ABSTRACT
Viewing Lisbon through Pocas Pascoal’s Angolan film Alda e Maria (2013) offers an unofficial, liminal version of the city which is permeated with postcolonial trauma. This is Lisbon as experienced by the title characters, teenage sisters Alda and Maria, who have recently fled the civil war in their native Angola. Through an analysis of four key spaces in the film—the dockyard, apartment, sewing room and phone booth—I will demonstrate first how the girls are subjected to a matrix of gendered, racialized and culturally specific violence, and second how this violence is represented, resisted and subverted by the body. I will argue, employing Laura Marks’ concept of “haptic expression”, that the sisterly bodies act as interactional sites of refuge and resistance, and that expectations of victimhood are subverted in the film’s multisensorial, embodied aesthetics. This analysis will draw on Avery Gordon’s theory of haunting to show how Alda and Maria both haunt and are haunted by the spaces they occupy. Also key to the analysis are concepts of bodily subjectivity and performativity in African and African diasporic modes of storytelling, including Gladys Francis’ work on gendered zones of violence and the body. It will thus be argued that the traversal and occupation of Portuguese space by Angolan female bodies is a powerful way of inscribing Angolan memories and testimonies into a shared but unequal narrative.
