Entre Memória e Barbárie: As Crónicas Jugoslavas de Álvaro Guerra

This essay produces a critical reading of the “Yugoslav Chronicles” (Crónicas Jugoslavas) written by the Portuguese writer Álvaro Guerra, taking into account the tension established between the space of the memory of a harmonic Yugoslavia and the testimony about it, confronted with the vision, in the moment of writing, of its demise in a fratricide war which is in itself an example of absurdity and barbarism. By placing Yugoslavia against the larger background of Balkan history, the author doesn’t cease to question himself about how it was possible to reinvent the ghosts of XIXth Century Nationalism (as if we were back to the Balkan wars of the beginning of the XXth century), this time mixed not only with the ambitions of the Great Powers, a constant in Modern Balkan History, but also with a new and threatening power: the capacity to mobilize populations through modern media discourse, namely television, which is able by itself to “create” facts. Organized within an assemblage of “galleries” that refer to the multiple facets of the author’s memories, our text does not have the aim of contextualizing the book within the rest of Álvaro Guerra’s literary production, but to do it taking into account the historical, anthropological and sociological spaces that his Yugoslav experience managed to highlight. Our central argument is that, within the tension between memory and barbarism, the author manages to find in the strength of his testimony a way of exorcising the drama of the catastrophe.