Portuguese Writer Lídia Jorge Wins Pessoa Prize

(Photo by José Sena Goulão/Lusa)

---

One of the most acclaimed voices in contemporary Portuguese literature, author of novels, short stories, essays, poetry and chronicles, Lídia Jorge, 79, is the winner of this year's Pessoa Prize, reported Expresso (December 11).

Named after celebrated writer Fernando Pessoa, the prize was founded by journalist Francisco Pinto Balsemão in 1987. It is an initiative of Expresso newspaper and Caixa Geral de Depósitos bank. Worth 70,000 euros, its purpose is "to highlight the Portuguese personality who, each year, stands out in the artistic, cultural or scientific life of the country".

Lídia Jorge captured the nation's attention when she addressed, among other things, the country's history of slavery in her speech as part of the June 10 celebrations of the Day of Portugal, Camões, and the Portuguese Communities, which is a national holiday that commemorates the death of Luís Vaz de Camões in 1580. She said, in part:

"It is said that in the 17th century, 10 percent of the Portuguese population had African origins. This population hadn't invaded us. The Portuguese had dragged them here. And we intermarried.

"This means that no one here has pure blood. The fallacy of single ancestry has no correspondence with reality. Each of us is a sum of our parts.

"We have the blood of the native and the migrant, of the European and the African, of the white and the black, and of all other human colors. We are descendants of the slave and the master who enslaved him. Children of the pirate and the one who was robbed. A mixture of the one who punished even to death and the merciful one who cleaned his wounds.

"Awareness of this anthropological adventure may mitigate the revisionist fury that assails us from extremes these days, almost everywhere."

Visão (June 19) reprinted her speech in full, an extract of which follows:

Camões, like us, experienced a period of transition, witnessed the end of a cycle, and, aware of this change, 22 of the 1,102 octaves that make up Os Lusíadas contain explicit warnings about the crisis that was then being experienced.

Moreover, it is now an accepted fact that the epic poem contains a paradox as a genre: the paradox of constituting an unlimited praise of the courage of a people who had resulted from the creation of the Empire and, conversely, containing a condemnation of the practices that, 50 years later, prevented the maintenance of that same Empire.

In this context, it can be said that Os Lusíadas, a poem that ultimately justifies Portugal's national day being Camões' day, expresses courageous truths directed at the very powers it praises.

Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Camões Overlapped

It is worth remembering that, between the 16th and 17th centuries, three of the greatest European writers of all time coincided in time for only 16 years, and yet all three produced remarkable works in response to the pivotal moment they witnessed.

They were Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Camões. In different ways, but converging, they proceeded to analyze human dilemmas and, among them, the universal mechanisms of power,  a corpus  that remains valid and intact to this day: on grandiose power, cruel power, tyrannical power, fearful power, and lax power.

In the case of Camões, what is he complaining about when he interrupts the poem of historical wonders to recall the petty reality that poisoned the present at that time? He was complaining about moral degradation, mentioning " the vile interest and hostile thirst/For money, which compels us to do everything ," and evoking, among the various aspects of degradation, the fact that the courageous men who had faced an unknown sea were succeeded by new, venal men who only thought about creating culture. More than that, he complained about the subversion of thought, he complained about the lack of intellectual seriousness, which then resulted, in practice, in the degradation of daily actions.

The poet writes at the end of the eighth canto: “ This one sometimes corrupts the sciences,/ Blinding judgments and consciences./ This one interprets texts more than subtly;/ This one makes and unmakes laws;/ This one causes perjury among the people/ And a thousand times makes kings tyrants .”

In fact, Camões, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, in different ways, exposed the intricacies of domination, intertwined with the historical context of the empires in which they lived.

"Hanging the Earth Around Their Neck"

At that time, it was said that the kings of Portugal, Spain, and England were fighting amongst themselves for dominion over the globe. Or more specifically, it was said that the three were competing to see who would end up hanging the earth around their neck as if it were a trinket.

The three authors clearly understood that, at a certain point, it is possible for deranged figures, emerging from the field of psychopathology, to seize power and subvert all the rules of harmonious coexistence.

Shakespeare wrote in Act IV of King Lear: " It is an unfortunate thing of the age that fools should lead the blind ."

Meanwhile, Cervantes created the brilliant figure of the delusional Don Quixote of La Mancha, who endures among us to this day as our maddened brother.

For his part, Camões, in the body of Os Lusíadas, did not speak of madness, but life would show him that the pages he himself had written had been prophetic, as a result of it, of madness. The disaster of Alcácer-Quibir, which occurred in 1578, was foreshadowed in one of the last stanzas of Canto X. It was history, as always, confirming the premonition experienced by literature.

However, the end of the cycle, which is of interest in this case, is no longer a localized transition which only concerns three kingdoms in Europe.

Today, We Move Meteor-Fast

In these times, it is about the emergence of a new era that is happening on a global scale. Because we, now, are different.

We move at the speed of meteors and are surrounded by invisible wires that connect us to space.

But something from that other end of the century, which followed the time of the failed Renaissance, relates to the days we are living in. The demented power, allied with technological triumphalism, makes us feel, every day, every morning, as we go to meet the news of the night, how the round earth is disputed by various necks in competition, as if it were once again a mere trinket.

And the citizens are merely an audience, watching spectacles on pocket screens. For some reason, citizens today have regressed to the subtle designation of followers. And their idols are ghosts.

Return to Lagos and Sagres

It is against this backdrop, and for this reason, that it is worthwhile for Portugal and the Portuguese Communities to use the name of a poet as a patron. For this very reason, it is also worthwhile to return to Lagos.

On these sandy beaches, decisive moments for the world took place.

At the beginning of the Modern Age, Lagos and Sagres were so significant to Portugal and Europe that enduring myths arose around them. The promontory and the silhouette of the austere Infante, who dreamed of finding islands and other discoveries as part of an ancient holy war, and accomplished everything through unwavering persistence and entrepreneurial shrewdness, transformed him into a figure of reference as a creator of the future. Associated with his figure is a dream that came true and then spread throughout the land, and legend places him meditating in Sagres.

In a somewhat imprecise reference, but one that allows for its evocation, Sophia wrote: “ There we saw the vehemence of the visible / the total appearance exposed whole / and that which we had not even dared to dream of / was the true ”.

This idea that an epiphany occurred in the mind of the Infante is associated with him as the mentor of a more or less informal team that he had the ability to motivate and lead. Sagres thus passed into history and mythology as a symbolic place of a strategy that would change the world.

"Sin of the Discoveries"

But there is another perspective, as is well known, and nowadays the prevailing public discourse is undoubtedly about the sin of the Discoveries and not about the magnitude of their transformative greatness.

It is true that the collective displacement that allowed the establishment of sea links between the various continents and the encounter between peoples followed a strategy of subjugation and abduction, the inventory of which is one of the painful topics of discussion today.

It is always necessary to emphasize, so as not to distort reality, that slavery is a cruel process of domination, as old as humanity itself.

What has always been observed is a diversity of procedures and different degrees of intensity.

And it is undeniable that the Portuguese were involved in a new, long, and painful process of enslavement.

Lagos, specifically, offers present-day populations, alongside the magical side of the Discoveries, also an image of its tragic side.

I speak with the genuine intention of restoring the truth and with remorse for the fact that the large-scale intercontinental slave trade was inaugurated, with supply hubs on the coasts of Africa, thus offering a new model for the exploitation of human beings that would be replicated and generalized by other European countries until the end of the 19th century.

235 Kidnapped From Mauritania

Lagos exposes the memory of that remorse. It shows how, on a sweltering August day in 1444, 235 individuals kidnapped off the coast of Mauritania landed here, and how they were divided and by whom.

Someone we hold in high esteem was on horseback and accepted his share of 46 head. That knight was none other than Prince Henry himself.

Lagos does not shy away from exposing this historical truth.

Lagos also shows the site where successive waves of slaves would later be traded. And more recently, it has been reported how they were thrown into the garbage dump when they died without a cloth covering their bodies. So far, the remains of 158 individuals of Bantu ethnicity have been removed from this garbage dump in Lagos.

Lagos is showing this past to the world so that it never happens again. Perhaps that's why we're here today.

Moreover, UNESCO created the Slave Route and included Lagos on the Slave Route so that we may know how human beings treat one another, even when they base themselves on religions founded on the principles of love and the law of human rights.

Lagos shows this film and becomes akin to the person who wrote the solemn plea on the door of a modern extermination camp: Men, do not kill each other.

It is true that we only know what happened on that day, August 8, 1444, because the chronicler of Prince Henry the Navigator narrated it. Eanes Gomes de Zurara could not help but feel compassion and commented, in a moving way, on how cruel the arrival and distribution of the slaves was. Fortunately, we have this page from the "Chronicle of the Deeds of Guinea" to be certain that there were those who did not find such degradation just and spoke out.

Moreover, we know that there have always been those who completely rejected the practice and theorized about it.

This means that Lagos, the city of Prince Henry the Navigator's dreams, of which Sagres is a metaphor, after all these centuries, promotes awareness of what we are capable of doing to one another. It has therefore become a city against indifference.

It's a struggle of our own, a contemporary one. In Lagos, today, the message of Simon Kneebone's 2014 cartoon, which has gone viral, is present in a different way.

The scene is contemporary. It takes place at sea. On a huge ship, equipped with defensive weapons, high in the tower, is a crewman who spots in the distance a fragile, shallow boat, laden with migrants.

The crew member of the large vessel asks: Where do you come from? From the crowded launch, someone replies: We come from land.

I suggest that young Portuguese people, descendants of manual laborers, sailors, and grandchildren of emigrants who left barefoot in search of work, print this cartoon on their shirts when they go to sea.

"We Have the Blood of the Native and the Migrant"

It is said that in the 17th century, 10 percent of the Portuguese population had African origins. This population hadn't invaded us. The Portuguese had dragged them here. And we intermarried.

This means that no one here has pure blood. The fallacy of single ancestry has no correspondence with reality. Each of us is a sum of our parts.

We have the blood of the native and the migrant, of the European and the African, of the white and the black, and of all other human colors. We are descendants of the slave and the master who enslaved him. Children of the pirate and the one who was robbed. A mixture of the one who punished even to death and the merciful one who cleaned his wounds.

Awareness of this anthropological adventure may mitigate the revisionist fury that assails us from extremes these days, almost everywhere.

Now that we realize we are at the end of one cycle and another is beginning, the existential uncertainty about the near future, still unknown, confronts us every morning when we wake up without knowing what the next day will bring.

The question is this: when the institutional, scientific, ethical, and political foundations, and the pillars of the human-machine intelligence relationship, are called into question, entering a new paradigm, what place will we occupy as human beings? What will it mean to be human?

I began by saying that Camões was born and never died.

Camões' Concept of a Human Being

I return to his work to try to understand the poet's concept of what a human being was. Regarding himself, all his work reveals him as a victim of persecution by all combined powers. His lyrical work is a response to this essential abandonment.

In keeping with this same idea, at the end of Canto I of Os Lusíadas, Camões defines the human being as an entity persecuted by the elements: “ Where can a weak human find refuge,/ Where will he have his short life secure,/ That the serene Heaven does not arm itself and become indignant/ Against such a small creature of the earth .”

In these verses, one recognizes the Renaissance concept of the great solitude of the human being and their stoic struggle against it, centered on self-confidence.

But, in practice, this attitude represented a proud orphanhood that fortune easily failed to recognize. Curiously, at the end of his life, Camões' naked body had only a sheet, the one offered to him, separating him from the earth. Like the fate of his body, this fate is no different from that which befell the bodies of slaves here in Lagos.

However, in the 19th century, the right to protection afforded by the State began to emerge. Essential documents were created with a view to respecting citizens. After the two world wars of the 20th century, the Charter of Human Rights was drafted and approved, and for several decades, attempts were made to implement it as a reference code throughout the world. But lately, there has been a regression with each passing day.

The concept of respectable representation of the Head of State, originating from the Greek people—a principle that underpinned the purifying plot of classical tragedies, later joined by the principle of exemplarity gleaned from the Gospels—this conduct that made the king the most worthy among the worthy, is being subverted.

Digital culture has subverted the rule of exemplary behavior. The chosen one has become the least exemplary, the least prepared, the least moderate, the one who offends the most.

A Head of State of a major power, during a rally, was able to say : I love you, I love the uneducated . And the uneducated applauded.

A Being of Resistance and Struggle

I ask, then, what is the concept of being human today? How can we protect this value that until recently worked and no longer does?

Today, Portugal Day, the Day of Camões and the Portuguese Communities, isn't it legitimate to ask, without intending to offend anyone, how we will maintain the notion of a respectable, free, dignified human being, deserving of access to the truth of the facts and the expression of their freedom of conscience?

We Portuguese are not rich. We are poor and unjust. But even so, we overthrew a very long dictatorship and ended the oppression we maintained over various peoples, establishing new alliances with them and creating a community of Portuguese-speaking countries. And we were able to establish a democracy and join a union of free and prosperous countries which desire peace.

Therefore, while we certainly don't yet have all the answers, we know that we have the strength to face the unknowns that confront us.

I read Camões, the one who never truly died, and I am moved by his fate, because if there is anything I have in common with him, who was a genius and I am not, it is the certainty that I share his idea that a human being is a being of resistance and struggle. It is only necessary to determine the right cause.

Thank you very much."