The example of Miguel Carvalho, who assumes that he arrived late at Amália’s fado – he discovered it through Rão Kyao’s album, “Fado Bailado” (1983) – is a mirror of history and narrative, as he tells, that was built around of the person and the artist.
“Amália: Dictatorship and Revolution, the Secret History” is “a political biography of a person who affirmed his whole life that he did not care about politics”, “which is at least ironic”, points out the author.
The work reveals, in nine chapters, official documents, namely a register of the central services of PIDE with the request for an identity card from Amália Rodrigues, from 1957, and a report from 1939 that included the name of the singer in the so-called “Communist Organization in the Fado “. Among the unpublished records is also a letter from the archive of the former leader of the dictatorship, the former president of the Council of Ministers, António de Oliveira Salazar, which Amália Rodrigues wrote to him days before the inauguration of the current 25 de Abril bridge, in 1966.
“I think Amália needed this biography, taking into account what she was as an artist and the way she resized and was the voice of this country in the world. It was important to analyze her path in the light of dictatorship and democracy”, she explains.
In this journey, Miguel Carvalho found “an amazing, contradictory, imperfect woman, who was under a series of layers that she was put in and that she also cultivated”. “And a woman who was a girlfriend and used by the regime – as it was also for democracy, it is good to say – but who at the same time did not fail when asked for help from political prisoners or when she was called to contribute to the resistance to the dictatorship itself “.
In the chapters of the story that is no longer secret, it is told how Amália contributed to the Youth MUD (Democratic Unity Movement, controlled by the PCP), paid trips to young communists to Warsaw and delivered money to her hairdresser (Manuel Augusto Brito) for political prisoners.
“There are those who say that this was a way to be right with God and the Devil”, says the journalist, adding afterwards that this is “tremendously unfair, even if here or there may have been true”.
About the post-revolution, Miguel Carvalho says that “democracy took a long time to realize that it could not throw Amália into the dustbin of fascism”. “It was a turbulent process, which I describe with as much depth as possible, but it ended up resulting in that national union that we have today in relation to it”, he explains.
She was accused of being “the Princess of PIDE”, of kneeling to the dictatorship, received the title of singer of the regime and it was proclaimed that fado was dead and that Amália died with it. “All this was said, it was said out loud, and it was written. Often and by very thoughtful people. And she faced all these attacks, being one of the first victims of fake news, and survived. It was she who recovered her importance, her artistic quality, her dimension and who forced, even late, the country and the institutions to recognize in fact that Amália would always be what she was, regardless of the regimes “.
But not everything is past waters and if the author had doubts “about the need for the book”, what happened last year, in a city in the south of Luxembourg with a strong influence of Portuguese emigration, is “proof that not everything is resolved” . “Her name was proposed for a street and the controversy that arose was such that this idea was abandoned and the name given to someone else. The arguments were that the street could not be named after Amália because she had been complicit in the old regime, there were issues that were very much present “.
With a journalistic look, between the regime and the resistance, crossing the stories of those who had the opportunity and the privilege of living with the fado singer, Miguel Carvalho wanted to show that Amália does not lose her “divine side” even when we resist the temptation to “put her above the human species “. “As much as she had a voice from the gods,” he points out.
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