In the Azores, you can’t travel far without tripping over a statue or dedication to one of its many illustrious writers. One such writer was Alfred Lewis (Alfredo Luís), a promising scholar who left his home on Flores in the Azores in 1922 for the far shores of America, and achieved considerable success as an […]
CAMÕES ADDRESSES HIS CONTEMPORARIES You can steal all that’s mine: my ideas, words, images, my metaphors, themes, motifs, my symbols and pre-eminence in suffering the pains of a new language, in understanding others, in daring to fight, to judge, to penetrate recesses of love where you are impotent. And then you can refuse to quote […]
Proud Portuguese immigrants in Vancouver, BC, circa 1960 Photo credit: Frank Trigueiro “The Portuguese are the unknown people. We are lost in this vast country. No one knows we are here. To be Portuguese in America is to be a stone dropped in the middle of the ocean.” —Charles Reis Felix, in Da Gama, Cary […]
In Bird By Bird, Anne Lamott writes of the little assistant that lives inside a writer’s mind, or dwells deep down in one’s gut: There in your unconscious, where the real creation goes on, is that little kid or the Dr. Seuss creature in the cellar, arranging and stitching things together. Her words resonate […]
I was asked if the photograph that accompanied my previous post had been taken in the Azores. And yes, it was. The image in question is the tomb of Antonio de Freitas which is located in the idyllic village of Mosteiro. De Freitas, born in Mosteiro in 1792, left his homeland for Macau and made a fortune […]
Damned island where a day has months, lasts years island of waves and disappointments island of tiredness and misfortunes: what enchantment do you hold? what truth is only yours? that makes me leave thinking of leaving forever thinking of leaving alone but I take with me as a stigma, a punishment the certainty of a […]
Yes, I know. I have tragically neglected my little blog and feel the worst for it. Would you believe me if I told you I’ve been busy with work, with life, with the myriad of responsibilities that come with being a citizen of the 21st century? No? Fine, I confess. I had a stoic breakdown following […]
Seven, eight, nine. The tolling of the church bell here in Fazenda das Lajes on the island of Flores heralds my arrival as I enter my parents’ summer house. The plaster walls are mildewed and the wooden floor is buckling here and there but otherwise the place is as I had left it five years […]
I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour […]
“My homeland is the Portuguese language,” said Pessoa. So what happens when you lose your language? Like many first-generation Portuguese Canadians, I grew up speaking Portuguese at home but my fluency had eroded by the time I entered junior high school. My father, anxious to see his children assimilate and succeed, encouraged my siblings and […]
NO PEGO DO MAR Na ilha parada O menino-do-mar Que sou e hei sido, E vela molhada Num ar de resdoma, Envolto e pesado: –Não passa de si!… Persiste quem é O menino-de-mar Que tenho de ser, A nuvem não pode Ao vento que sopra: –Desfaz-se é perdida A vida fundada no mar retraido de […]
I received a number of enquiries about A Profile of the Azorean, a slender book published in 1980 which I quoted from in this post–which so far, is the most popular post on my blog with just over 300 views. I came across a pdf version of the booklet on the website of the Canadian Centre for Azorean Research and Studies (CCARS) and contacted Onésimo […]
I’m not sure what to make of a curious little book in my library. A Profile of the Azorean is an offprint extracted from an academic paper on bilingual education published in the late 1970s. An online search revealed that the author, Onésimo T. Almeida, wrote the text as a guideline for workshops he held […]
“Reviews should be an occasion, not for tears or vendettas or shoe licking, but for dialogues.” ~ Heidi Julavits I’m tracking online conversations about a recently published novel by a Portuguese-North American author and I’m befuddled. There are glowing reviews and ecstatic blog posts and jacket blurbs by writers big and small but nobody mentions […]
