events that led directly to the end of the imperial project. The disparate reactions that this monument has solicited also have a great deal to say about the memory debates that now characterize much of contemporary Portuguese public discourse. (3) They point, perhaps not unexpectedly, to the limits of commemoration in late-twentieth-century, post-imperial Portugal.

A PORTUGUESE SITE OF MEMORY

Two of Belem's most emblematic structures date from the early period of the expansion, a time when economic and cultural wealth poured into the capital from Africa, Asia and Brazil. By the early sixteenth century, when the area was already recognized for its importance as a launching ground for Portuguese voyages of discovery and conquest, King Manuel I lent his support to the construction of the Tower of Belem (1515-21) and the Jeronimos Monastery (1516-44). The original intent of both these structures was practical rather than commemorative, although popular legend has long had it that the king ordered the construction of the monastery as a sign of thanks to God for Vasco da Gama's having successfully negotiated the Cape of Good Hope, thereby discovering the sea route to India. (4) As the ornate decorations of the monastery incorporated visual references to the figures associated with the Discoveries, and both structures also included images of the tools of navigation and the exotic plants and animals that the Portuguese encountered in the new lands they explored, their particular late-Gothic aesthetic was retroactively designated the Manueline style in the mid-nineteenth century. At that time, this architectural design was singled out as constituting a genuinely national style that gave expression to a unique "spirit" or "genius" associated with the Age of Portuguese Expansions. (5)

It is no coincidence that renewed emphasis on the historic feats of grandeur associated with the Discoveries occurred in the nineteenth century, during a period in the history of western Europe marked by the "invention of tradition." As Eric Hobsbawm has shown, the need to build consensus among the emerging middle class regarding the national project led elites in both the public and private sectors to invest a good deal of time and energy in developing new symbolic practices designed to assure the populace of their legitimacy. (6) Promoted as rooted in tradition, these practices were closely tied to the rise of nationalism; they were also indicative of a newly ambivalent and problematized understanding of memory and its relation to community. (7) Alluding to the disappearance of memory's traditional milieux, to the vanishing of highly localized practices of remembering that rarely required conscious preservation or institutionalized archival record keeping, Pierre Nora notes that today "we speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left." (8) The loss of memory's milieux was acutely experienced in the nineteenth century when, as John Gillis explains, "changes occurring at the economic as well as the political level created such a sense of distance between now and then that people found it impossible to remember what life had been like only a few decades earlier. The past went blank and had to be filled in...." (9) Subsequently, professional historians and other specialists were charged with identifying the events, figures and practices that would inscribe a sense of collective belonging.