On the Other Hand

Portuguese literature is living through an exciting yet fragmented moment.

Ours is a slow-burning country, taking its time to lick the wounds of its soul. Though the Carnation Revolution that reintroduced democracy will celebrate its half-century in 2024, our country still seems to be living in the aftermath of a very long dictatorship and a traumatizing thirteen-year war fought on several fronts, in the now-independent countries of Angola, Mozambique and Guiné. No wonder some of our best writing is still haunted both by the severance from fascism in 1974 and then from the colonies.

Writers seldom retire, thus mentor figures such as António Lobo Antunes (b. 1942) and Lídia Jorge (b. 1946) are still active. Many of their writings are about the colonial war that shaped their adult lives. From a younger generation, Dulce Maria Cardoso (b. 1964) and Isabela Figueredo (b. 1963) spent their childhoods in Africa and their most relevant books also deal with those experiences. Both are children of retornados (the returned), white people traumatically sucked back into a squalid motherland in which they had hardly ever set foot. Dulce Maria Cardoso’s O Retorno (The Comeback, 2012) is a wonderful novel about the resentment and confusion of refugees in Lisbon hotels, as they live in limbo after fleeing their livelihoods with little more than the clothes they had on. Isabela Figueredo’s Caderno de Memórias Coloniais (Colonial Memories Handbook, 2012) is a harsher hybrid of a book, and clearly and unapologetically autobiographical.

On the other hand, racialized voices emerged in our literature only recently, not as foreigners but as Portuguese writers (although with a tan). Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida (b. 1982) began her career with a literary essay titled “Esse Cabelo” (My Hair, 2015) dealing precisely with how “African hair” can become an unexpected (sometimes funny, at others bitter) cultural issue. And in 2023, Gisela Casimiro (b. 1984), whose work as a poet and activist was already noticed, released a book with a major publisher: Estendais (Clotheslines), stories of a Guiné-born woman humorously navigating the surrealness of daily life in Lisbon.

Is skin color important? It should not be and neither should gender. The current discussion in the West about who is entitled to talk about which subjects may seem futile, dangerously denying the power of the imagination (should we dismiss Madame Bovary because it was written by a man?). On the other hand, fiction does not come from nowhere; imagination has its roots in the same way that the self filters a given reality. Plus, it is not healthy when one group always speaks on behalf of others, no matter how good their intentions.

Writers such as Inês Pedrosa (b. 1960), author of In Your Hands (2010, a New York Times Notable Book in 2020), have remarked that, not so long ago, women writers tended somehow to be confined to after-hours panels on subjects such as “Is there a feminine literature?”, whereas their male colleagues would deal with weightier topics, such as “Can Literature change the course of history?”.
It is a sobering thought that, nowadays, arguably the most urgent voices in Portuguese literature are women’s. Authors such as Patrícia Portela (b. 1974), Cláudia Lucas Chéu (b. 1978) and Joana Bértholo (b. 1982) write novels with an acutely experimental and innovative voice, even unafraid to venture onto the theatre stage. A current tendency in Portuguese books is to complicate the booksellers’ task of arranging the shelves in their stores (call Marie Kondo).

The Saramago Heirs is a 2020 Portuguese documentary about the winners of the José Saramago Literary Prize, awarded to authors under thirty-five and created after the titular writer received the Nobel Prize, so far the only Nobel laureate in literature in the Portuguese-speaking world. The first winners were infants around the time of the Carnation Revolution: Valter Hugo Mãe (b. 1971), Gonçalo M. Tavares (b. 1972), José Luís Peixoto (b. 1974), João Tordo (b. 1975). Though not a recipient, Afonso Cruz (b. 1971) is somehow connected to them, and just as talented. Gonçalo is the most ambitious writer, building in only two decades an immense body of work (two books per year) that have been translated into an impressive number of languages. Maho Kinoshita’s translation of Peixoto’s novel Galveias won the Best Translation Award in Japan in 2019.

Portuguese writers do read a lot of foreign fiction. It always was so, but this trend seems to have now reached a critical juncture. It is good for writers to be openminded readers; on the other hand, such a strict diet becomes a trap when some end up purging their fiction of any “local stench”, to the point of even avoiding Portuguese names, characters and places. Some young writers go a step further, trying to write directly in English. Though it may seem the faster lane to success, they forget one thing: the language you are born with is usually the one you can be most creative in. The good news is, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, they eventually realize there’s no place like home.
On the other hand, as Fernando Pessoa would say, what could be more typically Portuguese than the wish to be an Other?