There is also a great American tradition in this area.
JM: In the literature there is still a stigma in this matter, because they confuse my book and other with the call light writing. I do not think I write literature because they are writers and we should not confuse things. I also think I do better journalism. It costs nothing to live in harmony and realize that we are important to each other. My books sell well.
Is it not related to the type of language? Has a conversational tone that is very close to the reader.
JM: It's a very simple language, am I talking about them, like them. The writers have no reason to worry. Literature is denser, a more elaborate way of writing; they work for it and live of it. There is room in a library or a bookstore for all kinds of books, there is nothing more democratic than writing. What is important is to reach a shelf and find all kinds of literature, from those who write well, those who do it badly, or that are so simple. From the moment people write a book, words belong to the readers and they have to have that freedom of choice. People who write do not define what is good or bad. The readers do. I think that is not yet realized here, that's why I always say that I am a journalist who writes books so the writers are not upset.
Your books have a common component, you write about the large demographic movements, in this as in others books, about the great exodus of Portuguese abroad, why?
JM: There are two reasons. First, this decade has a very important role in contemporary Portuguese history; the sixties were the subject of great demographic movements of Portuguese people. The other, because I always said I only write about things I knew and had lived. My first book is about my family and my friends back in Africa. As the book became a great success, the publisher saw fit to continue in the same editorial line of the first publication to focus in the 60s. It was not worth me venturing in other periods of the history of Portugal, in another kind of writing when I'm taking the first steps into the world of literature. It is a decade that gave many other ideas for writing books that had not been spoken.
It is also because it's little writing about this period?
JM: Very little. About the returnees from Africa there was very little literature, not about the military, but about the people. The many who lived in the countryside and had never seen the sea, or the many mothers and women who had been here, about the emigrants in France.
The movement itself, I do not recall any book that addresses this issue specifically.
JM: That's why the books were a success. You know why? Because, it was a taboo to talk about it. The returnees did not want to approach this moment of great humiliation, even the emigrants did not want to remember the hardships they suffered to get there, where they were subjected to tiny human condition to survive. They wanted to forget this period of their lives that never told their children and grandchildren. Forty years later there was much to be talk about it and I understood it was a good decade to continue writing.
It is curious that you say that, because before you said you present this book in France and people said to you: this is my story. It means that after 40 years they can live peacefully with the past?
JM: Many did. Some people who thought they never returned to Africa after they read it thought the book it had exorcised somehow, maybe even wanted. Several emigrants gave this book to their children and grandchildren so they knew their true life story. I think that I contributed for many exceed a very difficult decade, of which they never spoke about and did not want to remember. The book nevertheless addresses all these moments, ending with a success story. What they find in my books is just that, they have the pride that after so much deprivation, have success in life. And I think that helps a lot in this aspect so that people can exceed that taboo, this problem of their lives, which was not to speak of the past.
Far from my heart, why?
JM: For this difference there was between a Portuguese man and a French woman of another social level, at a time when it was very difficult, there were many stories of those that are lost, people moved away. It was not possible at this time, people from different social living together or marring. That is an exception to the rule; Portuguese of a low condition had no access to the French middle and upper classes.
