Literary Journalism in the Historical Intersection: the Case of the Book “Furriel não é Nome de Pai: Os filhos que os militares portugueses deixaram na Guerra Colonial”, by Catarina Gomes

Abstract

In 2014, the Portuguese journalist Catarina Gomes published the book Dad, Were You Afraid?, in which she describes how the issue of the Portuguese colonial war reached the generation of Portuguese children of former soldiers. Gomes’ trips to Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique resulted in several works of reportage about children born to Portuguese soldiers in Africa. She won the Gazeta Awards (multimedia), the AMI Award — Journalism Against Indifference and the King of Spain International Journalism Award. The author broke the silence and the taboo by reporting on the lives of children who were looking for their parents in a reportage work for the Público newspaper. In 2018, she published it in book format under the title Furriel is not a Father's Name: The Children that the Portuguese Military Left Behind in the Colonial War. A non-fiction book that brings together countless testimonies of men and women who were born from a relationship between a Portuguese soldier and an African woman, between 1961 and 1974, many of them abandoned by their father figure and rejected, in childhood, by the community. Through immersion, observation, and interviews, Catarina Gomes tells the stories of the “remains of tuga” or “children of the wind”, “incomplete” survivors, “half people”. The authorial voice and the desire to rescue the children of those who still mourn their paternal orphanhood from oblivion and ignorance give Catarina Gomes a place in Literary Journalism. The work highlights the need for policies of reparation, social support, inclusion, memory, gender equality, and access to information and justice to deal with the consequences of these historical situations.