‘What is that to me?’ Jorge de Sena’s Sinais de fogo, poetry and testimony during the Spanish civil war

The Spanish Civil War is featured in the works of Jorge de Sena as the moment which created a new level of political awareness and militancy. Sena’s incomplete, posthumously published novel Sinais de fogo/Signs of fire (1979), which draws from Sena's biographical experiences as a young student in 1936 Lisbon and Figueira da Foz, attempts a fictional inscription, for future remembrance, of the conflict’s impact on António de Oliveira Salazar’s Estado Novo regime, supportive of the alzamiento and Franco, and on the living conditions and political positioning of the generations which endured it. To this end, Sena’s considerations on poetry and testimony will assist in shedding light on the novel’s questioning of the roles and functions of – as well as relations between – art, politics, history, and individual memory. Ultimately, the novel will prompt a reflection on the meaning(s) and purpose(s) of communitas