Last night, I attended a marvelous reading and discussion with the author Anthony De Sa and Wilfried N'Sonde. Both authors were amazing, and revealed the excellent approaches they took about research and their backgrounds and how they contributed to their work. Both were WRITERS first, their backgrounds were just pieces which informed their writings-not characteristics by which they needed to be pigeonholed.
I admit, that I came because De Sa had grown up in the Portuguese neighborhood of Toronto, and I had read Barnacle Love while in the Azores. There aren't enough children of Portuguese immigrants writing fiction today and I loved what I had encountered-feeling as if I was not alone in the experience.
De Sa's new book is about Mozambique, Children of the Moon. In an aside, he revealed that even though his uncles had fought in the wars (including Angola and Guinea), he had never gotten a fuller story out of them. When I probed further, he mentioned how difficult it was for them-the strong macho characteristic against the idea of losing a war-and what they had to go through-and make other people endure. De Sa mentioned that everything in the media in the 1960's was about America and Vietnam. And sometimes stories came out of that war-or WWII, which made the soldiers feel like they were fighting for a noble cause. But colonialism is harder to reconcile and understand.
I've yet to get the fuller stories from my own uncles. I want to know. War is never easy for anyone, but I hope they have been able to process their memories and make some meaning out of them. I'd love to hear it.
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