The 'Other' within: Filipinos in the Portuguese literature of Macau
For most of the colonial period prior to the nineteenth century, relations between Macau and the Philippines tended to mirror those between Portugal and Spain: an intense rivalry only matched by a vague sense of complementarity and cooperation. The establishment of the dual monarchy in 1580 meant that Manila and Macau belonged, at least notionally, to the same kingdom. At this point, Manila began to assume itself as a kind of regional Madrid to Macau’s Lisbon, which reflected the desire of Manila’s merchants to break into Macau’s monopoly of trade with China. Instead, what ensued was a kind of complementarity, in which Macau preserved its primacy within trade with China, but shipping between Macau and Manila increased, boosted by the flow of Mexican silver, shipped across the Pacific from Acapulco. For the rest, Macau and Manila bore similarities: they were both among the first major European colonial cities in the region, both Catholic, ecclesiastical centres, and both witnessed the development of a creolised, mestizo elite that served as a bridge between colonial officaldom and the local, native populations. Yet the political sympathies of these elites say something about the nature of colonialism in Macau and the Philippines, in a trade entrepot whose colonial status was never really confirmed because of its dependence on the mainland upon which it was a tiny territorial encrustation, and in a more clearcut territorial colony subject, albeit patchily, to European rule. In Macau, with its shared sovereignty, the creole elite never made the transition to nationalism, while in the Philippines it embarked on a campaign to liberate itself from Spain at the end of the nineteenth century, much as the Spanish American colonies had done at the beginning of the same century.
It was during these nationalist uprisings that many Filipino activists sought refuge in the recently established British colony of Hong Kong, and also in Macau. One such figure was José Rizal, the author of two novels, one of which, Noli me Tangere (1887), is a classic of Philippine literature. Rizal briefly practised medicine in Hong Kong before returning to his native land where the Spanish authorities executed him in 1896. His country swapped Spanish colonial rule for United States colonialism as a result of the 1898 war, which saw the United States consolidate its expansion into the Pacific, and only became fully independent in 1946. But links between the islands and Macau and Hong Kong have continued due to the migration of Filipinos, especially during the Marcos years, to these two territories, where they form substantial minorities, largely employed in the service sector. So it is natural that there should be Filipino characters in Macau literature, most notably its fiction. What is surprising, on the other hand, is that they do not feature more in literature. This may reflect their relative social invisibility in the society of Macau, or it may have something to do, at least in the Portuguese-language literature, with their limitation to certain stereotypes, which in turn are derived from an Iberian model of ‘otherness’.
Filipino characters first make their appearance in what might best be termed colonial novels of the early decades of the twentieth century. Jaime do Inso's Caminho do Oriente and Emílio de San Bruno’s O Caso da Rua Volong were published respectively in 1932 and 1928, and both won literary prizes awarded by the Portuguese Government’s Agência Geral das Colónias, because they in some way justified and even exalted Portugal’s colonizing mission. Both authors had served in Macau as naval officers. As typical colonial novels, they contained warnings against the hidden dangers awaiting the agents of empire, especially those of a sensitive disposition, when surrounded by the attractions and dangers of ‘otherness’. Rodolfo and Frazão, in Inso’s novel, are childhood friends who journey to Macau to revive a family trading enterprise. Rodolfo is a romantic, who befriends a ‘golden-haired’ Portuguese girl from Macau on the boat out east. Frazão is a prosaic materialist who takes up with Pepita, a Filipino woman returning to Hong Kong to rejoin her husband. Frazão’s dalliance with a mestizo woman represents no threat to the colonial enterprise, or Frazão’s ability to act on behalf of it. The same is true of Paulo’s association with the Macanese nhonha, Maria José, in San Bruno’s novel. It is perfectly normal for a Portuguese colonizer to set up with a local woman as long as this does not lead to marriage, but is merely an arrangement of sexual and domestic convenience. But it is Paulo’s superior, the Count, who provides the negative example. The Count is, in turn, traced to Macau by a jilted lover, who arrives in melodramatic style, disguised as an American woman called Grace. Grace then develops a passion for the mysterious Mansilla. Mansilla frequents the higher echelons of colonial society, passing himself off as a South American, but he is in fact a Filipino, a gun runner and leader of a band of pirates. He then kidnaps Grace hoping to use her to seduce wealthy American and Russian expatriates, and so finance his cause. Mansilla thus represents the colonial stereotype of oriental exoticism, made all the more anarchic and corrosive because of his hybrid nature, and because he is allowed to prey on the vulnerabilities of those who are unsuited for the colonial mission. In addition, the relationship between the false American woman, Grace, and the false Spanish American man, Mansilla, reflects in symbolic terms the volatile politics of the area as the United States began to flex its muscles in the Pacific, upsetting an older balance of power.
The Mansilla stereotype survives in the more recent novel, O Romance de Yolanda (2005), by Rodrigo Leal de Carvalho, but with a contemporary twist, not only in the plot line, but in the evolving stereotype, which also relates in some ways to Carvalho’s ironic view of Macau society. When the Macanese divorcee, Yolanda Bañares dos Santos is introduced to the Filipino Ramon Macapagal González by Yolanda’s former husband, it is so that the latter can gain some commission from González’s Chinese business associate when the Filipno gains a Portuguese passport, thus protecting his business interests from the attentions of the British police in Hong Kong, not to mention the Marcos authorities in the Filipino’s home country. This is the Macau of the transition years, but González is a businessman with gun-running interests to the insurgents in the Southern Philippines. At the same time,Yolanda, like Grace in the San Bruno novel, exceeds expectations by falling in love with her Filipino date, who displays the same macho attractivesess as Mansilla had in San Bruno's earlier novel. The difference here is that the perceptions of Filipinos among the native population of Macau have evolved, and the exotic beauty stereotype collides with the scorn accorded to them as ‘pretos’, or ‘people who are either prostitiutes or pimps’, a product of the already mentioned migration into Macau during the Marcos years of Filipino domestic and service workers.
The most interesting portrayal of a Filipino, and by extension of a Filipino-Macanese family, is provided by the Macanese novelist Henrique de Senna Fernandes, in his first novel, Amor e Dedinhos-de-Pé (1986), for while there are elements of the stereotype that appeared in both San Bruno and Leal de Carvalho (the excessively macho stereotype), there is also greater complexity, if not in the actual portrayal of the character of Pablo Padilla, then certainly in the relations between a ‘foreign’ Eurasian and the local Macanese elite. While Mansilla and González belong to a vaguely exoticist, orientalist stereotype, Padilla comes much more out of the Vicentine tradition of the loud-mouthed, arrogant ‘castelhano’. But if Padilla, the theatrical Spaniard of popular Portuguese fun-making, is a figure of ridicule, his aspirations to join the Macanese elite, to some extent shed light on the closed nature of Macanese society that the author is criticising in his novel. He is therefore clearly the object of scorn on the part of the author, but also of some measure of sympathy. Who is the bigger villain, Fernandes seems to invite us to consider, the snobbish Vidal family, of largely Portuguese stock, or the resentful, aspirational Padilla, whom we assume to be of darker, mestizo, and foreign (albeit neighbourly) origins? Padilla had come to Macau with his father, a Filipino nationalist fighting for independence from Spain (and therefore by suggestion, alien to the ‘loyal’ elite of Macau with regard to Portugal). Padilla is therefore considered dubious because of his political as well as his social and ethnic origins. Subsequent activity, including money lending, involvement in the coolie trade, dabbling in Chinese medicine for the treatment of venereal (and therefore shameful) diseases, are merely added justification for Macanese society to keep him at arms’ length, while paradoxically relying on his services. Padilla’s problem, is one of his strengths, if we take him as representative of some of Fernandes’s other characters: he is a member of colonial society (even if only by the skin of his teeth), but also embedded in local culture and therefore Asian, as opposed to the pretentious 'Portugueseness' of the family of Hipólito Vidal, the young man he supposedly tricks into marrying his daughter.
For the rest, the Padillas have taken on some of the accoutrements of Macanese culture that Fernandes generally extols in his novels: Padilla takes pride in his knowledge of Chinese medicine, the women of the house become experts in Macanese cuisine, making them the suppliers of sweets and snacks for the ‘chás gordos’ of the elite families, and Cesaltina, Padilla’s daughter only seems to speak patois. We never know, of course, whether Padilla’s wife is Macanese or Filipino, but as the daughters all have Spanish names, one assumes that this is a family that has not yet ‘married’ into Macanese society. So in a sense, Fernandes is using this Filipino family to demonstrate Macanese cultural practices that the elite have grown away from. When Chico Frontaria, the fallen hero of the story, therefore re-encounters Victorina and they get married, we have the right combination of blue-bloodedness (Chico is from a time-honoured Macanese family) and mixed cultural values, an appropriate blend of Chineseness and Westernness as encarnated in the figure of Padilla’s grand-daughter. Indeed, it is her inheritance of Padilla’s knowledge of creams, ointments and teas, that brings about Chico’s cure and saves his life, all of which helps fuel his own moral regeneration and reintegration into society.
It is perhaps no coincidence that Fernandes, a writer who is himself a product of the east-west encounter in Macau, should incorporate the ‘outro familiar’, the Filipino, into the literature and social culture of his native city, in a more nuanced way than either San Bruno or Carvalho. And it may also be not far fetched to say that Fernandes has redeemed two minor characters in Rizal’s classic, the ridiculous, presumptuous and pro-Spanish Victorina in the Filipino novel becomes the sensible and stout-hearted Victorina Vidal of Fernandes’s novel, while the quack doctor, Don Tiburcio, Spanish husband of Rizal’s Victorina, becomes the skilled, self-taught curandeiro of Filipino nationalist extraction, Padilla, in Amor e Dedinhos-de-Pé.
* Working paper read at the 'Pen-insularities: Writing East and West in Portuguese' colloquium, University of Bristol, April, 2011.
Wednesday, 14 September 2011
Wednesday, 6 April 2011
Food and Identity in the Macanese Fiction of Henrique de Senna Fernandes
Food and identity in the Macanese Fiction of Henrique de Senna Fernandes*
In Goa, there is a well-known restaurant called Nostalgia, which is famed for its traditional Goan food, including, according to its website, 'bolo sansrival', a dessert that “is practically non-existent in Goa anymore”. This little reference seems to vindicate the restaurant's name, and therefore its mission: to preserve a cuisine, elements of which have been lost, and that is, by implication, under threat of possible disappearance. If Goans had little or no chance to proclaim a culinary identity to the world, such was the speed with which Goa was absorbed into India in 1961, the Macanese further East, had more time, a full twelve years between the signing of the Luso-Chinese accord in 1987, and the handover of the territory to Beijing in 1999. During this period, restaurants advertising Macanese food (as opposed to Portuguese or Chinese) proliferated. Yet, what is Macanese food exactly?
Macanese cuisine reflects, in many ways, the evolution of the Macanese as an ethnic group, or at least a frontier ethnicity occupying the ambivalent world between western and eastern cultures, absorbing influences from Malay, Indian, Chinese and Portuguese roots, but also open to other influences as well. It is no coincidence, for example, that one of the most widely known Macanese dishes, minchi, is derived from the English word mince, and is a dish based on minced, or ground, meat. If there is an origin to Macanese cuisine, then it is commonly assumed to have begun with the adaptation of Portuguese dishes to different ingredients, depending on what was available as a substitute to the original components of a dish, and on the interpretation given to it by the cook or chef. Thus, the Macanese tacho is a kind of local evolution of the Portuguese cozido, while a regional Portuguese dish such as 'sarrabulho' reappears in Macanese cuisine. Given the early historical links between Macau and Malacca, and the presence of Malay women accompanying the first Portuguese settlers in Macau, it is not surprising that some signature dishes of Macau cuisine bear a close resemblance to those produced in Malacca and even in Goa. Lacassá is no other than Malay/Singapore laksa, consumed nowadays in any number of Thai and Asian fusion chains across Europe and North America, while the use of 'balichão', or shrimp paste in a number of Macanese dishes, echoes influences of 'balchan' in Malay cooking. Then there is the ubiquitous piri-piri chicken, often termed in Macau 'galinha africana', and served as part of a lunch deal to day trippers to the territory. If the term luso-tropical could be applied to any dish, 'galinha africana' would no doubt qualify, anecdotally originating in an adaptation of grilled chicken marinaded in pepper sauce, popular among Mozambican soldiers stationed in Macau up until the 1960s, to a Chinese predilection for larger amounts of sauce. Interestingly, 'galinha africana' is still a new kid on the block, and does not have the time-honoured pedigree of some other famous Macanese dishes.
It is probably true to say that when people are placed in a position in which they have to define identity, or what they think is authentic about their identity, they are forced into a degree of self-consciousness that in turn produces confusion and disagreement. One of the oldest restaurants in Macau, Fat Siu Lau, established at the beginning of the twentieth century by a Chinese entrepreneur, happily served Portuguese and local dishes for many decades, as we shall see. Nowadays, its signature dish is roast pigeon, prepared in a secret marinade, and it is advertised as being typically Macanese. But pigeon is also associated with Cantonese cusine, so it is obvious that the delicacy is a highly localised variant of a more generally regional dish, unless, of course, the cooking of pigeon spread from Macau into the adjacent province of Guangdong. At the other, western end of the spectrum, tourists are encouraged to try the typically Macanese soup called 'caldo verde', suggesting that the tourist authorities often cannot distinguish between Portuguese and Macanese culinary traditions. It is important to see Macanese cuisine as being situated on a kind of culinary continuum between Portugal and China, with inputs from traditions in between, that is, from along the old oceanic trading routes developed by the Portuguese. Like any cuisine, it is subject to change and re-invention, as old recipes are lost (often along with the availability of ingredients), and new ones evolve, and like many cuisines associated with an ethnic minority, such as the Macanese, food, the nostalgia for 'hometown' cooking, are woven into the group's cultural expression. In literature, the fiction of Henrique de Senna Fernandes is full of culinary references. They feature as markers of a strongly expressed concern with preserving Macau's unique culture, so much a part of this writer's work, but food references also reflect the author's lament at the passing of an age. Food is therefore woven into the author's memory and his sense of identity, and nowhere is this revealed more clearly than in his most well-known work of fiction, the novel A Trança Feiticeira.
The novel's plot is simple. It is in the detail of everyday life in Macau as it affects the hero and the heroine, that A Trança Feiticeira, shines a torch into the apparent confusion of what it means to be Macanese, above all for an author originating in one of the territory's older mixed families. Adozindo is the only son of a well-to-do Macanese family that is nevertheless not as rich as it once was. He is the product of considerable mixture down the centuries, with Dutch, Portuguese and a hint of Oriental ancestry. His father, Aurélio, hopes that he will carry on the family's import/export firm, but injected with new capital that the wealthy young widow, Lucrécia might bring through marriage to his son. Lucrécia is not the ideal partner envisaged by Adozindo's family given her widow's status, and the fact that she is the daughter of a lowly Portuguese soldier and a local peasant woman, but the capital she has inherited from Santerra, her late husband, suggests that this is a major factor in papering over her past. Adozindo is, however, a playboy, and Lucrécia is only one of his conquests among many others. One of these is the impoverished water seller, Ah Leng, to whose 'trança feiticeira', Adozindo is inexplicably attracted. Ah Leng repudiates the advances of Adozindo, who is regarded as a foreigner, or kwai, in the Chinese quarter of town, but she eventually succumbs to him and the two embark on an affair that eventually sees both of them banished from their respective communities. Much of the novel, set during the 1930s, focusses on their adaptation to each other's culture, their eventual rehabilitation into their communities and Adozindo's final reconciliation with his family. It is a novel that, through Adozindo and Ah Leng evokes the hybrid culture of Macau, in which food is often alluded to. Indeed, the importance of food at certain seminal points in the story, seems to illustrate the shifting identities of both main characters, in particular Adozindo.
In the beginning, Adozindo is the spoilt, relatively privileged gadabout, protected by his indulgent family, secure in a Macanese patriarchy that is as yet still unthreatened by the forces of history gathering on the horizon in the form of the Japanese occupation of large parts of China and the War of the Pacific. His father is a generous entertainer and giver of dinner parties, which we assume broadly consist of dishes that the family consider Portuguese (but are more essentially Macanese). Adozindo's hobbies are those of his class, and consist of fishing trips and picnics around the bay of Macau. He speaks Cantonese, and he does not hesitate to refresh himself at the stalls and bars selling to fu, in the same way that the local Chinese might do. So he has inevitably adopted some of the eating habits of the Chinese, not to mention other cultural mores, without assuming for one moment that he is Chinese. Indeed, the Chinese area of the city, the notorious Cheok Chai Un, is a strange and hostile place to him, much as the so-called Christian city is to Ah Leng initially.
Food plays an important part later as the relationship between Adozindo and Ah Leng develops to the point when he finds himself invited to her hovel. She has prepared a meal of crab cooked in black bean sauce, and a particularly fragrant tea, which serve as conduits to his seduction and the consumation of their physical attraction to one another (it is, of course, no coincidence that crab, in Chinese cuisine, is appreciated for its assumed aphrodisiac qualities). The food and drink are not foreign to Adozindo, and the relationship between them is one of social distance rather than cultural alienation. Not long after this encounter, Aurélio prevails upon his son to accept Lucrécia's invitation to dinner, as a result of which he hopes an announcement of their engagement will be made. And so we see Adozindo at the other end of town, openly visiting the widow's mansion that he has only entered before in clandestine fashion. Here the food is sumptuous, but of course prepared by Lucrécia's chef. As Adozindo embarks on the soup course, he recognizes its quality, but ponders on his preference for Macanese food: 'O jantar era de comida de pão, à europeia. Preferiria comida de arroz, isto é, à macaense' (56). But Lucrécia is out to impress him with an array of 'cristais, talheres', and 'pratos', not to mention fine wines from her late husband's cellar, all of which she would confidently assume, were she to know, would wipe the floor with her humble rival's chopsticks, bowls and tea. The fresh sea bass, 'mergulhado num molho que dava um sabor divinal', followed by 'a carne estufada, uma carne vinda de propósito de Hong Kong, da Dairy Farm', are the types of dishes that mark off the highest echelons of the Macanese elite from the middle and lower social orders, food that would not be out of place in the Governor's Palace. In the event, Adozindo's marriage proposal is never proferred, Lucrécia gets drunk, and her lover withdraws after a closing brandy. The affair in effect ends at that point.
When the spoilt young Adozindo and the resourceful Ah Leng are thrown together in their exile within Macau, they live from hand to mouth while trying to negotiate a future together. Tensions revolve around cultural difference, one of which is food. Adozindo's resentment is directed towards his companion's frugal cuisine based on rice and vegetables, she ultimately yearns for her former existence in the Chinese quarter. There is a temporary separation when she decides to leave him, during which time Adozindo, as if to reassert his 'Portuguese' identity, comforts himself by spending his last few savings on a steak and chips (bife com ovo a cavalo) at none other than Fat Siu Lao: 'Nunca lhe souberam tão bem os ovos estrelados, a clara tostadinha nos bordos, o bife grosso e enorme, o monte de cebolas e batatas. Calculou que estivesse a bater os lábios, mas não se importava. Regou tudo com meia-garrafa de tinto que naquela ocasião suplantava qualquer vinho francês de marca elegante da garrafeira de Santerra' (92). This, therefore, is Adozindo's 'hometown' cooking: middle of the road, popular Portuguese, knocked back with half a bottle of 'vinho de mesa'.
After their reconciliation, Adozindo and Ah Leng settle down to a life of domesticity. This part of the book, which is in part autobiographical, details the cultural adjustments that both make. Adozindo begins to appreciate the qualities of his wife's cooking, tastes in music, and understanding of Cantonese opera, while she adjusts to eating bread, drinking coffee, and going to the cinema. He never eats with chopsticks, while she finds sugar in tea an alien concept. With regard to Portuguese cuisine, the narrator notes, 'ainda não conseguia o apuramento ideal na comida macaense e na portuguesa. Faltavam-lhe os ensinamentos duma cozinheira de mão cheia' (130). The only Macanese people they socialise with at this stage are poorer ones who were 'muito limitados no mister', a revealing comment, for it suggests that for the narrator, proper Macanese food was that prepared and eaten in the houses of the traditional elite – not, it goes without saying, Lucrécia's nouveau riche cuisine, but that of Adozindo's family and their ilk, food associated with the routine Catholic festivities, the social gatherings, the renowned 'chá gordo' that Fernandes, through his main character, identified as binding the community together. It is the Macanese food of the 'casa-grande' rather than the 'senzala'. But it is also clear that certain foods are closely associated with Adozindo's nostalgia, and here the Chinese delicacies of the street vendors mingle with the Macanese dishes of his childhood home: 'Respondia-lhe, da embocadura duma escadaria, o vendilhão de <> e de <>, os bolos de catupá, bolos quentes de arroz gomoso, carne de porco e ovo salgado de pata, embrulhados em folhas de bananeira. Eram sons que enchiam de nostalgia a noite e evocavam a infância e as suas delícias' (119). Later, when thinking back to his parental home, time-honoured Macanese dishes are recalled: 'Moviam-no saudades (…...) dos pratos macaenses que, em casa dos pais, eram uma especialidade: o empadão de massa fina, com a sua chincha de galinha, cogumelos e nacos de porco, a capela, de sabor a queijo e azeitona preta, o sarrabulho de molho apimentado. Dos condimentos que acompanham o arroz, como o missó-cristão, o peixe esmargal, o limão de Timor e o balichão macaense' (135-6).
Adozindo's eventual re-admission into the society of the 'Cidade Cristã', along with his wife, who remains proudly Chinese but has herself entered the hybrid world of the Macanese through baptism and learning to express herself in Portuguese, is partly engineered by Ah Leng herself, who charms the domineering Macanese matriarch, Dona Capitolina, into renting them one of her houses, her devotion to Santo António, the patron of the parish in which Adozindo was brought up, and this reappearance of the young couple and their family in society eventually leads to Adozindo's reconciliation with his father. This is accompanied by a re-integration into the social life of the community, for Adozindo has already been invited by his landlady's son to go on a fishing trip with him, and to join them in a St John's Day picnic to partake in the 'tradicional arroz carregado com porco balichão tamarindo' (161).
What then do food references in the novel tell us about Macanese cuisine and culinary tastes? If Adozindo is typical, then he is at home with Chinese food as he is with Portuguese, although the latter is a comforter and re-statement of an identity at a time when he is in exile from his community. But food, for Fernandes, who occasionally uses his hero to convey his sentiments on this, is intricately linked to the author's overwhelming nostalgia1. Here, it is not always clear what his nostalgia is directed at specifically. Certainly, there is a yearning for the days of his youth, but also there is a lament for the passing of an age, for what he refers to as the 'boa e abundante vida da era patriarcal' (160), when traditional Macanese dishes were eaten in the home. In this sense, Macanese food was about eating in, and not eating out. In this sense too, it is the food of an enclosed circle, a secret food – hence the importance of secret recipes handed down by the women of the house from generation to generation. It is a food you are invited to partake of, and so enter the community, rather than being yours of right. But it is also a food that is threatened by modernity, by growing urbanization, the loss of the rural space that the Macanese elite once ranged over on their hunting and shooting expeditions. Here, Fernandes's nostalgia extends backwards beyond his own lifespan. In the introduction to his collection of stories, Mong Há, he writes: 'Em tempo mais remoto caçavam-se nas várzeas a rola, a narceja, os passarinhos ou pardais do arrozal, os rice-birds que a cozinha do Restaurante Fat Sio Lau tornava saborosíssimos e se comiam assados com oleoso pão torrado em forma triangular e pulverizados por uma pimenta especial. O meu pai falava ainda de almoçaradas de arroz-de-passarinhos amanteigado, um prato hoje inteiramente defunto da gastronomia ou mesa macaenses' (5). Maybe the current speciality of Fat Siu Lau, roast pigeon made to a secret recipe, is the last example of a whole variety of wild fowl dishes that the surrounding countryside once provided, proving that cuisines evolve in accordance with both what is available, and what is marketable. But the loss of a rural hinterland is central to the twin props of identity: memory and nostalgia, and Fernandes's evocation of Macanese food is an expression of this lament for a world that has gone for ever. The balance between town and country has been lost: Macau is no longer surrounded by hunting grounds, but by urban China, the surrounding metropolis of Zhuhai, which dwarfs Macau itself. And yet, ironically, Macanese food is probably more readily available than ever before. Any number of restaurants in modern-day Macau may be able to serve 'carne de porco balichão tamarindo', but it is not the dish of Fernandes's youth. It is served, consumed and paid for in another social and cultural context – it has been reduced to a commodity rather than remaining the expression of a community's stability and cohesion.
*Paper presented at the conference of the American Portuguese Studies Association, Brown University, 7-9 October 2010.
In Goa, there is a well-known restaurant called Nostalgia, which is famed for its traditional Goan food, including, according to its website, 'bolo sansrival', a dessert that “is practically non-existent in Goa anymore”. This little reference seems to vindicate the restaurant's name, and therefore its mission: to preserve a cuisine, elements of which have been lost, and that is, by implication, under threat of possible disappearance. If Goans had little or no chance to proclaim a culinary identity to the world, such was the speed with which Goa was absorbed into India in 1961, the Macanese further East, had more time, a full twelve years between the signing of the Luso-Chinese accord in 1987, and the handover of the territory to Beijing in 1999. During this period, restaurants advertising Macanese food (as opposed to Portuguese or Chinese) proliferated. Yet, what is Macanese food exactly?
Macanese cuisine reflects, in many ways, the evolution of the Macanese as an ethnic group, or at least a frontier ethnicity occupying the ambivalent world between western and eastern cultures, absorbing influences from Malay, Indian, Chinese and Portuguese roots, but also open to other influences as well. It is no coincidence, for example, that one of the most widely known Macanese dishes, minchi, is derived from the English word mince, and is a dish based on minced, or ground, meat. If there is an origin to Macanese cuisine, then it is commonly assumed to have begun with the adaptation of Portuguese dishes to different ingredients, depending on what was available as a substitute to the original components of a dish, and on the interpretation given to it by the cook or chef. Thus, the Macanese tacho is a kind of local evolution of the Portuguese cozido, while a regional Portuguese dish such as 'sarrabulho' reappears in Macanese cuisine. Given the early historical links between Macau and Malacca, and the presence of Malay women accompanying the first Portuguese settlers in Macau, it is not surprising that some signature dishes of Macau cuisine bear a close resemblance to those produced in Malacca and even in Goa. Lacassá is no other than Malay/Singapore laksa, consumed nowadays in any number of Thai and Asian fusion chains across Europe and North America, while the use of 'balichão', or shrimp paste in a number of Macanese dishes, echoes influences of 'balchan' in Malay cooking. Then there is the ubiquitous piri-piri chicken, often termed in Macau 'galinha africana', and served as part of a lunch deal to day trippers to the territory. If the term luso-tropical could be applied to any dish, 'galinha africana' would no doubt qualify, anecdotally originating in an adaptation of grilled chicken marinaded in pepper sauce, popular among Mozambican soldiers stationed in Macau up until the 1960s, to a Chinese predilection for larger amounts of sauce. Interestingly, 'galinha africana' is still a new kid on the block, and does not have the time-honoured pedigree of some other famous Macanese dishes.
It is probably true to say that when people are placed in a position in which they have to define identity, or what they think is authentic about their identity, they are forced into a degree of self-consciousness that in turn produces confusion and disagreement. One of the oldest restaurants in Macau, Fat Siu Lau, established at the beginning of the twentieth century by a Chinese entrepreneur, happily served Portuguese and local dishes for many decades, as we shall see. Nowadays, its signature dish is roast pigeon, prepared in a secret marinade, and it is advertised as being typically Macanese. But pigeon is also associated with Cantonese cusine, so it is obvious that the delicacy is a highly localised variant of a more generally regional dish, unless, of course, the cooking of pigeon spread from Macau into the adjacent province of Guangdong. At the other, western end of the spectrum, tourists are encouraged to try the typically Macanese soup called 'caldo verde', suggesting that the tourist authorities often cannot distinguish between Portuguese and Macanese culinary traditions. It is important to see Macanese cuisine as being situated on a kind of culinary continuum between Portugal and China, with inputs from traditions in between, that is, from along the old oceanic trading routes developed by the Portuguese. Like any cuisine, it is subject to change and re-invention, as old recipes are lost (often along with the availability of ingredients), and new ones evolve, and like many cuisines associated with an ethnic minority, such as the Macanese, food, the nostalgia for 'hometown' cooking, are woven into the group's cultural expression. In literature, the fiction of Henrique de Senna Fernandes is full of culinary references. They feature as markers of a strongly expressed concern with preserving Macau's unique culture, so much a part of this writer's work, but food references also reflect the author's lament at the passing of an age. Food is therefore woven into the author's memory and his sense of identity, and nowhere is this revealed more clearly than in his most well-known work of fiction, the novel A Trança Feiticeira.
The novel's plot is simple. It is in the detail of everyday life in Macau as it affects the hero and the heroine, that A Trança Feiticeira, shines a torch into the apparent confusion of what it means to be Macanese, above all for an author originating in one of the territory's older mixed families. Adozindo is the only son of a well-to-do Macanese family that is nevertheless not as rich as it once was. He is the product of considerable mixture down the centuries, with Dutch, Portuguese and a hint of Oriental ancestry. His father, Aurélio, hopes that he will carry on the family's import/export firm, but injected with new capital that the wealthy young widow, Lucrécia might bring through marriage to his son. Lucrécia is not the ideal partner envisaged by Adozindo's family given her widow's status, and the fact that she is the daughter of a lowly Portuguese soldier and a local peasant woman, but the capital she has inherited from Santerra, her late husband, suggests that this is a major factor in papering over her past. Adozindo is, however, a playboy, and Lucrécia is only one of his conquests among many others. One of these is the impoverished water seller, Ah Leng, to whose 'trança feiticeira', Adozindo is inexplicably attracted. Ah Leng repudiates the advances of Adozindo, who is regarded as a foreigner, or kwai, in the Chinese quarter of town, but she eventually succumbs to him and the two embark on an affair that eventually sees both of them banished from their respective communities. Much of the novel, set during the 1930s, focusses on their adaptation to each other's culture, their eventual rehabilitation into their communities and Adozindo's final reconciliation with his family. It is a novel that, through Adozindo and Ah Leng evokes the hybrid culture of Macau, in which food is often alluded to. Indeed, the importance of food at certain seminal points in the story, seems to illustrate the shifting identities of both main characters, in particular Adozindo.
In the beginning, Adozindo is the spoilt, relatively privileged gadabout, protected by his indulgent family, secure in a Macanese patriarchy that is as yet still unthreatened by the forces of history gathering on the horizon in the form of the Japanese occupation of large parts of China and the War of the Pacific. His father is a generous entertainer and giver of dinner parties, which we assume broadly consist of dishes that the family consider Portuguese (but are more essentially Macanese). Adozindo's hobbies are those of his class, and consist of fishing trips and picnics around the bay of Macau. He speaks Cantonese, and he does not hesitate to refresh himself at the stalls and bars selling to fu, in the same way that the local Chinese might do. So he has inevitably adopted some of the eating habits of the Chinese, not to mention other cultural mores, without assuming for one moment that he is Chinese. Indeed, the Chinese area of the city, the notorious Cheok Chai Un, is a strange and hostile place to him, much as the so-called Christian city is to Ah Leng initially.
Food plays an important part later as the relationship between Adozindo and Ah Leng develops to the point when he finds himself invited to her hovel. She has prepared a meal of crab cooked in black bean sauce, and a particularly fragrant tea, which serve as conduits to his seduction and the consumation of their physical attraction to one another (it is, of course, no coincidence that crab, in Chinese cuisine, is appreciated for its assumed aphrodisiac qualities). The food and drink are not foreign to Adozindo, and the relationship between them is one of social distance rather than cultural alienation. Not long after this encounter, Aurélio prevails upon his son to accept Lucrécia's invitation to dinner, as a result of which he hopes an announcement of their engagement will be made. And so we see Adozindo at the other end of town, openly visiting the widow's mansion that he has only entered before in clandestine fashion. Here the food is sumptuous, but of course prepared by Lucrécia's chef. As Adozindo embarks on the soup course, he recognizes its quality, but ponders on his preference for Macanese food: 'O jantar era de comida de pão, à europeia. Preferiria comida de arroz, isto é, à macaense' (56). But Lucrécia is out to impress him with an array of 'cristais, talheres', and 'pratos', not to mention fine wines from her late husband's cellar, all of which she would confidently assume, were she to know, would wipe the floor with her humble rival's chopsticks, bowls and tea. The fresh sea bass, 'mergulhado num molho que dava um sabor divinal', followed by 'a carne estufada, uma carne vinda de propósito de Hong Kong, da Dairy Farm', are the types of dishes that mark off the highest echelons of the Macanese elite from the middle and lower social orders, food that would not be out of place in the Governor's Palace. In the event, Adozindo's marriage proposal is never proferred, Lucrécia gets drunk, and her lover withdraws after a closing brandy. The affair in effect ends at that point.
When the spoilt young Adozindo and the resourceful Ah Leng are thrown together in their exile within Macau, they live from hand to mouth while trying to negotiate a future together. Tensions revolve around cultural difference, one of which is food. Adozindo's resentment is directed towards his companion's frugal cuisine based on rice and vegetables, she ultimately yearns for her former existence in the Chinese quarter. There is a temporary separation when she decides to leave him, during which time Adozindo, as if to reassert his 'Portuguese' identity, comforts himself by spending his last few savings on a steak and chips (bife com ovo a cavalo) at none other than Fat Siu Lao: 'Nunca lhe souberam tão bem os ovos estrelados, a clara tostadinha nos bordos, o bife grosso e enorme, o monte de cebolas e batatas. Calculou que estivesse a bater os lábios, mas não se importava. Regou tudo com meia-garrafa de tinto que naquela ocasião suplantava qualquer vinho francês de marca elegante da garrafeira de Santerra' (92). This, therefore, is Adozindo's 'hometown' cooking: middle of the road, popular Portuguese, knocked back with half a bottle of 'vinho de mesa'.
After their reconciliation, Adozindo and Ah Leng settle down to a life of domesticity. This part of the book, which is in part autobiographical, details the cultural adjustments that both make. Adozindo begins to appreciate the qualities of his wife's cooking, tastes in music, and understanding of Cantonese opera, while she adjusts to eating bread, drinking coffee, and going to the cinema. He never eats with chopsticks, while she finds sugar in tea an alien concept. With regard to Portuguese cuisine, the narrator notes, 'ainda não conseguia o apuramento ideal na comida macaense e na portuguesa. Faltavam-lhe os ensinamentos duma cozinheira de mão cheia' (130). The only Macanese people they socialise with at this stage are poorer ones who were 'muito limitados no mister', a revealing comment, for it suggests that for the narrator, proper Macanese food was that prepared and eaten in the houses of the traditional elite – not, it goes without saying, Lucrécia's nouveau riche cuisine, but that of Adozindo's family and their ilk, food associated with the routine Catholic festivities, the social gatherings, the renowned 'chá gordo' that Fernandes, through his main character, identified as binding the community together. It is the Macanese food of the 'casa-grande' rather than the 'senzala'. But it is also clear that certain foods are closely associated with Adozindo's nostalgia, and here the Chinese delicacies of the street vendors mingle with the Macanese dishes of his childhood home: 'Respondia-lhe, da embocadura duma escadaria, o vendilhão de <
Adozindo's eventual re-admission into the society of the 'Cidade Cristã', along with his wife, who remains proudly Chinese but has herself entered the hybrid world of the Macanese through baptism and learning to express herself in Portuguese, is partly engineered by Ah Leng herself, who charms the domineering Macanese matriarch, Dona Capitolina, into renting them one of her houses, her devotion to Santo António, the patron of the parish in which Adozindo was brought up, and this reappearance of the young couple and their family in society eventually leads to Adozindo's reconciliation with his father. This is accompanied by a re-integration into the social life of the community, for Adozindo has already been invited by his landlady's son to go on a fishing trip with him, and to join them in a St John's Day picnic to partake in the 'tradicional arroz carregado com porco balichão tamarindo' (161).
What then do food references in the novel tell us about Macanese cuisine and culinary tastes? If Adozindo is typical, then he is at home with Chinese food as he is with Portuguese, although the latter is a comforter and re-statement of an identity at a time when he is in exile from his community. But food, for Fernandes, who occasionally uses his hero to convey his sentiments on this, is intricately linked to the author's overwhelming nostalgia1. Here, it is not always clear what his nostalgia is directed at specifically. Certainly, there is a yearning for the days of his youth, but also there is a lament for the passing of an age, for what he refers to as the 'boa e abundante vida da era patriarcal' (160), when traditional Macanese dishes were eaten in the home. In this sense, Macanese food was about eating in, and not eating out. In this sense too, it is the food of an enclosed circle, a secret food – hence the importance of secret recipes handed down by the women of the house from generation to generation. It is a food you are invited to partake of, and so enter the community, rather than being yours of right. But it is also a food that is threatened by modernity, by growing urbanization, the loss of the rural space that the Macanese elite once ranged over on their hunting and shooting expeditions. Here, Fernandes's nostalgia extends backwards beyond his own lifespan. In the introduction to his collection of stories, Mong Há, he writes: 'Em tempo mais remoto caçavam-se nas várzeas a rola, a narceja, os passarinhos ou pardais do arrozal, os rice-birds que a cozinha do Restaurante Fat Sio Lau tornava saborosíssimos e se comiam assados com oleoso pão torrado em forma triangular e pulverizados por uma pimenta especial. O meu pai falava ainda de almoçaradas de arroz-de-passarinhos amanteigado, um prato hoje inteiramente defunto da gastronomia ou mesa macaenses' (5). Maybe the current speciality of Fat Siu Lau, roast pigeon made to a secret recipe, is the last example of a whole variety of wild fowl dishes that the surrounding countryside once provided, proving that cuisines evolve in accordance with both what is available, and what is marketable. But the loss of a rural hinterland is central to the twin props of identity: memory and nostalgia, and Fernandes's evocation of Macanese food is an expression of this lament for a world that has gone for ever. The balance between town and country has been lost: Macau is no longer surrounded by hunting grounds, but by urban China, the surrounding metropolis of Zhuhai, which dwarfs Macau itself. And yet, ironically, Macanese food is probably more readily available than ever before. Any number of restaurants in modern-day Macau may be able to serve 'carne de porco balichão tamarindo', but it is not the dish of Fernandes's youth. It is served, consumed and paid for in another social and cultural context – it has been reduced to a commodity rather than remaining the expression of a community's stability and cohesion.
*Paper presented at the conference of the American Portuguese Studies Association, Brown University, 7-9 October 2010.
Friday, 1 October 2010
A Pioneer of Women's Writing in Macau
A Pioneer of Women's Writing in Macau: Deolinda da Conceição*
It is often the case in emerging literatures that one work assumes a particular importance when a country’s literary history comes to be written. One only has to think of Mozambican author Luís Bernardo Honwana’s lone collection of short stories, We Killed Many-Dog and Other Stories, and the special place it has in the literature of Mozambique, or Alan Paton’s iconic novel of apartheid South Africa, Cry the Beloved Country. In Macau, Deolinda da Conceição’s collection of stories, Cheong-sam – A Cabaia (Cheongsam – the Kebaya), published in 1956, occupies a special place, not only in the literature of Macau, but in the wider world of lusophone literature and, arguably, of the literature of China. Six of the twenty-seven tales included in the collection were translated into English and feature in the anthology of Macau prose writing, Visions of China: Stories from Macau, published by the Hong Kong University Press in 2002.
Deolinda da Conceição was a unique figure in a number of ways. Born in Macau in 1914, like many Macanese she migrated to Shanghai in the 1930s in search of better opportunities than the Portuguese territory could, at that stage, provide. In due course, and by that time the mother of two children, she was forced to flee southwards before the Japanese invasion and occupation of Shanghai, and headed for Hong Kong, where she taught in a school for Portuguese refugees. In 1941, when the Japanese overran Hong Kong, she was briefly interned in a concentration camp. After the end of the war, and by this time a divorcee, she joined the staff in 1947 of the newly established Macau paper, Notícias de Macau, whose editor, Herman Machado Monteiro, was a Republican exile from the Salazar dictatorship. Her colleagues on the paper included other Macanese intellectuals, such as Luís Gonzaga Gomes, the author of unparalleled studies on the popular Chinese cultural heritage of Macau, and José dos Santos Ferreira, the main exponent of literature in ‘patois’, the local creole language. Deolinda da Conceição was the first female journalist in Macau, and was responsible for the women’s page of Notícias de Macau, but some of the stories subsequently published in her sole collection, originally appeared in the newspaper. She was therefore very much of her time, in the sense that she lived through a period of considerable social change and political conflict in China, while also witnessing first hand the brutalities of war. She was also in advance of the age in which she lived. As a divorcee, at least until her second marriage in 1948, and a journalist at a time when there were few women in the professions, and living in what was still a highly conservative society (as a divorcee, she was even barred from teaching), she must have seemed a disturbingly free spirit in the sheltered world of post-war Macau.
Her stories reflect, in their themes, the cultural fusions and confusions of Macau and China during the first half of the twentieth century, and her particular focus is the situation of women, very often caught between traditional expectations of their role in society or within marriage, and the new possibilities open to them as a result of Western influences in China’s great coastal cities. To some extent, the very title of the collection symbolizes the multicultural background against which these female dramas are enacted, for the cheongsam, the one-piece dress adapted from the northern Chinese qípáo, and worn by upper-class women in Shanghai from the 1920s, came to synthesize the process of modernizing East-West fusion in the area of women’s fashion and became a symbol of feminine allurement. On the other hand, the kebaya, a type of long blouse, was the product of a much earlier process of fusion. There is a debate about the origins of this garment, but what we can be reasonably sure of is that it was introduced by the Portuguese into Southern China from Southeast Asia not long after the foundation of Macau. By the time the cheongsam was developed, the kebaya was therefore a traditional, native form of clothing among Chinese women, so that the journey undertaken by Deolinda’s female characters, is also a journey between the kebaya and the cheongsam, between tradition and modernity. Nowhere is this more evident than in the title story of the collection, ‘Cheongsam’, which was also one of the stories included in the anthology mentioned above. It centres on a young Chinese couple who had married in obedience to their parents’ wishes. The young wife, educated in the West, has unwittingly grown away from her traditional Chinese cultural roots, and to some extent is on a journey of no return. As a consequence of this, there is a likelihood of later incompatibility with her traditionally educated Chinese husband, and this begins to occur following the Japanese invasion and the couple’s forced flight southwards, first to Shanghai, and then to a city we assume to be Macau. The husband’s inability to provide for his wife and their children obliges her to look for work as a nightclub hostess, which enables the family to eat, but has a severe effect on the husband’s self-esteem, eventually leading to jealousy, resentment and murderous instincts. If the outcome of the story is tragic, Deolinda concentrates both on the social and economic influences leading to this outcome, and also on the moral issues surrounding the wife’s actions, not to mention the husband’s initial acceptance of them. The more the wife frequents rich foreign men in what amounts to high-class prostitution, the more she despises her husband and forgets her duties as a mother. And yet what is the underlying cause of her behaviour and the ultimate tragedy? Is it the war and hardship? Is it the fact that they have married to fulfil their parents’ rather than their own wishes? Or is it the wife’s pursuit of a dream for which her Western education is partly to blame? It is this more universal, moral problem that we find ourselves reflecting upon, and which transforms this story into an exemplary tale that we can all somehow identify with. The same could be said of other stories in the collection, from the tale of a Eurasian fashion model who, as a result of a disfiguring accident, is forced to give up her glamorous lifestyle and rethink her mission in life in a positive way, to a poor girl’s obsession with possessing a jade ring, and the moral price she might be prepared to pay in order to do so. Other tales focus on the theme of inter-racial love, and the tragedy of shame and prejudice besetting the offspring of such relationships in what was still a profoundly colonial society. As a product herself of Macau’s melting pot, the theme was particularly close to the author’s heart.
We cannot tell how Deolinda da Conceição’s work might have developed over the years of profound change that were to follow, for she died prematurely in 1957, not long after returning from her only trip to Portugal, a country with which she, like many Macanese, strongly identified as her fatherland. We cannot tell whether that loyalty might have been subtly re-defined if she had lived to witness, albeit at a distance, the long drawn-out colonial wars in Africa, and the growing obstinacy of an ailing dictatorship that only came to an end in 1974. More probably, she might have continued to chronicle the lives of the Chinese and Macanese during the topsy-turvy years of the Cultural Revolution, whose effects were felt so closely in her native city. What we are left with, however, is a collection of stories that form a unique contribution to literature in Portuguese, as well as chronicling the moral choices faced by those who are the victims of social injustice or of war, or occasionally the perpetrators of it. They are stories that still have a relevance today, and upon which we can all ponder.
* First published in the Macau Daily Times (Weekend Magazine), 19 July, 2009.
It is often the case in emerging literatures that one work assumes a particular importance when a country’s literary history comes to be written. One only has to think of Mozambican author Luís Bernardo Honwana’s lone collection of short stories, We Killed Many-Dog and Other Stories, and the special place it has in the literature of Mozambique, or Alan Paton’s iconic novel of apartheid South Africa, Cry the Beloved Country. In Macau, Deolinda da Conceição’s collection of stories, Cheong-sam – A Cabaia (Cheongsam – the Kebaya), published in 1956, occupies a special place, not only in the literature of Macau, but in the wider world of lusophone literature and, arguably, of the literature of China. Six of the twenty-seven tales included in the collection were translated into English and feature in the anthology of Macau prose writing, Visions of China: Stories from Macau, published by the Hong Kong University Press in 2002.
Deolinda da Conceição was a unique figure in a number of ways. Born in Macau in 1914, like many Macanese she migrated to Shanghai in the 1930s in search of better opportunities than the Portuguese territory could, at that stage, provide. In due course, and by that time the mother of two children, she was forced to flee southwards before the Japanese invasion and occupation of Shanghai, and headed for Hong Kong, where she taught in a school for Portuguese refugees. In 1941, when the Japanese overran Hong Kong, she was briefly interned in a concentration camp. After the end of the war, and by this time a divorcee, she joined the staff in 1947 of the newly established Macau paper, Notícias de Macau, whose editor, Herman Machado Monteiro, was a Republican exile from the Salazar dictatorship. Her colleagues on the paper included other Macanese intellectuals, such as Luís Gonzaga Gomes, the author of unparalleled studies on the popular Chinese cultural heritage of Macau, and José dos Santos Ferreira, the main exponent of literature in ‘patois’, the local creole language. Deolinda da Conceição was the first female journalist in Macau, and was responsible for the women’s page of Notícias de Macau, but some of the stories subsequently published in her sole collection, originally appeared in the newspaper. She was therefore very much of her time, in the sense that she lived through a period of considerable social change and political conflict in China, while also witnessing first hand the brutalities of war. She was also in advance of the age in which she lived. As a divorcee, at least until her second marriage in 1948, and a journalist at a time when there were few women in the professions, and living in what was still a highly conservative society (as a divorcee, she was even barred from teaching), she must have seemed a disturbingly free spirit in the sheltered world of post-war Macau.
Her stories reflect, in their themes, the cultural fusions and confusions of Macau and China during the first half of the twentieth century, and her particular focus is the situation of women, very often caught between traditional expectations of their role in society or within marriage, and the new possibilities open to them as a result of Western influences in China’s great coastal cities. To some extent, the very title of the collection symbolizes the multicultural background against which these female dramas are enacted, for the cheongsam, the one-piece dress adapted from the northern Chinese qípáo, and worn by upper-class women in Shanghai from the 1920s, came to synthesize the process of modernizing East-West fusion in the area of women’s fashion and became a symbol of feminine allurement. On the other hand, the kebaya, a type of long blouse, was the product of a much earlier process of fusion. There is a debate about the origins of this garment, but what we can be reasonably sure of is that it was introduced by the Portuguese into Southern China from Southeast Asia not long after the foundation of Macau. By the time the cheongsam was developed, the kebaya was therefore a traditional, native form of clothing among Chinese women, so that the journey undertaken by Deolinda’s female characters, is also a journey between the kebaya and the cheongsam, between tradition and modernity. Nowhere is this more evident than in the title story of the collection, ‘Cheongsam’, which was also one of the stories included in the anthology mentioned above. It centres on a young Chinese couple who had married in obedience to their parents’ wishes. The young wife, educated in the West, has unwittingly grown away from her traditional Chinese cultural roots, and to some extent is on a journey of no return. As a consequence of this, there is a likelihood of later incompatibility with her traditionally educated Chinese husband, and this begins to occur following the Japanese invasion and the couple’s forced flight southwards, first to Shanghai, and then to a city we assume to be Macau. The husband’s inability to provide for his wife and their children obliges her to look for work as a nightclub hostess, which enables the family to eat, but has a severe effect on the husband’s self-esteem, eventually leading to jealousy, resentment and murderous instincts. If the outcome of the story is tragic, Deolinda concentrates both on the social and economic influences leading to this outcome, and also on the moral issues surrounding the wife’s actions, not to mention the husband’s initial acceptance of them. The more the wife frequents rich foreign men in what amounts to high-class prostitution, the more she despises her husband and forgets her duties as a mother. And yet what is the underlying cause of her behaviour and the ultimate tragedy? Is it the war and hardship? Is it the fact that they have married to fulfil their parents’ rather than their own wishes? Or is it the wife’s pursuit of a dream for which her Western education is partly to blame? It is this more universal, moral problem that we find ourselves reflecting upon, and which transforms this story into an exemplary tale that we can all somehow identify with. The same could be said of other stories in the collection, from the tale of a Eurasian fashion model who, as a result of a disfiguring accident, is forced to give up her glamorous lifestyle and rethink her mission in life in a positive way, to a poor girl’s obsession with possessing a jade ring, and the moral price she might be prepared to pay in order to do so. Other tales focus on the theme of inter-racial love, and the tragedy of shame and prejudice besetting the offspring of such relationships in what was still a profoundly colonial society. As a product herself of Macau’s melting pot, the theme was particularly close to the author’s heart.
We cannot tell how Deolinda da Conceição’s work might have developed over the years of profound change that were to follow, for she died prematurely in 1957, not long after returning from her only trip to Portugal, a country with which she, like many Macanese, strongly identified as her fatherland. We cannot tell whether that loyalty might have been subtly re-defined if she had lived to witness, albeit at a distance, the long drawn-out colonial wars in Africa, and the growing obstinacy of an ailing dictatorship that only came to an end in 1974. More probably, she might have continued to chronicle the lives of the Chinese and Macanese during the topsy-turvy years of the Cultural Revolution, whose effects were felt so closely in her native city. What we are left with, however, is a collection of stories that form a unique contribution to literature in Portuguese, as well as chronicling the moral choices faced by those who are the victims of social injustice or of war, or occasionally the perpetrators of it. They are stories that still have a relevance today, and upon which we can all ponder.
* First published in the Macau Daily Times (Weekend Magazine), 19 July, 2009.
Tuesday, 7 September 2010
The Portuguese of Malaysia and Singapore
The Portuguese of Malaysia and their novelist, Rex Shelley.*
The Portuguese Eurasians of the Malay Peninsula are close historical cousins of the Macanese, Macau’s native sons (and daughters) of Portuguese and Asian ancestry. For nearly one hundred and fifty years after its seizure by the Portuguese in 1511, the port city of Malacca was an important commercial hub in trade between Goa and China and Japan. Early Portuguese settlers in Macau inevitably came through Malacca, and very often they brought with them Malay women. Unlike Macau, of course, Malacca was seized by the Dutch in 1641, before coming under British control in the early nineteenth century. But the Portuguese creole language, Kristang, which has affinities with Macau’s Patuá, continued to be spoken by the Portuguese Eurasian community, albeit with some Dutch and later English influences. The city lost much of its previous commercial status even under the Dutch, whose main centre of operations in the region was Batavia. But it was during British rule that the centre of commercial power shifted away from Malacca to Penang and then Singapore. Malacca’s importance therefore dwindled, rather like Macau’s decline after the foundation of Hong Kong. Like the Macanese, who migrated from their tiny homeland to seek employment in Hong Kong, Shanghai and the Chinese Treaty Ports, the Portuguese Eurasians in British-ruled Malaya spread out from Malacca, seeking employment in other, more thriving metropolitan environments, in particular Singapore. They took with them their language, their cuisine, and of course, their Roman Catholicism, along with the cultural memory of their heartland. Like the Macanese, the Portuguese Eurasians of the Malay Peninsula constituted a buffer group, a frontier ethnicity whose position within the colonial order was ambiguous. They occupied the lower to middle ranks of the civil service and the police, and they worked for banks and trading houses. They were the most Oriental of the Westerners, but the most Western of the Orientals. Finally, during the volatile years of the 1950s and 60s, which witnessed the rise of Malay nationalism, the communist insurgency, and eventual independence, these Eurasians began to migrate and form diasporas elsewhere. Many went to Australia. So once again, like the Macanese, the lives of these Malay Portuguese were affected by the profound political changes that followed the end of the Second World War.
Rex Shelley is the novelist who has done most to highlight in his work, the life of the Eurasian community in Malaysia and Singapore during the most turbulent period of the region’s recent history, beginning with the Japanese invasion of 1941 and culminating in the tensions between Sukarno’s newly independent Indonesia and Malaysia and Singapore as they lurched towards their own independence, a period known in regional history as 'Konfrontasi'. Shelley, who died in 2009, was himself of partial Portuguese Eurasian origin. Born in 1930, he experienced the Japanese occupation of Malaya, took degrees in Singapore and in England, and spent his professional life in the civil service and in business. He began publishing novels when he was in his sixties, which is why it is tempting to see an analogy with Macau’s Henrique de Senna Fernandes. Perhaps both writers wanted to explain to a wider world the history and drama of the community from which they sprang, but that was becoming increasingly vulnerable to change and the forces of dispersal in the post-war world. Shelley wrote four novels in which characters in one are mentioned or feature in another, thus enhancing the notion of a communal history and an inter-related set of individual and family experiences. The novel for which he will be most remembered is probably The Shrimp People (1991).
The prologue to Shelley’s first novel explains in almost mythical terms the origins of the Portuguese Eurasians. A wounded Portuguese sailor, a survivor of the initial expedition to Malacca in 1509 by Diogo Lopes de Sequeira, is tended to by a native woman, after the Portuguese have been driven back by local forces. The man’s name is Rodrigues, the woman’s, Bedah. Together, they settle by the seashore, and devote themselves to catching shrimps to make the paste that will become a culinary mark of the Portuguese Eurasians of Malaya. This is the celebrated 'belachan', which of course appears in Macanese cuisine as 'balichão'. From the depths of the sixteenth century, the scene then switches to a bar in present-day Australia, where members of the Portuguese Eurasian diaspora are talking of the folks back home. From these conversations, the novel gradually focuses on the story of its heroine, Bertha Rodrigues, daughter of a policeman in Singapore, a direct descendant of the original Portuguese pioneer. The story traces her passage from youth to adulthood, her exploits on the hockey field, her failed marriage following an unhappy love affair, and her involvement in espionage and the nationalist struggle for Malaysia and Singapore. Bertha is intuitive rather than intellectual, she is active, a doer, someone who is adaptable to changing circumstances, but ultimately places loyalty to her country above her attraction to Hartono, the Indonesian infiltrator who seeks to destabilise British-ruled Malaysia in the name of Sukarno’s revolutionary nationalism. At once a novel of social customs and of history, it also incorporates elements of spy fiction. But above all, it is a novel that evokes the life and culture of a small community that straddles and fuses a variety of cultural influences. Linguistically, Portuguese (or at least its creolised form) has been lost, except in Malacca, but religion and the social life that revolves around the church continue to be important for the Eurasian community. British culture, including the English language, but with a local Malay flavour, has long supplanted Portuguese, at least among Bertha's generation. At the same time, food is an important feature of the community’s identity, and The Shrimp People is littered with references to dishes and to eating. Indeed, the Eurasians, apart from attachment to their own ethnic cuisine with its blend of Portuguese and Asian influences, seem at home across the various food tastes of the Malay peninsula, which perhaps underlines their cultural adaptability and therefore their claim to a sense of belonging to the country.
Another of his novels, People of the Pear Tree (1993), is set during the Japanese occupation, and has as one of its themes the relationship between the invaders and the Eurasians, through the romantic attraction of a Japanese officer for a young beauty by the name of Anna Perera. For Captain Junichiro, the Portuguese Eurasians are a mystery, a kind of exotic 'other'. More generally, the Japanese authorities found it difficult to classify this group: were they Asian, and therefore potential allies, or were they alien Europeans, and therefore enemies? Anna's predicament is that she will have to choose between the sensitive, artistic, and scrupulously polite Japanese who is her suitor, and the English officer who is sent to liaise with the local guerrillas fighting the occupying forces in the jungle near where the bulk of the Eurasian community from Singapore has been effectively interned. Her brother, Gus, on the other hand, joins the resistance. Here then, we have what might be termed a war novel, but like Shelley's other work, it engages with the concerns of his own Eurasian community, and the question of where its loyalty lies. If the Pereras are 'a noisy family of all brown bodies interspersing their dreadful English with Portuguese', Anna's Britishness emerges when she finds herself singing along with her brother the old wartime favourite, 'There'll always be an England'. On the other hand, in discussing their future, they are torn between the choice of being absorbed into the wider Asian population and thus losing their specific identity, or reaching out to other Eurasian groups in a bid to create a homeland of their own. Historically, the third possibility of migration emerged in the 1950s and 60s, bringing with it further problems of adaptation, integration, and the preservation of a unique cultural identity. Shelley touched upon this in his first novel, but migration and the experience of the Portuguese Eurasian diaspora in the wider world has been a theme taken up by other writers from Malaysia and Singapore. I look forward to returning to the subject of these writers in the near future.
DAVID BROOKSHAW
* Published in the Macau Daily Times (Weekend Magazine), 10 July, 2010.
The Portuguese Eurasians of the Malay Peninsula are close historical cousins of the Macanese, Macau’s native sons (and daughters) of Portuguese and Asian ancestry. For nearly one hundred and fifty years after its seizure by the Portuguese in 1511, the port city of Malacca was an important commercial hub in trade between Goa and China and Japan. Early Portuguese settlers in Macau inevitably came through Malacca, and very often they brought with them Malay women. Unlike Macau, of course, Malacca was seized by the Dutch in 1641, before coming under British control in the early nineteenth century. But the Portuguese creole language, Kristang, which has affinities with Macau’s Patuá, continued to be spoken by the Portuguese Eurasian community, albeit with some Dutch and later English influences. The city lost much of its previous commercial status even under the Dutch, whose main centre of operations in the region was Batavia. But it was during British rule that the centre of commercial power shifted away from Malacca to Penang and then Singapore. Malacca’s importance therefore dwindled, rather like Macau’s decline after the foundation of Hong Kong. Like the Macanese, who migrated from their tiny homeland to seek employment in Hong Kong, Shanghai and the Chinese Treaty Ports, the Portuguese Eurasians in British-ruled Malaya spread out from Malacca, seeking employment in other, more thriving metropolitan environments, in particular Singapore. They took with them their language, their cuisine, and of course, their Roman Catholicism, along with the cultural memory of their heartland. Like the Macanese, the Portuguese Eurasians of the Malay Peninsula constituted a buffer group, a frontier ethnicity whose position within the colonial order was ambiguous. They occupied the lower to middle ranks of the civil service and the police, and they worked for banks and trading houses. They were the most Oriental of the Westerners, but the most Western of the Orientals. Finally, during the volatile years of the 1950s and 60s, which witnessed the rise of Malay nationalism, the communist insurgency, and eventual independence, these Eurasians began to migrate and form diasporas elsewhere. Many went to Australia. So once again, like the Macanese, the lives of these Malay Portuguese were affected by the profound political changes that followed the end of the Second World War.
Rex Shelley is the novelist who has done most to highlight in his work, the life of the Eurasian community in Malaysia and Singapore during the most turbulent period of the region’s recent history, beginning with the Japanese invasion of 1941 and culminating in the tensions between Sukarno’s newly independent Indonesia and Malaysia and Singapore as they lurched towards their own independence, a period known in regional history as 'Konfrontasi'. Shelley, who died in 2009, was himself of partial Portuguese Eurasian origin. Born in 1930, he experienced the Japanese occupation of Malaya, took degrees in Singapore and in England, and spent his professional life in the civil service and in business. He began publishing novels when he was in his sixties, which is why it is tempting to see an analogy with Macau’s Henrique de Senna Fernandes. Perhaps both writers wanted to explain to a wider world the history and drama of the community from which they sprang, but that was becoming increasingly vulnerable to change and the forces of dispersal in the post-war world. Shelley wrote four novels in which characters in one are mentioned or feature in another, thus enhancing the notion of a communal history and an inter-related set of individual and family experiences. The novel for which he will be most remembered is probably The Shrimp People (1991).
The prologue to Shelley’s first novel explains in almost mythical terms the origins of the Portuguese Eurasians. A wounded Portuguese sailor, a survivor of the initial expedition to Malacca in 1509 by Diogo Lopes de Sequeira, is tended to by a native woman, after the Portuguese have been driven back by local forces. The man’s name is Rodrigues, the woman’s, Bedah. Together, they settle by the seashore, and devote themselves to catching shrimps to make the paste that will become a culinary mark of the Portuguese Eurasians of Malaya. This is the celebrated 'belachan', which of course appears in Macanese cuisine as 'balichão'. From the depths of the sixteenth century, the scene then switches to a bar in present-day Australia, where members of the Portuguese Eurasian diaspora are talking of the folks back home. From these conversations, the novel gradually focuses on the story of its heroine, Bertha Rodrigues, daughter of a policeman in Singapore, a direct descendant of the original Portuguese pioneer. The story traces her passage from youth to adulthood, her exploits on the hockey field, her failed marriage following an unhappy love affair, and her involvement in espionage and the nationalist struggle for Malaysia and Singapore. Bertha is intuitive rather than intellectual, she is active, a doer, someone who is adaptable to changing circumstances, but ultimately places loyalty to her country above her attraction to Hartono, the Indonesian infiltrator who seeks to destabilise British-ruled Malaysia in the name of Sukarno’s revolutionary nationalism. At once a novel of social customs and of history, it also incorporates elements of spy fiction. But above all, it is a novel that evokes the life and culture of a small community that straddles and fuses a variety of cultural influences. Linguistically, Portuguese (or at least its creolised form) has been lost, except in Malacca, but religion and the social life that revolves around the church continue to be important for the Eurasian community. British culture, including the English language, but with a local Malay flavour, has long supplanted Portuguese, at least among Bertha's generation. At the same time, food is an important feature of the community’s identity, and The Shrimp People is littered with references to dishes and to eating. Indeed, the Eurasians, apart from attachment to their own ethnic cuisine with its blend of Portuguese and Asian influences, seem at home across the various food tastes of the Malay peninsula, which perhaps underlines their cultural adaptability and therefore their claim to a sense of belonging to the country.
Another of his novels, People of the Pear Tree (1993), is set during the Japanese occupation, and has as one of its themes the relationship between the invaders and the Eurasians, through the romantic attraction of a Japanese officer for a young beauty by the name of Anna Perera. For Captain Junichiro, the Portuguese Eurasians are a mystery, a kind of exotic 'other'. More generally, the Japanese authorities found it difficult to classify this group: were they Asian, and therefore potential allies, or were they alien Europeans, and therefore enemies? Anna's predicament is that she will have to choose between the sensitive, artistic, and scrupulously polite Japanese who is her suitor, and the English officer who is sent to liaise with the local guerrillas fighting the occupying forces in the jungle near where the bulk of the Eurasian community from Singapore has been effectively interned. Her brother, Gus, on the other hand, joins the resistance. Here then, we have what might be termed a war novel, but like Shelley's other work, it engages with the concerns of his own Eurasian community, and the question of where its loyalty lies. If the Pereras are 'a noisy family of all brown bodies interspersing their dreadful English with Portuguese', Anna's Britishness emerges when she finds herself singing along with her brother the old wartime favourite, 'There'll always be an England'. On the other hand, in discussing their future, they are torn between the choice of being absorbed into the wider Asian population and thus losing their specific identity, or reaching out to other Eurasian groups in a bid to create a homeland of their own. Historically, the third possibility of migration emerged in the 1950s and 60s, bringing with it further problems of adaptation, integration, and the preservation of a unique cultural identity. Shelley touched upon this in his first novel, but migration and the experience of the Portuguese Eurasian diaspora in the wider world has been a theme taken up by other writers from Malaysia and Singapore. I look forward to returning to the subject of these writers in the near future.
DAVID BROOKSHAW
* Published in the Macau Daily Times (Weekend Magazine), 10 July, 2010.
Tuesday, 3 August 2010
Poetry without borders: translating Macau
Poetry without borders: translating Macau*
A decade after the handover, it is encouraging to see that the question of Macau as a literary space, is becoming a point of discussion and debate, and all the more so in the place where it matters most: Macau itself. The Association of Stories in Macao is a non-profit making publishing operation, the aim of which is to disseminate the fiction and poetry of Macau-based authors in English or in translation. Many of the works published so far are by young writers attached to the creative writing programme of the University of Macau's English Department, a programme that has been developed and led by Christopher (Kit) Kelen. Kelen is an Australian poet, artist and critic, who has lived in Macau and in Hong Kong for over ten years, and is a leading light in this latest editorial initiative, having published some of his own work in the series, including his beguiling collection of stories and poems, Macao: a Map of the Seasons (2006). But it is in his coordination of a team of translators that Kelen has sought to bridge the gaping abyss between the linguistic communities in Macau, namely those who write in Chinese, in English and in Portuguese. Two recent anthologies of Macau poetry, I Roll the Dice – Contemporary Macao Poetry (2008), and Portuguese Poets of Macau (2010), are testimony to these efforts. To these, one should add Kelen’s own City of Poets (2009), in which he dons his scholar’s hat to write the first interpretative study of poetry produced in Macau, a kind of companion volume to the anthologies. In the study, he sets out to explore common themes and concerns suggested by authors from different linguistic backgrounds, but who are drawn together by the fact that they inhabit the same geographical space and experience the same everyday preoccupations, but from different cultural perspectives.
There have, of course, been concerted attempts to evoke Macau through literature before. During the ten years leading up to the handover, there was a considerable amount of literary activity in the city, and even one or two attempts to cross the linguistic divide by producing anthologies of poetry containing the work of both Portuguese and Chinese poets, such as that organised by Jorge Arrimar and Yao Jingming under the title of Antologia de Poetas de Macau, and published in 1999. But what proved to be quite a prolific period in the emerging literature of Macau came to a sudden end after the handover for a number of reasons, not least of which was the scaling down, if not outright disappearance of subsidies for publication. Literary movements that seek to evoke a particular place tend to mirror and reflect upon issues of profound change. Macau during the late 1980s and 1990s was on the cusp of such change as Portuguese rule drew to a close, and the city skyline began to emulate that of Hong Kong during what, in retrospect, was a modest construction boom. The decade since 1999 has seen even greater change with the arrival of unbridled casino capitalism, even more spectacular building on ever larger areas of land reclamation, and genuine examples of Macau’s UNESCO-protected architectural heritage rubbing shoulders with postmodern kitsch, whether in the form of lotus-shaped casinos or re-creations of Venetian waterfronts backed by proliferations of mosaic pavements in the Portuguese style. The time has come for literature again, and Kelen and his group are showcasing it through the intermediary of English.
At the same time, there has been a subtle change in approach since the publication of I Roll the Dice. The particular focus for this first anthology was the work of contemporary poets in Macau, most of whom were Chinese, some from Kelen’s creative writing programme. Other poems were by Portuguese or English-speaking residents of Macau. As the editors explained in the introduction, ‘… this is an important book for Macao poetry – precisely because it is in English, because it thus introduces a wide range of current Macao writing in the genre to an international audience’. The confident assertion is true, of course, but not unconditionally so. There is the small matter of distribution and marketing, which plays its part in determining readership. Internationally known lusophone writers such as José Saramago, Mia Couto and José Eduardo Agualusa have undoubtedly broadened their readership by being translated into English, but they are probably read more consistently by greater numbers of lusophone readers in the world than they are by anglophones, and one should not forget their popularity among readers of their work in French, Italian, German, Spanish and other translations. Ultimately, the English-speaking world is still a linguistic prison, if only larger and with more inmates than most others.
This brings us to the position of English in Macau, where it is understood and spoken more widely than the region’s second official language, Portuguese. As we all know, the encroachment of English gathered pace with the expansion of British and American commercial power into the Pacific and South China Sea in the Nineteenth Century. There is nothing new here, for English has been familiar to the Macanese ever since the establishment of the East India Company in their city over two hundred years ago. But what seems to be happening now is that the special Luso-Cantonese character of the city is being squeezed, on the one hand by China’s main dialect, Mandarin, and on the other by the pan-European dialect of English. Yet it is precisely the Portuguese heritage that gives Macau its specific character in relation to other cities in China, and its linguistic complexity is far richer than, say, Hong Kong, its postcolonial neighbour. With Portuguese, Cantonese, Mandarin and English, and a creole language of long tradition, which, even if no longer spoken, is still a mark of Macanese identity, Macau is a peculiarly multi-lingual space. Nor have we even mentioned Thai, Filipino, Tetum, and languages from the Indian subcontinent, that are spoken by minority communities. Macau is a place of translation in more ways than one, but for its writers to have any hope of dialogue with one another, there must be a to-ing and fro-ing between and among its constituent linguistic parts. In this sense, English should just be another tool for expressing Macau rather than the language of coalescence. Kelen and his team seem to have sensed this: it is, for example, no coincidence that the latest anthology, Portuguese Poets of Macau, features the Portuguese original alongside the English translation. Containing examples of poems by early writers to have left their mark on Macau, such as Camões, Garrett and Pessanha, the collection also covers a broad range of contemporary poets who have resided in the city, or others who were born and raised here. In all, the anthology contains work by over forty poets, rendered into English by a team of fifteen translators. At the same time, single-author collections published during the last two years include Kelen's As from the Living Page – One Hundred Poems for Yao Feng, in English, Portuguese and Chinese, John Mateer's Republic of the East, featuring Portuguese translations alongside the English originals, and Agnes Vong's Glitter on the Sketch, in English and Chinese. The overall effect is of poetry being relayed from one language to another and back again in an exercise of poetic give and take.
It has often been argued that multi-cultural, and pluri-lingual environments have a special role in equipping people for the challenges of globalization. Mia Couto, the Mozambican writer, claimed in a speech to an international conference in Stockholm, that Africans 'may be better suited to modernity than even they themselves think' because of their ability to speak more than one African language in addition to a European one. In reality, many Mozambicans speak excellent English in addition to Portuguese, and the country’s recent adherence to the organization of francophone countries, suggests that some, at least, will be adding French to their linguistic repertoire. What could be said for Couto's native country, with its long coastline, and its openness to outside influences from the Atlantic world and from across the Indian Ocean, could be articulated with even more certainty for Macau, which was born out of international trade, and has never quite lost the cultural personality that goes with that position. The Association of Stories in Macao reflects this personality in literature, enabling, as it does, writers to acknowledge each other across linguistic borders, and to understand both their common experiences as well as their differences in relation to the city they inhabit. As Kelen so aptly states in his study, the new Macao poetry ‘reveals a place-based poetics deeply concerned with Macao identity, its evolution and potentials’. Part of this potential surely lies in the very languages used to express its poetic self.
DAVID BROOKSHAW
*Published in the Macau Daily Times (Weekend Magazine), 19 June, 2010.
A decade after the handover, it is encouraging to see that the question of Macau as a literary space, is becoming a point of discussion and debate, and all the more so in the place where it matters most: Macau itself. The Association of Stories in Macao is a non-profit making publishing operation, the aim of which is to disseminate the fiction and poetry of Macau-based authors in English or in translation. Many of the works published so far are by young writers attached to the creative writing programme of the University of Macau's English Department, a programme that has been developed and led by Christopher (Kit) Kelen. Kelen is an Australian poet, artist and critic, who has lived in Macau and in Hong Kong for over ten years, and is a leading light in this latest editorial initiative, having published some of his own work in the series, including his beguiling collection of stories and poems, Macao: a Map of the Seasons (2006). But it is in his coordination of a team of translators that Kelen has sought to bridge the gaping abyss between the linguistic communities in Macau, namely those who write in Chinese, in English and in Portuguese. Two recent anthologies of Macau poetry, I Roll the Dice – Contemporary Macao Poetry (2008), and Portuguese Poets of Macau (2010), are testimony to these efforts. To these, one should add Kelen’s own City of Poets (2009), in which he dons his scholar’s hat to write the first interpretative study of poetry produced in Macau, a kind of companion volume to the anthologies. In the study, he sets out to explore common themes and concerns suggested by authors from different linguistic backgrounds, but who are drawn together by the fact that they inhabit the same geographical space and experience the same everyday preoccupations, but from different cultural perspectives.
There have, of course, been concerted attempts to evoke Macau through literature before. During the ten years leading up to the handover, there was a considerable amount of literary activity in the city, and even one or two attempts to cross the linguistic divide by producing anthologies of poetry containing the work of both Portuguese and Chinese poets, such as that organised by Jorge Arrimar and Yao Jingming under the title of Antologia de Poetas de Macau, and published in 1999. But what proved to be quite a prolific period in the emerging literature of Macau came to a sudden end after the handover for a number of reasons, not least of which was the scaling down, if not outright disappearance of subsidies for publication. Literary movements that seek to evoke a particular place tend to mirror and reflect upon issues of profound change. Macau during the late 1980s and 1990s was on the cusp of such change as Portuguese rule drew to a close, and the city skyline began to emulate that of Hong Kong during what, in retrospect, was a modest construction boom. The decade since 1999 has seen even greater change with the arrival of unbridled casino capitalism, even more spectacular building on ever larger areas of land reclamation, and genuine examples of Macau’s UNESCO-protected architectural heritage rubbing shoulders with postmodern kitsch, whether in the form of lotus-shaped casinos or re-creations of Venetian waterfronts backed by proliferations of mosaic pavements in the Portuguese style. The time has come for literature again, and Kelen and his group are showcasing it through the intermediary of English.
At the same time, there has been a subtle change in approach since the publication of I Roll the Dice. The particular focus for this first anthology was the work of contemporary poets in Macau, most of whom were Chinese, some from Kelen’s creative writing programme. Other poems were by Portuguese or English-speaking residents of Macau. As the editors explained in the introduction, ‘… this is an important book for Macao poetry – precisely because it is in English, because it thus introduces a wide range of current Macao writing in the genre to an international audience’. The confident assertion is true, of course, but not unconditionally so. There is the small matter of distribution and marketing, which plays its part in determining readership. Internationally known lusophone writers such as José Saramago, Mia Couto and José Eduardo Agualusa have undoubtedly broadened their readership by being translated into English, but they are probably read more consistently by greater numbers of lusophone readers in the world than they are by anglophones, and one should not forget their popularity among readers of their work in French, Italian, German, Spanish and other translations. Ultimately, the English-speaking world is still a linguistic prison, if only larger and with more inmates than most others.
This brings us to the position of English in Macau, where it is understood and spoken more widely than the region’s second official language, Portuguese. As we all know, the encroachment of English gathered pace with the expansion of British and American commercial power into the Pacific and South China Sea in the Nineteenth Century. There is nothing new here, for English has been familiar to the Macanese ever since the establishment of the East India Company in their city over two hundred years ago. But what seems to be happening now is that the special Luso-Cantonese character of the city is being squeezed, on the one hand by China’s main dialect, Mandarin, and on the other by the pan-European dialect of English. Yet it is precisely the Portuguese heritage that gives Macau its specific character in relation to other cities in China, and its linguistic complexity is far richer than, say, Hong Kong, its postcolonial neighbour. With Portuguese, Cantonese, Mandarin and English, and a creole language of long tradition, which, even if no longer spoken, is still a mark of Macanese identity, Macau is a peculiarly multi-lingual space. Nor have we even mentioned Thai, Filipino, Tetum, and languages from the Indian subcontinent, that are spoken by minority communities. Macau is a place of translation in more ways than one, but for its writers to have any hope of dialogue with one another, there must be a to-ing and fro-ing between and among its constituent linguistic parts. In this sense, English should just be another tool for expressing Macau rather than the language of coalescence. Kelen and his team seem to have sensed this: it is, for example, no coincidence that the latest anthology, Portuguese Poets of Macau, features the Portuguese original alongside the English translation. Containing examples of poems by early writers to have left their mark on Macau, such as Camões, Garrett and Pessanha, the collection also covers a broad range of contemporary poets who have resided in the city, or others who were born and raised here. In all, the anthology contains work by over forty poets, rendered into English by a team of fifteen translators. At the same time, single-author collections published during the last two years include Kelen's As from the Living Page – One Hundred Poems for Yao Feng, in English, Portuguese and Chinese, John Mateer's Republic of the East, featuring Portuguese translations alongside the English originals, and Agnes Vong's Glitter on the Sketch, in English and Chinese. The overall effect is of poetry being relayed from one language to another and back again in an exercise of poetic give and take.
It has often been argued that multi-cultural, and pluri-lingual environments have a special role in equipping people for the challenges of globalization. Mia Couto, the Mozambican writer, claimed in a speech to an international conference in Stockholm, that Africans 'may be better suited to modernity than even they themselves think' because of their ability to speak more than one African language in addition to a European one. In reality, many Mozambicans speak excellent English in addition to Portuguese, and the country’s recent adherence to the organization of francophone countries, suggests that some, at least, will be adding French to their linguistic repertoire. What could be said for Couto's native country, with its long coastline, and its openness to outside influences from the Atlantic world and from across the Indian Ocean, could be articulated with even more certainty for Macau, which was born out of international trade, and has never quite lost the cultural personality that goes with that position. The Association of Stories in Macao reflects this personality in literature, enabling, as it does, writers to acknowledge each other across linguistic borders, and to understand both their common experiences as well as their differences in relation to the city they inhabit. As Kelen so aptly states in his study, the new Macao poetry ‘reveals a place-based poetics deeply concerned with Macao identity, its evolution and potentials’. Part of this potential surely lies in the very languages used to express its poetic self.
DAVID BROOKSHAW
*Published in the Macau Daily Times (Weekend Magazine), 19 June, 2010.
Monday, 19 July 2010
Fiction awaiting the arrival of history: Martin Edmond's Luca Antara.*
The cover of the 2009 British edition of Martin Edmond’s beguiling book, Luca Antara, features the outline of a face of indeterminate ethnicity upon an image of the Australian interior, and a sixteenth-century sailing ship with a large red cross on its billowing sail. We could be forgiven for assuming that the book is a literary re-enactment of the old debate surrounding the supposed ‘discovery’ of Australia by the Portuguese nearly two centuries before the arrival of James Cook, and indeed, if that was what we were looking for, we would not be disappointed. However, Edmond’s book is far more than a mere contribution to the theories put forward by Kenneth McIntyre and more recently Peter Trickett, based on their readings of the so-called Dieppe Map, and refuted by various Australian academics.
Luca Antara defies genre. It interweaves elements of autobiography, biography, bookish criticism, history and fiction. It includes a quest motif, and to cap it all, it was located by this reader in the ‘travel literature’ section of one of his favourite local bookshops. Edmond is the author of a number of books, and has lived in Sydney since 1981, when he left his native New Zealand. In Sydney, he has worked as a taxi driver, but the persona he reveals in that part of Luca Antara that might loosely be termed a memoir, is one that has an abiding interest in the remote history of travel in the Pacific, an obsession that is fed by a Borgesian fascination with the labyrinthine world of second-hand bookshops, from where his own personal library is re-stocked with a regular stream of bibliographical curiosities. It is this that leads him eventually to the figure of Manoel Godinho de Herédia, the Luso-Malay cosmographer and supposed sponsor of an expedition from Malacca at the beginning of the seventeenth century to discover the fabled southern continent. But Edmond, the bookish taxi driver, is a more general bibliophile who has his own favourite authors, one of whom is none other than Fernando Pessoa, Portugal’s greatest poet of the twentieth century and who, rather as Edmond inhabited the demimonde of migrants and the unsettled in inner-city Sydney, led an apparently anonymous life around the bars and cafés of central Lisbon in the 1920s and 30s, while inventing an alternative world through the creation of his heteronyms. Indeed, it is the relationship between the artist and his invention, the plausibility of the hoax that fascinates Edmond. Following this line of argument, for Edmond, Ern Malley, the literary creation who fooled the worthies of the Australian literary establishment in the 1950s, is as real as Pessoa’s fictitious personalities such as Alberto Caeiro, Bernardo Soares, and Álvaro de Campos. And when Pessoa’s other heteronym, Ricardo Reis, appropriated by José Saramago in his novel, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, declares his independence from his original inventor, the act merely underlines Edmond’s attachment to the importance of reader reception in determining the authenticity of character. What is important is not that people are deceived by the hoax, but rather the inner truths of what the hoax, or in the case of Pessoa, the heteronyms, might have to impart, and this consideration will become important in what goes on to constitute the central quest of the book.
As the narrative meanders along, Edmond develops an obsession with the figure of Herédia, after obtaining an English translation of his works from the Kuala Lumpur branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. His curiosity about Herédia’s supposed commissioning of a voyage of discovery to Luca Antara undertaken by his servant in 1610, leads him to wonder whether, to quote him, ‘it would be possible to fabricate an account of this voyage in such a way as to give it not just credence as a work of fiction but the unmistakable aura of truth’. In the end he decides against the attempt, but instead is put in touch with the enigmatic Henry Klang, in Malacca, who claims to have seen and copied the account of the voyage of Herédia’s servant, António da Nova, to Australia, while he was working in the national archive of Malaysia. It is his English rendition, or summary, of the supposed document that is fed to Edmond via e-mail, and then re-spun into the book, Luca Antara. So he has ended up doing what he had decided against doing, that is, he has fabricated a story based on supposed archival evidence, but which he later discovers has mysteriously disappeared. We are back to the author’s professed fascination with Pessoa, for we are unsure whether the oddball Klang is not merely Edmond’s heteronym – another obsessive misfit like himself, a Portuguese Catholic Eurasian, and therefore like Edmond in Australia, a kind of outsider within. But even if Klang exists, and we are led to believe that he does, for Edmond tracks him down on an investigative trip to Malacca, then we are still left in little doubt that António da Nova is, after all, Klang’s invention, a spiritual ancestor, as Klang himself terms him, a kind of heteronym from the deep history of Portuguese expansion in Southeast Asia. As for António da Nova, what does his story say about the supposed arrival of the Portuguese in North-western Australia at the beginning of the seventeenth century? Nothing beyond providing us with an enthralling, but plausible tale of romance. Stranger things happened in Portugal’s far-flung empire. António’s contracting of a sea-going ‘prahu’, or fishing boat, to take him further south than any European had ventured before, his abandonment on the coast of Luca Antara, his astonishing encounter with a Portuguese New Christian degradee, and his flight with Estrela, the degradee’s mixed-race daughter on another vessel carrying a cargo of the prized sea-slugs for the Chinese market, all come as no surprise to those who are familiar with historically verified incidents in Portuguese overseas history. Portuguese adventurers ranged far beyond the confines of their main commercial hubs of Goa, Malacca, Macassar, and Macau, cropping up around the coasts of the Bay of Bengal and throughout the so-called Spice Islands. The arrival of a lone Portuguese in Australia is an intriguing possibility that clearly appeals to Edmond’s romantic sensibilities.
In the final part of the book, which takes on the characteristics of a travel narrative, Edmond returns from Malacca to Australia, but attempts to follow the route of António da Nova through Java, Bali and on to the island of Flores, on a succession of ever more decrepit ferries, and in the company of various more or less picturesque travellers. His encounter with the myths of local pygmies on the island of Flores, the residue of some prehistoric population dating from the time when the islands were joined to Australia, before the seas flooded and destroyed the lands between these islands, lead Edmond to surmise that perhaps Herédia’s depiction of Luca Antara was no more than the lost continent of his sixteenth-century imagination. To put it another way, Herédia was his own heteronym, and Luca Antara a lost paradise waiting to be regained: Luca Antara was fiction awaiting the arrival of history.
DAVID BROOKSHAW
* Published in the Macau Daily Times (Weekend Magazine), on 8 May 2010.
The cover of the 2009 British edition of Martin Edmond’s beguiling book, Luca Antara, features the outline of a face of indeterminate ethnicity upon an image of the Australian interior, and a sixteenth-century sailing ship with a large red cross on its billowing sail. We could be forgiven for assuming that the book is a literary re-enactment of the old debate surrounding the supposed ‘discovery’ of Australia by the Portuguese nearly two centuries before the arrival of James Cook, and indeed, if that was what we were looking for, we would not be disappointed. However, Edmond’s book is far more than a mere contribution to the theories put forward by Kenneth McIntyre and more recently Peter Trickett, based on their readings of the so-called Dieppe Map, and refuted by various Australian academics.
Luca Antara defies genre. It interweaves elements of autobiography, biography, bookish criticism, history and fiction. It includes a quest motif, and to cap it all, it was located by this reader in the ‘travel literature’ section of one of his favourite local bookshops. Edmond is the author of a number of books, and has lived in Sydney since 1981, when he left his native New Zealand. In Sydney, he has worked as a taxi driver, but the persona he reveals in that part of Luca Antara that might loosely be termed a memoir, is one that has an abiding interest in the remote history of travel in the Pacific, an obsession that is fed by a Borgesian fascination with the labyrinthine world of second-hand bookshops, from where his own personal library is re-stocked with a regular stream of bibliographical curiosities. It is this that leads him eventually to the figure of Manoel Godinho de Herédia, the Luso-Malay cosmographer and supposed sponsor of an expedition from Malacca at the beginning of the seventeenth century to discover the fabled southern continent. But Edmond, the bookish taxi driver, is a more general bibliophile who has his own favourite authors, one of whom is none other than Fernando Pessoa, Portugal’s greatest poet of the twentieth century and who, rather as Edmond inhabited the demimonde of migrants and the unsettled in inner-city Sydney, led an apparently anonymous life around the bars and cafés of central Lisbon in the 1920s and 30s, while inventing an alternative world through the creation of his heteronyms. Indeed, it is the relationship between the artist and his invention, the plausibility of the hoax that fascinates Edmond. Following this line of argument, for Edmond, Ern Malley, the literary creation who fooled the worthies of the Australian literary establishment in the 1950s, is as real as Pessoa’s fictitious personalities such as Alberto Caeiro, Bernardo Soares, and Álvaro de Campos. And when Pessoa’s other heteronym, Ricardo Reis, appropriated by José Saramago in his novel, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, declares his independence from his original inventor, the act merely underlines Edmond’s attachment to the importance of reader reception in determining the authenticity of character. What is important is not that people are deceived by the hoax, but rather the inner truths of what the hoax, or in the case of Pessoa, the heteronyms, might have to impart, and this consideration will become important in what goes on to constitute the central quest of the book.
As the narrative meanders along, Edmond develops an obsession with the figure of Herédia, after obtaining an English translation of his works from the Kuala Lumpur branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. His curiosity about Herédia’s supposed commissioning of a voyage of discovery to Luca Antara undertaken by his servant in 1610, leads him to wonder whether, to quote him, ‘it would be possible to fabricate an account of this voyage in such a way as to give it not just credence as a work of fiction but the unmistakable aura of truth’. In the end he decides against the attempt, but instead is put in touch with the enigmatic Henry Klang, in Malacca, who claims to have seen and copied the account of the voyage of Herédia’s servant, António da Nova, to Australia, while he was working in the national archive of Malaysia. It is his English rendition, or summary, of the supposed document that is fed to Edmond via e-mail, and then re-spun into the book, Luca Antara. So he has ended up doing what he had decided against doing, that is, he has fabricated a story based on supposed archival evidence, but which he later discovers has mysteriously disappeared. We are back to the author’s professed fascination with Pessoa, for we are unsure whether the oddball Klang is not merely Edmond’s heteronym – another obsessive misfit like himself, a Portuguese Catholic Eurasian, and therefore like Edmond in Australia, a kind of outsider within. But even if Klang exists, and we are led to believe that he does, for Edmond tracks him down on an investigative trip to Malacca, then we are still left in little doubt that António da Nova is, after all, Klang’s invention, a spiritual ancestor, as Klang himself terms him, a kind of heteronym from the deep history of Portuguese expansion in Southeast Asia. As for António da Nova, what does his story say about the supposed arrival of the Portuguese in North-western Australia at the beginning of the seventeenth century? Nothing beyond providing us with an enthralling, but plausible tale of romance. Stranger things happened in Portugal’s far-flung empire. António’s contracting of a sea-going ‘prahu’, or fishing boat, to take him further south than any European had ventured before, his abandonment on the coast of Luca Antara, his astonishing encounter with a Portuguese New Christian degradee, and his flight with Estrela, the degradee’s mixed-race daughter on another vessel carrying a cargo of the prized sea-slugs for the Chinese market, all come as no surprise to those who are familiar with historically verified incidents in Portuguese overseas history. Portuguese adventurers ranged far beyond the confines of their main commercial hubs of Goa, Malacca, Macassar, and Macau, cropping up around the coasts of the Bay of Bengal and throughout the so-called Spice Islands. The arrival of a lone Portuguese in Australia is an intriguing possibility that clearly appeals to Edmond’s romantic sensibilities.
In the final part of the book, which takes on the characteristics of a travel narrative, Edmond returns from Malacca to Australia, but attempts to follow the route of António da Nova through Java, Bali and on to the island of Flores, on a succession of ever more decrepit ferries, and in the company of various more or less picturesque travellers. His encounter with the myths of local pygmies on the island of Flores, the residue of some prehistoric population dating from the time when the islands were joined to Australia, before the seas flooded and destroyed the lands between these islands, lead Edmond to surmise that perhaps Herédia’s depiction of Luca Antara was no more than the lost continent of his sixteenth-century imagination. To put it another way, Herédia was his own heteronym, and Luca Antara a lost paradise waiting to be regained: Luca Antara was fiction awaiting the arrival of history.
DAVID BROOKSHAW
* Published in the Macau Daily Times (Weekend Magazine), on 8 May 2010.
Saturday, 19 June 2010
Teolinda Gersão, The Word Tree
The Word Tree, by Teolinda Gersão: a novel of colonial Mozambique.*
Last month saw the launch, in English translation, of Portuguese writer Teolinda Gersão’s novel, A Árvore das Palavras, first published in Lisbon in 1996. The Word Tree, rendered from the original by prize-winning translator, Margaret Jull Costa, and published by Dedalus, is the first novel by Gersão to appear in English. It is set in Mozambique during the late colonial period, but unlike Lídia Jorge’s The Murmuring Coast, or António Lobo Antunes’s South of Nowhere, set respectively in Mozambique and Angola during the height of the colonial war, Gersão’s novel has as its background the city of Lourenço Marques (now called Maputo) in the early 1960s, on the eve of the conflict that would only end with the overthrow of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974.
The novel’s central character is Gita, a young girl born in Mozambique to white parents from Portugal. It is about her growing up and coming of age, but it is also about her own identification with the country and continent of her birth, facilitated in part by the presence of the black maid and Gita's former wet nurse, Lóia, and her daughter Orquídea, a kind of adopted sister with whom Gita finds the freedom from the inhibitions placed upon her by her biological mother, Amélia, who is obsessed with being accepted into the higher echelons of colonial society. Indeed, in some ways, Amélia is the novel’s most intriguing character because she represents an attitude towards her surroundings that is generally overlooked or dismissed by mainstream postcolonial literature. Amélia arrived in Lourenço Marques as a mail-order bride to Laureano Capítulo, a surname that translates into English as 'Chapter', the significance of which becomes apparent as the story progresses. ‘Casamento por procuração’ (marriage by procurement) was a common practice in Portuguese Africa, for it allowed impoverished women in Portugal to exchange hardship and lack of prospects back home for greater comfort and privilege in the tropics, through marriage to a white colonial male. What she discovers is that Laureano cannot match her ambitions to rise socially and enter the ‘grande bourgeoisie’ of the colonial capital. Instead, all she can do is live on its fringes as a seamstress, while compensating for her lack of status by dyeing her hair blond, enrolling her daughter in ballet classes, and eventually entering into a correspondence, under the fantasy name of Patricia Hart, with an Australian Portuguese who is looking for a wife, and takes her back to Sydney, so closing her Mozambique ‘chapter’. More suburban Madame Bovary than Moll Flanders, and certainly less raunchy than Defoe’s distant heroine, Amélia nevertheless illustrates the interface between home and empire in her journey from the stagnant gloom of Salazar’s Portugal to the open possibilities of a wider colonial world.
By the time Amélia abandons the family, Gita is in secondary school. She experiences romance with a wealthy school friend who lets her down, dabbles in student politics, and as the colony lurches towards its remote bush war, leaves for Portugal to stay with distant relatives and work her way through college. It is perhaps a paradox that while Amélia had left the imprisonment of rural Portugal in pursuit of freedom, Gita abandons the cosmopolitan freedoms of her native land, for the constraints of a motherland she has never known, but which inevitably now represents the next chapter in her own life, and a possible route to her own freedom as a young woman. And if Gita’s mother, resentful and fearful of blacks when in Mozambique, has taken flight to Australia, the last bastion of white settler safety, the abandoned Laureano, whose lack of social ambition was only matched by his love of Africa, has gone native in the autumn of his existence, by fathering a child with the local woman who has taken over as his live-in housekeeper. Unable to cater for Amélia's aspirations in the highly stratified society of colonial Lourenço Marques, Laureano has also unwittingly embarked on another, perhaps final chapter in his life. The novel is a snapshot of Portugal and Portuguese Africa in the middle years of the twentieth century as the country’s elderly and embattled regime sought to maintain order at home, and its ailing empire intact.
Above all, The Word Tree is an atmospheric novel, which evokes a time and a place in impressive detail. The contours and topography of the city are precisely mapped, and there are myriad references to neighbourhoods, streets, squares, buildings, shops, cafés and beaches, which lend the narrative greater authenticity. Gersão never lived in Mozambique for any length of time, but only visited it during long summer holidays in her youth. The narrative is therefore, to some extent, an exercise in memory. Perhaps its most abiding quality is its evocation of the space, freedom and open possibilities that Africa represented for the sons and daughters of a colonial population that has now largely been displaced, and who, like Gersão, only have memories of the environment in which they grew up. In recalling Africa, it is simultaneously recalling the innocent idealism of youth. Gita’s thoughts, as she embarks for Lisbon, speak to the memories of many who, like her, identified more with the land of their birth than they did with that from where their parents had originally migrated, a mother country they had only heard about: “The world that I’m leaving behind. Rivers, plantations, savannahs, palm groves, wide open spaces, broad horizons, and a tree that used to grow in my dreams and that reached up to the sky – what do they know of all that, how can they understand?”
DAVID BROOKSHAW
* Publsihed in the Macau Daily Times (Weekend Magazine), 10 April, 2010.
Last month saw the launch, in English translation, of Portuguese writer Teolinda Gersão’s novel, A Árvore das Palavras, first published in Lisbon in 1996. The Word Tree, rendered from the original by prize-winning translator, Margaret Jull Costa, and published by Dedalus, is the first novel by Gersão to appear in English. It is set in Mozambique during the late colonial period, but unlike Lídia Jorge’s The Murmuring Coast, or António Lobo Antunes’s South of Nowhere, set respectively in Mozambique and Angola during the height of the colonial war, Gersão’s novel has as its background the city of Lourenço Marques (now called Maputo) in the early 1960s, on the eve of the conflict that would only end with the overthrow of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974.
The novel’s central character is Gita, a young girl born in Mozambique to white parents from Portugal. It is about her growing up and coming of age, but it is also about her own identification with the country and continent of her birth, facilitated in part by the presence of the black maid and Gita's former wet nurse, Lóia, and her daughter Orquídea, a kind of adopted sister with whom Gita finds the freedom from the inhibitions placed upon her by her biological mother, Amélia, who is obsessed with being accepted into the higher echelons of colonial society. Indeed, in some ways, Amélia is the novel’s most intriguing character because she represents an attitude towards her surroundings that is generally overlooked or dismissed by mainstream postcolonial literature. Amélia arrived in Lourenço Marques as a mail-order bride to Laureano Capítulo, a surname that translates into English as 'Chapter', the significance of which becomes apparent as the story progresses. ‘Casamento por procuração’ (marriage by procurement) was a common practice in Portuguese Africa, for it allowed impoverished women in Portugal to exchange hardship and lack of prospects back home for greater comfort and privilege in the tropics, through marriage to a white colonial male. What she discovers is that Laureano cannot match her ambitions to rise socially and enter the ‘grande bourgeoisie’ of the colonial capital. Instead, all she can do is live on its fringes as a seamstress, while compensating for her lack of status by dyeing her hair blond, enrolling her daughter in ballet classes, and eventually entering into a correspondence, under the fantasy name of Patricia Hart, with an Australian Portuguese who is looking for a wife, and takes her back to Sydney, so closing her Mozambique ‘chapter’. More suburban Madame Bovary than Moll Flanders, and certainly less raunchy than Defoe’s distant heroine, Amélia nevertheless illustrates the interface between home and empire in her journey from the stagnant gloom of Salazar’s Portugal to the open possibilities of a wider colonial world.
By the time Amélia abandons the family, Gita is in secondary school. She experiences romance with a wealthy school friend who lets her down, dabbles in student politics, and as the colony lurches towards its remote bush war, leaves for Portugal to stay with distant relatives and work her way through college. It is perhaps a paradox that while Amélia had left the imprisonment of rural Portugal in pursuit of freedom, Gita abandons the cosmopolitan freedoms of her native land, for the constraints of a motherland she has never known, but which inevitably now represents the next chapter in her own life, and a possible route to her own freedom as a young woman. And if Gita’s mother, resentful and fearful of blacks when in Mozambique, has taken flight to Australia, the last bastion of white settler safety, the abandoned Laureano, whose lack of social ambition was only matched by his love of Africa, has gone native in the autumn of his existence, by fathering a child with the local woman who has taken over as his live-in housekeeper. Unable to cater for Amélia's aspirations in the highly stratified society of colonial Lourenço Marques, Laureano has also unwittingly embarked on another, perhaps final chapter in his life. The novel is a snapshot of Portugal and Portuguese Africa in the middle years of the twentieth century as the country’s elderly and embattled regime sought to maintain order at home, and its ailing empire intact.
Above all, The Word Tree is an atmospheric novel, which evokes a time and a place in impressive detail. The contours and topography of the city are precisely mapped, and there are myriad references to neighbourhoods, streets, squares, buildings, shops, cafés and beaches, which lend the narrative greater authenticity. Gersão never lived in Mozambique for any length of time, but only visited it during long summer holidays in her youth. The narrative is therefore, to some extent, an exercise in memory. Perhaps its most abiding quality is its evocation of the space, freedom and open possibilities that Africa represented for the sons and daughters of a colonial population that has now largely been displaced, and who, like Gersão, only have memories of the environment in which they grew up. In recalling Africa, it is simultaneously recalling the innocent idealism of youth. Gita’s thoughts, as she embarks for Lisbon, speak to the memories of many who, like her, identified more with the land of their birth than they did with that from where their parents had originally migrated, a mother country they had only heard about: “The world that I’m leaving behind. Rivers, plantations, savannahs, palm groves, wide open spaces, broad horizons, and a tree that used to grow in my dreams and that reached up to the sky – what do they know of all that, how can they understand?”
DAVID BROOKSHAW
* Publsihed in the Macau Daily Times (Weekend Magazine), 10 April, 2010.
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