The archeology of an exiled: deconstructions and restorations of Portuguese mythology in Atlântico, by Manuel Alegre.

Abstract

This article seeks to analyze, from the topic of exile, the revisitations and reformulations of the Portuguese imperial mythical imaginary in some poems from the book Atlântico (1981), by Manuel Alegre. Constructing a parallel with the wars of conquest of the 15th and 16th centuries and with fundamental characters of Portuguese culture, Alegre finds in the past a way of apprehending both the individual experience and that of his nation in the last decades of the 20th century, in an attempt to elaborate the recent wounds of Portugal after April 25^th. In this scope, the notion of “empire as imagination of the center” proposed by Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, as well as the “border culture” that, according to Boaventura de Sousa Santos, defines the Portuguese identity will be especially relevant to understand how the reconfigurations of this imaginary occur in the poems and what are their effects on the construction of a new homeland identity that wants to be free of the imperialist ties reinforced by the recently ended dictatorship.