Bearing Witness to a Poisoned Inheritance: Isabela Figueiredo's Notebook of Colonial Memories

There are books that comfort, and then there are books that wound—ruthlessly, deliberately, necessarily. I believe Isabela Figueiredo's Notebook of Colonial Memories belongs firmly to the latter category. It is a slim volume, less than 200 pages long, but it carries the weight of an empire's moral reckoning. It is a work of such unflinching honesty, such controlled fury, that reading it feels less like turning pages and more like bearing witness to an exorcism. And I may not have enough words or structured thought to describe its impact properly

Cutting Through Portugal's Colonial Amnesia

Figueiredo is a retornada—one of hundreds of thousands who "returned" to Portugal after the 1974 Carnation Revolution toppled the Estado Novo and set Portugal's African colonies on the path to independence. But "return" is a curious word for those who had never seen the metropole, who knew only the colonial world of Lourenço Marques, now Maputo (more on this later). Born in 1963 in Mozambique, Figueiredo carries the particular burden of having been shaped by a system she would later come to recognise as monstrous. This memoir, first published in Portuguese in 2009 and later translated into other languages, represents her attempt to excavate that formation—to understand how a child absorbs the toxins of systemic racism and what it costs to expel them.

The book arrived at a crucial moment in Portugal's ongoing struggle with what might be called colonial amnesia. While other European powers have engaged, however imperfectly, with their imperial legacies, Portugal has often wrapped its colonial past in the seductive gauze of saudosismo—a nostalgic longing for the lost territories. Figueiredo's work slashes through that gauze with surgical precision.

A Notebook, Not a Narrative

The title itself signals the book's methodology. This is a notebook—fragmentary, urgent, somewhat unpolished, seemingly repetitive, and quite insistent. The structure mirrors the jagged nature of traumatic memory, offering us short, sharp vignettes rather than a chronological account. Chapters bear starkly numbered titles. Some last only a few paragraphs; others stretch to a few pages. This fragmentation is not a stylistic affectation but an aesthetic necessity. Trauma does not arrange itself neatly; it erupts in flashes, sensory details, and involuntary recollections.

What emerges from these fragments is not a traditional plot but something more primal: a daughter's attempt to understand, reject (in her own words, "betray") and profoundly love the father who embodied everything she would come to despise. Her father, an electrician for the colonial state, is presented without mitigation. He is not rendered as a complicated man caught in his historical moment; he is the historical moment made flesh. A virulent racist, a believer in the colonial project's essential righteousness, he becomes the book's moral black hole—the centre around which all the narrator's horror and rage orbit, and our own thoughts and feelings with it.

The Prose of Reckoning

Figueiredo writes with incisive sharpness that borders on cruelty. Her sentences are lean, stripped of sentimentality, yet somehow achieve a terrible, brutal beauty. The sensory details overwhelm: the oppressive Mozambican heat, the smells of the segregated city, the casual violence that punctuated daily life. She places us directly in the skin of the child she was, even as the adult narrator provides the merciless commentary that the child could not yet articulate.

This dual consciousness—the innocent child and the anguished adult—creates the book's central tension. We watch a young girl slowly awakening to the grotesque injustice of her world, while her adult self refuses any easy absolution. Figueiredo is pitiless in examining her own complicity, however involuntary. She was, after all, a white child in a system designed for her comfort and advantage. The book's moral power derives from this refusal to let herself off the hook.

The Father as Metaphor

If this were a complete fiction, I might criticise the father's characterisation as quite one-dimensional. But this is testimony, and the father functions on multiple levels. Yes, he is the man who raised her, but he is also colonial Portugal itself—the abusive parent whose toxic inheritance must be confronted and rejected. The father-daughter relationship becomes a powerful metaphor for the citizen's relationship with the nation-state, particularly when that state is built on exploitation and racial violence.

The mother remains more shadowy, a presence rather than a fully realised figure. One senses Figueiredo's uncertainty about how to reckon with maternal complicity—the woman who enabled the system through her silence and accommodation. This absence feels to me less like an oversight and more like an acknowledgement of the complexity the author isn't yet ready to explore fully.

The Burden of Witness

What makes this book so vital, and so difficult, is its absolute refusal of comfort. There is no redemption arc here, no moment of reconciliation or healing. Figueiredo offers us no easy exit from the moral labyrinth she constructs. The bleakness is unremitting, the rage sustained across every page. This is not a flaw but the very essence of the work. Some truths cannot be softened; some wounds should not be bandaged before they've been properly cleaned. It's an ongoing process that will last her whole life.

In my view, the book belongs to a tradition of writers who have used personal memory as a tool for broader social and historical excavation. One thinks of Annie Ernaux's clinical dissection of class in France, or J.M. Coetzee's stark portrayal of boyhood under apartheid. Like Marguerite Duras's The Lover, it concerns a European girl's coming of age in a colonial setting, but Figueiredo's work is far more politically direct, stripped of any romantic haze.

For Whom This Book Exists

This is essential reading for anyone grappling with the legacies of empire—not just Portuguese colonialism but the broader architecture of European racial dominance. It speaks to students of postcolonial literature, historians of the Portuguese-speaking world, and anyone interested in how personal memory intersects with collective guilt. It is for readers who can tolerate discomfort, who understand that some of the most important books are also the most harrowing.

It is decidedly not for those seeking joyful nostalgia or easy answers.

Reading Figueiredo: A Mirror for Colonial Inheritance

Reading Isabela Figueiredo's powerful memoir through the lens of my own colonial childhood, I found myself drawn to her excavation of Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique. Her book invites us to look beyond broad generalisations into the nuanced textures of colonial experience, revealing how history shapes human lives in profoundly personal ways.

As someone compelled to understand these formations, I find myself reflecting on how Mozambique and Angola—two neighbouring territories under Portuguese rule—developed distinct yet similarly oppressive systems of racial control.

Both Mozambique and Angola operated under Portugal's official ideology of lusotropicalismo—a romanticised notion that the Portuguese were uniquely suited for "racial harmony" in the tropics. Yet beneath this veneer lay rigid racial hierarchies. Portuguese colonial law created categories: civilizados (civilised) and indígenas (indigenous), with the former enjoying legal rights while the latter were subject to forced labour and had virtually no legal protections.

The assimilado system required Africans to abandon their cultures, languages, and communities to gain minimal legal recognition—a psychological violence that complemented the physical brutality of forced labour. These weren't abstract policies but lived experiences shaping generations of families who navigated impossible choices about assimilation, identity, and survival.

Angola's longer, more complex history of Portuguese presence—dating back centuries—created a more established mixed-race (mestiço) population, particularly in urban centres like Luanda. These communities occupied an ambiguous middle space in the racial hierarchy—not fully Portuguese, but distinct from the indigenous African majority.

Angola's oil wealth and mineral riches attracted heavier white settlement, creating by 1975 a more entrenched settler society with sharper racial boundaries and more overt spatial segregation. The musseques—those sprawling urban slums where the African majority was confined—stood in stark geographic and symbolic opposition to white neighbourhoods with their superior infrastructure, healthcare, and schools. The social structure was arguably more rigidly stratified, with a larger and more influential mestiço and assimilated elite serving as intermediaries, creating a complex racial hierarchy that some argue reinforced white supremacy rather than challenging it, akin to South African Apartheid.

Yet others—including my parents and myself—defend a different possibility: that given genuine independence from the motherland, Angola might have evolved into a modern, open, participatory, democratic society where whites and blacks lived together harmoniously, sharing governing responsibilities, ambitions, and their love for a magical, captivating, passionate land. I believe... or rather, I wish to believe the will was there. Not because we, as Portuguese, were predestined to promote this balance, but because we would all become Angolans. Yes, that may be naive of me, but I will die on this hill—without ever really finding out.

This stubborn insistence on believing in a possibility that history never allowed to unfold, this refusal to let the actual violent outcome be the only story that could have been told—there's something both tragic and defiant about this. It captures the particular grief of someone who inherited a counterfactual, who must live with the ghost of what might have been had history turned differently, had independence come without war, had the will toward multiracial democracy been given time to prove itself or fail on its own terms rather than being consumed by Cold War proxy conflicts. Such is my controversial self, I suppose.

Mozambique: Labour Reserves and Permeable Boundaries

Mozambique's settler population was smaller and more dispersed than Angola's, concentrated primarily in Maputo (then Lourenço Marques) and a handful of coastal towns. The colony functioned primarily as an agricultural province and labour reserve—a place from which bodies were extracted to work the mines of South Africa and Rhodesia.

This weaker settler presence meant that while segregation was certainly enforced through urban planning and educational apartheid, daily interactions between whites and blacks were more frequent out of sheer economic necessity. The boundaries, though rigid, were more permeable at the quotidian level. Where Angola's segregation felt more urban, spatial, and economically entrenched, Mozambique's was shaped as much by the urban-rural divide as by race alone.

Liberation and the Scars of Hierarchy

By the 1960s and early 1970s, as liberation movements gained strength, Portugal's attempts at reform appeared too little, too late. The struggles of FRELIMO in Mozambique and the MPLA, FNLA, and UNITA in Angola emerged from these specific contexts of oppression, each movement shaped by its territory's particular colonial experience.

When independence came in 1975, both nations inherited not just borders and institutions, but the deep scars of racial hierarchy—wounds that would continue to influence their post-colonial trajectories in different ways.

The Psychological Architecture of Colonial Childhood

Both colonies were laboratories for racial hierarchy, operating under forced labour regimes and legal systems designed to exclude the African majority from political agency. Both left their children—white and Black alike—contaminated by proximity to a system designed to dehumanise.

What Figueiredo captures so powerfully is not just the mechanics of segregation but its psychological architecture, the way it seeps into a child's consciousness and shapes the very categories through which they understand the world.

A Necessary Violence

If I am honest, Notebook of Colonial Memories almost drained me. It is meant to. The unrelenting intensity, the sustained note of rage and disgust—these are not bugs but features. Figueiredo has written a book that refuses to make itself palatable, that insists on the reader's discomfort as a form of ethical engagement. We are meant to feel implicated, to recognise that the systems she describes did not vanish with independence but echo forward into our present.

What lingers long after the final page is the bravery of the testimony itself. In a culture that has too often preferred the comfortable lie of colonial benevolence, Figueiredo offers the uncomfortable truth. Her truth. She has excavated her own formation and found it riddled with rot, and she has had the moral clarity and literary skill to map that rot for others to see.

This is probably not a book you will enjoy. But it is a book you may need—a fierce, fragmented reckoning that refuses to let us look away.

And then there are readers like me, who know exactly what to expect at this bend in the road and step forward calmly, resignedly, facing the upcoming accident head-on. I suppose what follows is my post-traumatic testimony in greater detail.

The Burden of Inherited Displacement

The term retornado has always sat uneasily with me—a linguistic fiction suggesting a return to something never truly mine. How can you return to a place you've never known? Born in Angola in 1972, I was swept from that land in 1975 at barely three years old, caught in the chaos following independence and the descent into civil war. Portugal was not home; it was exile masquerading as homecoming.

I was not a returnee but a war refugee, torn from the only home I had known—however briefly—and deposited in a country that regarded me with suspicion. Neither fully African nor fully European, I became a living remainder of an empire's collapse, frequently and cruelly ostracised, pointed out as the "privileged son" of "black exploiters" and "racists" who had come "to steal jobs from the locals." The injustice of this prejudice struck me deeply, leaving wounds that never fully healed.

What emerged from my experience was a portrait of someone caught in a particular kind of liminal space: too young to remember the colonial world firsthand, yet too marked by it to claim innocence. This in-betweenness, this living at the borders of multiple histories and identities, becomes its own form of truth-telling. It reveals how colonial systems create not just clear oppressors and victims, but complicated, contaminated positions where complicity and victimhood become impossible to fully disentangle. Allow me to digress a bit on the subject...

The Different Burdens of Memory and Forgetting

Reading Figueiredo's analysis of her father's racism, I found myself searching through my own fragmented memories for similar traces, but discovered only absence—the blank space where memory should reside. At three years old, I was too young to consciously absorb the ideological poison she describes, too young to retain clear images of the segregated world in which I lived.

This temporal mercy carries its own moral complications. Whilst Figueiredo must actively dismantle the architecture of complicity built into her psyche, meticulously deconstructing each inherited prejudice, I face a different challenge—that of inheriting the legacy of a system in which I have no personal recollection of participating.

To be torn from Angola at such a tender age was to lose not merely a homeland, but the very consciousness of having had one. Forever, that is. What remains is a kind of phantom geography—a non-place that exists only in stories told by others, in faded sepia-toned photographs, in the particular cadence of my parents' voices when they speak of what was lost, in their complicated nostalgia—a nostalgia I can neither fully share nor completely reject.

What strikes me most in this reflection of mine is how it portrays a different kind of colonial inheritance—an inheritance measured not by what one remembers, but by what was lost to the ravages of time and the violence of displacement.

Figueiredo's book forced me to confront uncomfortable questions: might my inability to remember be a form of privilege, a convenient erasure allowing me to claim innocence? Or is it merely a different configuration of the colonial wound—an expropriation not only of place, but of the very memories that might have enabled me to understand my own formation?

Isabela Figueiredo's fierce testimony suggests that forgetting—even involuntary forgetting—cannot absolve us from the work of reflection. We carry these histories whether we remember them or not, encoded in the assumptions we make, in the discomforts we feel, in the silences we maintain. The author's directness in confronting her memories becomes a harsh mirror for those of us whose own recollections offer less clarity, a reminder that the work of decolonising consciousness isn't optional simply because we were too young to remember. In reading this Notebook of Colonial Memories, I relearnt that there is a peculiar pedagogy in discomfort. Figueiredo reminded me of this unwittingly—she showed me that confronting uncomfortable memories is a form of courage, but that confronting the absence of these memories demands a different courage, perhaps an even more demanding one. If fighting a visible enemy is difficult, perhaps more difficult still is fighting shadows, fighting what might have been, fighting experiences that never consolidated into memory.

This reflection became, for me, an exercise in radical honesty. I refused to accept the simplified comfort of innocence through age, but I also refused to fabricate a performative guilt that doesn't truly belong to me. Instead, I chose to inhabit that uncomfortable space between not-knowing and the duty-to-know, between the absence of memory and the undeniable presence of consequences, knowing that I still owe those who suffered under the weight of that empire—however decadent it was—the labour of excavating that mental structure, however painful it might be. I also need to speak openly—and to write—about this, because the weight of inherited silence has its own gravity: we begin to carry a very heavy burden of inexplicable, unjustified, and unbearable guilt.

The comparison with Figueiredo's experience clarifies something crucial about how colonial trauma manifests differently depending on people, ages, and circumstances. Figueiredo feels she must actively dismantle what she can see and feel—the remembered architecture of complicity, the specific moments of racist conditioning. But what of those who carry the burden without the memories or the feeling of guilt?

That burden is no lighter, merely different. Without the clarity of specific memories to question, what remains is only the more arduous work of excavating what shaped us through absence, through silence, through the stories others chose to tell or conceal, and through so many accusatory injustices.

Fundamentally, this reading becomes a meditation on a specific type of accountability: that of questioning an inheritance we didn't choose, of confronting histories we cannot personally verify, of continuing to suspect our own innocence even when that innocence has so many convenient alibis. It isn't responsibility for acts I didn't commit, but the responsibility not to allow my history to become yet another layer of facilitated forgetting. It's refusing the seduction of collective amnesia, keeping interrogation alive even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts.

Ultimately, this book did not encourage me to remember better or forget less, but rather to inhabit with dignity the impossible space between the two. To understand that true courage lies not in resolving contradictions, but in sustaining them without seeking easy relief.

There is a particular loneliness in this kind of reflection — that of carrying the burden of questions that have no simple answers, of living on a border that few recognise as legitimate territory. Neither coloniser nor colonised, neither innocent nor unequivocally guilty. Just human, terribly human, trying to make sense of a heritage that was imposed on me before I even had consciousness. It is a slow, painful and patient task — that of digging through the deafening noise of pseudo-memories, in the intervals between what we heard, what we dreamed, what we intuited and what we sensed, in the vagueness forever lost somewhere in the air bridge between a fading, mythical, almost unreal origin and an uncertain, unattainable, almost impossible destination.

There are days when I feel the weight of this heritage like a stone in my chest. There are days when anger consumes me — anger at those who built that system, anger at those who waged bloody wars because of it, anger at those who tore me away from it, anger at those who judged me for having coexisted with it. And there are days when I just feel a deep, oceanic sadness at the impossibility of ever belonging completely anywhere.

But there are also days — and these are the ones that sustain me — when I understand that this impossible position, this being-in-between, has its own value. Perhaps those of us who live on these borders have a unique responsibility: to reject simplified narratives, to insist on complexity, to keep alive the memory not only of what happened, but of what that violence continues to do to people, families, identities. And that, I have learned, is and always has been for me a form of resistance to pure prejudice. Small, imperfect, but genuine. Wherever I am, wherever I live, because, coming from a non-place, a non-home, I am at home in the whole world.

I have learned to make the margins my centre. I have learned that not having fixed roots does not mean being adrift — it means, perhaps, having aerial roots, like certain plants that grow suspended, feeding on the air, the humidity, the very impossibility of fixing themselves. There is a strange freedom in this, a freedom I did not choose but have learned to inhabit.

Wherever I am, I carry with me this particular awareness of someone who lost a home before they could even remember it. It is a special sensitivity to the temporary, to the fragile, to everything that can be snatched away in an instant. But it is also an unusual ability to adapt, to find beauty in the transitory, to build belonging not in fixed places, but in relationships, in stories, in moments of genuine connection.

Coming from a non-place, I learned something that many take a lifetime to discover: that identity is not a destination, but a constant negotiation. That belonging is not a final achievement, but a daily exercise in presence. That home is not necessarily where we are born, but where we choose to build meaning.

This lesson, however painful it may have been at first, became one of my greatest treasures. It allowed me to see the world through the eyes of a perpetual foreigner — always curious, always willing to learn, always aware that there are multiple truths, multiple ways of being and living. Paradoxically, it was precisely because I didn't belong completely anywhere that I learned to find fragments of home everywhere. And perhaps this is, after all, the most profound lesson Angola taught me without my realising it: that we are all, deep down, travellers in this world, that all places are temporary, that all identities are constructed. Some of us just discover this earlier and more brutally. However, once learned, this truth becomes a compass. It guides me not to a fixed destination, but to a way of travelling — with open eyes, an open heart, and a curious mind.

This reflection arose from the need to name an invisible inheritance, to give shape to the formless. And in doing so, I discovered that the real work is not to recover lost memories, but rather to develop a keen awareness of how these absences continue to operate, of how the unsaid shapes us as much as the said, of how forgetting has its own grammar of power. There is something profoundly human in this navigation between memory and forgetting. The attempt to capture something essentially elusive: that nebulous zone where our memories dissolve at the borders of the imagined. The experience of trying to reconstruct who we were, where we came from. It is not solid ground — it is suspension, it is a constant crossing between two places we can never fully inhabit.

It is in the vagueness, between the lines, in the ‘almost’ that perhaps my most authentic truth lies — not in crystallised facts, but in the imprecise and ambiguous texture of what I feel I have experienced.

What this Notebook of Colonial Memories offered me was permission — permission to be imperfect in this work of memory, permission not to have all the answers, permission to inhabit contradiction without resolving it. It was confirmation that this work of mental decolonisation is legitimate even when done blindly, groping in the dark of non-memories, building bridges between fragments, trying to make sense of what was violently interrupted.

Isabela Figueiredo has written a book that refuses comfort. I choose to live a life that refuses convenient forgetting. Not because it is more noble or more virtuous, but because I have discovered that there is no true peace in lies, nor is there real rest in denial.

The discomfort that this book provokes and that these reflections generate in me is not a flaw — it is precisely the point. It is in this space of discomfort that critical thinking is born, that empathy develops, that change becomes possible.