Foundational fictions

Studies of the literature of Macao, that is, the literature of Macao in Portuguese, are occasionally unsure of whether, if at all, there is a division between what one might call a colonial literature, and one that raises some of the issues and values that modern criticism would define as postcolonial. If it is easy enough to consider the novels of Jaime do Inso and Em í lio de San Bruno as works that are well within the colonial mould, namely that they in some way glorify the colonial effort while falling prey to Orientalist stereotypes, it is less easy to paint the fiction of Maria Ondina Braga with the same brush, not least because she writes as a woman, and a lone woman in a colonial environment in which she is uneasy. ¹ Equally difficult are the cases of the two doyens of fiction in Macao during the 1990s, Rodrigo Leal de Carvalho, a Portuguese resident for four decades in Macao, whose work is characterized by a deep and sometimes overladen irony that is occasionally directed towards the colonial administrators, and Henrique de Senna Fernandes, the only writer mentioned so far who was born in Macao, into an old Macanese family.