My Country, Today

        One might as well ask if it really had to take a deep economic crisis to make the portuguese finally understand what the idea of society is meant to signify. One might as well wonder if only a neoliberal shock could show us crystal clear what politics is about. One might also think that only a deep social and economic crisis could awaken us from the civic slumber we had indulged ourselves with. In the meanwhile, one might as well have remembered, perhaps inspired by the examples of past generations, that it takes blood, tears, toil and sweat to actually build anything worthy of admiration. And, by the way, we could also had borne in mind a clear picture of our utter fragility, a constantly renewed consciousness that no man is an island and that there is no such thing as a self-made-man: not in Europe, not even in America and much less in Portugal. We could have learnt the lessons our very landscape taught us: the harsh climate of the north, its rocky stubbornness yielding only to the strength of many arms combined; the dry extensions of the south, their flat horizons turned into blood-stained gold by the sweat of many and the profit of few; and the sea, the never-ending sea, the eternally mysterious sea. We could have remained wise, but we haven't. We could have been faithful to ourselves, but we haven't. And now we’re lost: as we have always been.  

A Post-industrial Vignette and a Driving Song

The density of the landscape slowly melts into the falling night. The hesitant rain, quietly coming and going, dots the windshield with ephemeral drops. I drive through the falling night: I drive back home, my eyes fixed on the red lights of the car in front of me. Postmodern life, I wonder, so replete with suburban roads and constant traffic flows, so glassy and dimly lit, so unpredictable: rhythms of work which are as hesitant as the autumn rain, now coming, now going, as capricious as the changing season. Winter is coming, by the way...

The car in front of me turns left and I unthinkingly probe the night with the high-beam lights. There’s not much to see beyond the flickering radius of the lampposts. Deserted sidewalks, precariously crammed between apparently empty houses and the road; scattered stores, here and there glimmering in the dark; and, overlooking the ensemble, heavy, silent and often crumbling buildings of old textile factories loom beyond the reach of the lights. The factories are everywhere: this is the heart of industrial Minho. Places like Vila das Aves, Moreira de Cónegos, Vizela, Pevidém, places with interesting names that may sometimes sound familiar on account of local football teams. Places of low wages, widespread illiteracy and rampant unemployment.

I stop somewhere among these places to pump fuel. Rising prices, a few cars and a lorry. As I finish pumping a car queues up behind mine. It takes rather long to pay. The lorry driver is telling a guy how easy it is to get a job when one has a driving license for heavy weight vehicles. In the meanwhile the cashier stares at the cash register, apparently unable to deal with some technical problem. The lorry driver completes his idea: “some money is needed to get all the proper licences, of course; prepare to spend some 3000 euros in the process”. The guy, not older than thirty, laughs off the idea: “3000 euros?” he gasps, mentally processing such a huge amount, such an unthinkable fortune; “I would get married if I had 3000 euros; why would I need a job in the first place if I had such money?”. 3000 euros, a driving licence, a job: those things are apparently way beyond the reach of the guy, their sheer inaccessibility making them not even worth the effort of trying. The lorry driver allows himself a little smile, takes his change and leaves.

As this edifying conversation takes place I keep looking at the car behind mine. It didn’t move, even though all pumps had long become available. Some ten minutes have gone by and there it is: why doesn’t its owner simply choose another pump? As I pay I notice that the fuel station staff is growing impatient with the guy. I learn that he must have been there for quite a while: he’s waiting for a coffee; I mean, he’s trying to persuade the staff into giving him a coffee: “I would pay for it if I had 3000 euros”, he amusedly says.

I take my change, slightly disturbed by the passivity of the customer who keeps on waiting behind my car. I’m about to make some gesture, some shoulder shrugging, something that could express some empathy, some regret for the time it took me to pay when I actually see the driver: a middle-aged woman, her eyes blankly looking at some fixed point in the distance; there’s no sign in her whatsoever indicating that she had moved at all during the nearly fifteen minutes it took me to pay; I give up my shoulder shrugging: she simply didn’t see me. In her eyes nothing but absolute nothingness.

I have seen this look on other people’s faces: the look of purposelessness. Time stretches no more than a day for these people, the future lying somewhere in the distance, vanishing beyond the radius of the lampposts, darkened by the crumbling building of some old textile factory. They are utterly demoralized by having nothing to do, nothing to expect, nothing to hope for.

I drive through the night. I turn on the radio: news of austerity darken the darkness even more. I change to another station and some music fills the car. Driving music, how appropriate: this one, to be more precise.

The Meaning of Unemployment

            The two things may seem unrelated but as I was reading about Stuart Hall and Roland Barthes in a book about cultural studies the blog o desemprego tem rosto (unemployment has a face) immediately came to my mind. The website is a one-year long project described by the newspaper which publishes it as a photographic essay made with the aim of giving the Portuguese unemployed a voice of their own: a touch of human actuality to help break down the hegemony of cold statistics and faceless numbers. In terms of layout the concept is remarkably simple: over a dark background a black and white close-up photograph of a face and a mini-interview with questions such as how old are you, how long have you been unemployed, what was your last job, what are your educational achievements, what do you expect the future to be. 

         It is certainly interesting to note how people articulate their speech or, more specifically, their self-representation in the face of the particularly difficult context of their lives and in the broader scope of Portuguese society in general. Contrary to the apparent homogeneity of the mainstream narrative of unemployment, common people show a remarkable variety of stories about this alarming social concern. The fact is that the wearied talk about the economic crisis reverberates kaleidoscopically in popular expressions of actual unemployment, according to the specific circumstances of each person’s life. Ideology, as Barthes refers to it (the mainstream meaning of unemployment disseminated, with the help of the traditional media, by both the political and economic elites, with the maintenance of the status quo in mind), thus echoes increasingly dimly within the people who actually have to face the social and individual consequences of unemployment on a daily basis. 

           As ideology wanes so the legitimacy of the whole political system begins to falter: in the specific case of Portugal it would be fair to say that we’re living the final days of a social grand narrative which started with the Carnage Revolution. The question that nowadays dominates social debate is, however, one of alternatives: all over the West, and most likely beyond it, the what to do of the whole thing is far more a blank than the already contentious affair of the how did we end up in this mess. This blank, translated in the general moral void into which society has fallen, is a huge challenge to social agents of signification everywhere. The most interesting point about the aforementioned blog is how this challenge is being individually met by common people in the field. 

            A reading of its entries shows how the poorest among the poor cannot even articulate the proper words to define their situation. Their laconic answers and meagre use of language bears testimony to the real nature of their poverty: in fact, they’re in a state of utter symbolic deprivation. Referring to what Stuart Hall calls the struggle to signify it is fair to say that they lost the battle of signification before it had even begun. Others, usually younger and holding a university degree, opt to call for a narrative of action in the hope of change, but do so without reference to any intellectual framework: thus action, change and even revolution become in their speech signifiers without signified, failed attempts at meaning-making. Others still are significantly despondent, finding themselves lost somewhere outside the realm of social meaning after the collapse of the symbolic pillars which had previously sustained their biographies: not altogether defeated in their struggle to signify, they are still grappling to understand where they are. It seems to me that these are the most interesting of them all: people in the middle of difficult process of self-reinvention, only their faces can properly signify the deep and painful mutations Portuguese society is going through.   

A Tiny History of Contemporary Portugal

Portugal has to get poorer if it is to survive the crisis, prime-minister Passos Coelho said yesterday (http://aeiou.expresso.pt/passos-coelho-so-vamos-sair-da-crise-empobrecendo-video=f683176 in Portuguese). This is an eloquent example of what we are being subjected to. In the meanwhile, people are slumbering in a mixed state of panic and depression.

This country is now awakening from two decades of daydreaming. I can, from my personal experience, illustrate that very well. When I was a child, I remember that the country lived in the anticipation of its first major international event, the Expo98. A universal exhibition centered on the theme of the oceans, it was meant to be a culminating national celebration. The narrative was indeed uplifting: a small country on the edge of Europe had, in the past, been able to turn its peripheral position into a new world centrality (if you take a look at a world map you’ll notice that Portugal, despite being on a corner of Europe, is right at the center of the world); some five centuries later, the country had finally been able to shake off its burden of obscurantism left by half a century of dictatorship and was then re-emerging as a modern, fully European nation, bound to be (it was just a matter of time, it was believed) as rich and developed as any northern state like, say, Switzerland or Denmark.

It is interesting that we spoke of these places without really knowing them: for our purpose of would-be nouveau-riche our only idea of developed Europe was precisely that: they were rich, and we wanted to be like that also. Of course, we weren’t totally ignorant: we were selectively so. As the typical guy with an inferiority complex, we only saw what we wanted to see. Besides, there were lots of Portuguese emigrants abroad, but far from throwing some light on real differences and similarities, they just played the same game: Portugal was for them just a fading memory of poverty and absurdities, a country where nothing works properly. Even the seventh-hand BMW, which had always worked perfectly in Düsseldorf (as it had spent the whole year in the garage) had capriciously decided to break down as soon as it crossed the border (damn Portuguese roads!).

The result was a general sense of animosity towards emigrants returning on summer holidays which could be fairly summed up as the usual suspicion of the nouveau-riche seeing in each other a reflection of their ill-disguised lack of pedigree.

But back to history. The Expo was great (and quite expensive), but we were suddenly without the prospect of a future party. Then came the Euro 2004. Ten stadia were built, some of them costing tenfold the initial predictions: who cares? But the European championship itself left an ominous taste behind it. The day we lost the final against Greece the country was ungoverned, as our prime-minister had left office to go somewhere to Europe. Since then, we and the Greeks were doomed, and our government was never again to leave that place somewhere in Europe. Eventually we would find that the actual places where our government had made its abode were Berlin (on weekdays) and Paris (on weekends).

And now, after two decades believing ourselves almost rich, we are told that we have to get poorer. In fact, we never were anything else but poor: we just bought our way out of poverty, with the ensuing burden of indebtedness. Well, recognizing that we’re poor has at least some solace in it: we can always get poorer… Or die trying.