According to the author, the book now presented,

Integrated into the summer festival "Caisagosto 2012", organized by the Municipality of São Roque do Pico, the program was held on 26th June to the book "African-sided" Urban Bettencourt. The event took place at the Municipal Library and was attended by the author, with the presentation of the work by Carlos Alberto Machado. Throughout the session, some texts of that book by Susana Moura and by the author who also explained, those present were read, the context in which most of the texts were written, with the backdrop of the setting of the colonial war in Africa.
Urban Bettencourt, born in the parish of Mercy, municipality of Lajes, Pico, is a professor of English Literature, African Literature of Portuguese Expression and Azorean Literature at the University of the Azores, is represented in several national and international anthologies. Author of extensive work, where poetry and literary essay predominate. He published his first book, "Root Heartache" in 1972, Setubal, at which time he taught in that city. Followed by "Islands" in 1976, "Sailor Fixed Residence", 1980, "Inscriptions Shipwrecks", 1987, "Some Cities", 1995 "Places shadows and affections" af and "Santo Amaro on the Sea" 2005 and "That blot Landscape", 2010, in addition af to several essays, some published in the book, other specialty magazines scattered inside and outside the country
According to the author, the book now presented, "African-sided" and containing a first part entitled "Lost Time", consisting af of (13 +1) poems and a second where prose-poetic texts of predominance, "recovers the texts over several years was leaving in his books, plus some unpublished, and in which the war experience affects successively remade and transfigured now a harsh light, and cruel too. " It is, therefore, a collection of texts whose thematic integrated mavórcio everyday life of the author himself, in the early years of the seventies of last century, in full colonial war in Bissorã (Guinea-Bissau) and in some so, reveal "the ghosts of a troubled af generation" littered with permanent and continuing threat af of recruitment for the war overseas. Is it a book "tainted by war" and in which, therefore, may bring us more light on the "back side" than actually on the "front" of an Africa, massacred, af dismayed, af suffering, with tropical scents and bolanhas of the mix with noxious smell of sulfur and gunpowder, with sounds of drums to be silenced with the estrambólicos bursting af of shells, with the sharpest shots of Kalashes and the slow and lengthy chatter af of Unimogs, with flavors of fresh fruit and sweetened to intersect with the unpleasantness of permanent af tragedy, with the colorful sunset and "lilac violated in every night by bombs", where even the "berry-berry" stood majestic, haughty and imposing in its nights prospects giant in the middle af of the savannah, secularly af built by colonies of ants and mingled with the soldiers - "statues of shadows, trembling and tired." af Verse and perhaps even the reverse of an Africa where even the linguistic specificity of Fulani speak, af Mandinka, Balanta and Bijagós and "manga snoring" go out and amarfanham obscene verbiage af by military patrols, and the flowering of African watercolors obstruct it dawns the permanent collection and remains of those killed in combat and the coffins of lead stored in the sacristy of the church, af waiting for transport to the metropolis.
For all this and much more, even though the "my love has not come to war," to the "back" of an African, repressed, twisted, and painful war, and because in addition to not prove the "agony of the dying rivers spilling boredom hurt in hours "would exonerate death ambushed" between Uenquem and Imboé "or, perhaps af worse, the bursting of a mine and the subsequent attack along the infamous" trail of death ", one of the columns usually attacked and that there were forced by the loop between agouti to Mansabá, bound for Farim, or maybe even the massacre of a tabanca any native.
All that Bettencourt lived as Urban terror, anguish, fear, grief and the imposition of permanent war that was not his and which unintentionally af became involved and where were driven by force and that, moreover, although without power manifest, as opposed and condemned the ideology that advocated, encouraged and maintained, af stored inside themselves feelings of permanent revolt, moments of agonizing suffering, terrible pictures, tragedies resulting from an ongoing, urgent af and destructive involvement in massive attacks af permanent ambushes, devastating massacres, in which they fell colleagues and friends on one side, men and brothers of another. But not everyone, perhaps even a few or just som