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.

Twenty-odd Years in one Watch

               

             As a kid I remember my schoolmates showing theirs, proudly activating the faint green light which we saw flickering through the dark hollow made with our hands. It was a symbol of a certain kind of modernity, a type of civilization which only then Portugal had fully entered: technological civilization for sure, but also the worldwide market of cheap eastern gadgetry. In personal terms, and for little kids who had just learnt how to count, a watch was also the first tangible sign of independence: if not sovereignty over time (by then we still naively thought we would conquer it one day) at least awareness of its passing. I thought however, at the time, that the facilitated reading of the time afforded by a digital watch was cheating somehow: from the very beginning I preferred the complicated turning around of hour, minute and second hands one can see on analogue watches. I never had a Casio F-91W as a kid, I never asked my parents for one. Until rather recently I consistently relied on freebie watches or Chinese ones which hopefully would last for some months. On my early twenties I was finally offered my first adulthood watch: a black analogue Pulsar, and then two more watches came along, a blue Swatch and a brown, rather more classic French one. The last time I remember thinking about the Casio F-91W was around September 2001 and the reasons couldn’t be worse: bin Laden wore one in one of the videos in which he appeared, with his finger pointing up, threatening the West. I remember commenting on that with some friends back in high school: couldn’t he at least afford a better watch? The watch became suspicious in America on account of that, years after its appearance marked the end of a certain kind of American international supremacy: the rise of the East with the ensuing global bombardment of cheap plastic. Lately I decided to buy one: I needed a cheap watch, with a clearly visible stopwatch to jog with. I was slightly disappointed to see that they aren’t manufactured in Japan anymore (were they ever?), the inevitable “made in China” glittering on its back. It is still interesting though, its retro-futuristic style marking a past perception of what the future would be. It turned out to be quite different, but then that’s a secret in time that watches don’t tell.

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.   

Eucalypti

                

                   There was a time before them, of course. One of the earliest literary references to them can be traced back to the late nineteenth century. In Eça de Queirós’ The City and the Mountains the main character Jacinto, a Portuguese aristocrat living in Paris who had recently discovered the charms of rural Portugal, complains about how slow the rhythms of nature are. Realizing that during his whole princely life amidst the comforts of civilization he had never planted a tree, he asks which one is the fastest-growing, only to be appalled by the answer. “An oak tree!” - he whines - “Thirty years before it turns into something beautiful… I falter. That’s good for God, who can wait. (…) Thirty years! In thirty years, trees!... Only if it were to cover my grave!” The alternative, the fastest-growing tree, is the eucalyptus, “the horrible and ridiculous eucalyptus. In six years you get the whole Tormes covered with them”. Jacinto doesn’t seem to have accepted the suggestion as Tormes, the bend of the Douro river where the action takes place, has so far remained fairly eucalyptus-free. Unfortunately, most of the country has not been that lucky.

                Eucalypti are ugly indeed. Their bluish green colour is unattractive. Their shape is uninteresting. The shade they throw is mostly uninviting and often dangerous, as they like to drop branches on people’s heads. Only the bigger ones which can sometimes be seen besides some inland faraway road deserve some respect, and even so only because of their sheer size. Botanically speaking, they’re little more than water-sucking rascals, their smell being the only positive thing about them. That and obviously the money the paper industry makes from them (which, of course, doesn’t allow them the time to grow to a respectable size). Their worth as sources of pulp is the obvious reason behind their being almost everywhere in Portugal. That wouldn’t be strange in itself, being just another example of landscape being destroyed for profit. However, there has been an odd insistence on calling them forest, the weirdest thing being that people have actually come to see idyllic woodlands in the shabby agglomerations of eucalypti. This phenomenon illustrates an inconvenient truth about today’s social life: in fact, the media can convince an entire society of virtually anything nowadays.

              This curious collective illusion reaches its peak during the summer, being one of the essential markers of our cherished silly season. As everybody knows, eucalypti burn. It’s in their nature. Besides drying up the land and covering it in litter, they release highly combustible oils. Fire actually benefits them: they easily survive it, getting rid of the competition in the process. Wildfires in Portugal are then something quite epic, as areas bigger than Luxembourg vanish in the blink of an eye. The media gather around the fires, and the whole thing gains the appearance of a Hollywood super production (only, in version bad), with the firemen running and yelling around, elderly people praying, locals carrying pointless water buckets and reporters making live inventories of fire-fighting equipment, starting with the firemen and ending in the aerial means (they never say planes or helicopters). In the middle of all this eucalypti are the big elephant in the room: they are never mentioned, disguised behind the generic label of forest. People in positions of responsibility diffusely talk about prevention (and how much it costs), campaigns on TV urge people to be careful when they make picnics and for some weeks the whole country repeats that something has definitely to be done to solve the problem. But then, of course, nothing happens, and a revealing pattern goes largely unnoticed: the fact that only eucalypti and large spots of pine trees (equally artificial) burn. Everywhere where some faraway traces of our original and autochthonous forest are still extant, wildfires are much rarer or outright absent. Nevertheless, people naively carry on believing that every summer the country turns into a postcard of hell simply because of driving smokers, another wonder of contemporary media constructivism. Most people in Portugal actually believe that the country has always been like this. They have no idea of what an actual forest looks like, they are utterly ignorant of how spoilt the country really is and, even if they weren’t, they just wouldn’t care. In the contemporary Portuguese psyche trees, along with plants, vegetables, agriculture and nurturing the land in general are reminders of a poorer time. A rapidly urbanizing people has no time for such things.

                In fact, we’ve been following Jacinto’s footsteps... in both directions. We’ve been commuting between civilization and nature, living in none. Believing ourselves rich and too sophisticated for rural life, we have deserted for the large towns. That’s where the shopping centers are; that’s where the wide suburban motorways lead; that’s where all the excitement is; that’s where all the jobs are, we thought. Alas, we were just eagerly consuming a second-hand civilization, sent by parcels from Europe, as somewhere someone says in one of Eça’s books… The fires, the abandoned land, the dying villages, the dams forever sinking areas of outstanding natural beauty, the increasingly frequent droughts had become mere echoes of a past world, while simultaneously the countryside was gradually becoming the symbol of a lost identity. As the optimistic certainties of modernity keep fading, many Portuguese are now looking back to it in nostalgia. David Lowenthal says that “if the past is a foreign country, nostalgia has made it the country with the healthiest tourist trade of all”. We have thus every reason to believe that the Portuguese are returning to the countryside not as the actual owners of the land, but as mere tourists: as superficially and naïvely as tourists and equally ignorant of the ways of the land. On the contrary an actual appropriation of the land would require the knowledge to interpret its symbols: the Portuguese have willfully lost the common sense acquaintance with the land they once had, and have never bothered acquiring the scientific, contemporary and reflexive understanding of it. It is not to uncover the meaning of the land that the Portuguese are returning to it: it is merely to quiet the torments of post-modern living with a weekend escapade. In the meanwhile, and since man can’t live without some level of interpretation of his environment, the show must and will go on. Eucalypti will keep on burning while we flee to the coast, thus providing the distinctive smoky atmosphere we so much appreciate in our summers and the ultimate symbol of the Portuguese man’s disconnectedness with his native land.

                So, there’s surely been a time before them, but now they seem to be here to stay. A solution might be to fell them all outright, plant oaks in their place and wait for some three decades. That seems impossible, however. We can only watch them burn, only to be replanted, to burn again, to be replanted…     

The Story of a Square

On the way here I saw an antique photograph of the Toural Square, occupying the centre of an apparently abandoned shop display. The place where I am now, the destination of my half-leisurely stroll, is the Milenário Café. I’m now sitting at a table by one of its large windows overlooking the Toural, the main square of the town of Guimarães, in northern Portugal. Guimarães is known as the cradle of the country and is also, by the way, the current European Capital of Culture. Much has been changed in the previous look of the town in order to prepare it for that event. The Toural, as one of the most iconic sights of the town, was naturally at the centre of a whirlwind of construction works for quite a long time. It opened a couple of months ago amid the usual mixed feelings of the locals, with positive impressions only slightly beating the negative ones. Personally I liked it, but then I’m not a local, so my opinion doesn’t really matter much for the point I’m trying to make here.

People from Guimarães (the vimaranenses) like to think of their town and themselves as a peculiar case of identity, almost as if they were the representatives of a different people inhabiting a country within the country: quintessentially Portuguese, but not mainstream Portuguese. They combine in an attitude that resembles a sort of local nationalism an extreme pride in their town and an obstinate sense of uniqueness. While the former is amply justified by the sheer beauty of the town, the latter is largely an exaggeration. In fact, most cultural traits of Guimarães have, in one form or another, equivalents in most comparable Portuguese towns, at least the northerly ones.

The history of the Toural is a good example of that. Originally, and judging from its name, it must have been the place of cattle fairs. However, old photographs already show the typical Portuguese square of the nineteenth century: neat, with a love of detail and closed. The entrance to the inner part of it was paid, thus making the place an exclusive of the better-off classes. The majority of the people would just stay outside staring at the Sunday stroll of the bourgeoisie. Public space was then a perfect symbol of society, its carefully marked social divisions echoing the God-given order of things.

Then the iron fence disappeared, and with it the social prestige of the centre of the square. The benches were now available to everyone, as well as the shade thrown by the trees, but only retired elderly people sat there. The square was consciously becoming a place of memory, a symbol of what the town no longer was. Those were the days of democratisation, of economic growth, of high buildings, big roads and shopping centres. A modern monument then occupied the place where previously there had been a fifteenth-century water fountain, its electrically powered jets of water mocking its predecessor. The advent of the era of memory, culminating in the classification of the historic centre of Guimarães by the UNESCO, can hardly disguise that everywhere memory was being wilfully shunned. Real memory, and not the cheap imitation sold to tourists, was now abandoned on the fringes of society, the exclusive property of a new kind of socially excluded people, the elderly.

Now things seem to be changing again, and the Toural along with them. The fifteenth-century water fountain has returned, the electrically powered water jets have vanished along with most trees. The benches have been relegated to a discrete an uninviting corner of the square, as there wasn’t enough courage to get rid of them altogether. The black and white patterns of the traditional Portuguese cobblestone walkways were replaced by some inconsequent lines casually drawn on the floor. The square has lost many of the features that made it a cosy place where to stay, in fact, that made it a place at all. Now people pass through it, more or less hurriedly depending on whether they are locals or tourists. The new Toural gives the town a cosmopolitan outlook, the uneven façades of the buildings adding the necessary local taste to an urban landscape that is essentially and intentionally tasteless. A church, some nineteenth-century buildings, a granite building that vaguely resembles a rural manor-house, a remarkably homogenous series of white buildings that bring to memory the downtown of Lisbon, a fascist style building housing Portugal’s public bank and a trace of a medieval wall claiming that Portugal was born here: an historical and architectural composite framing an experience of vague out-of-placeness. I can’t think of a better metaphor for the times we’re living... 

Long Live the King!

               

              Anyone who has been fortunate to have strolled from Trafalgar Square to the Mall past the Admiralty Arch on a fine winter’s day, with the sun shining through the velvety colours of the countless Union Jacks that cheer up the naked trees of St. James’s Park to see the changing of the guard in Buckingham Palace with the royal standard flying over it knows that a monarchy is better than a republic. Period!

                This discussion, always latent here, has hit the agenda following the publication of a manifesto under the title “implement democracy, restore monarchy” by a monarchic pressure group. Besides being a timely initiative (see previous post), they make a few valid points, namely the fact that Portugal had a democratic regime while under the rule of the king, something the republicans couldn’t keep for long. The republic, implemented by way of a coup, was itself later dismissed by a mutinous army, paving the way for half a century of reactionary dictatorship. Actually, the story is quite similar to Spain’s: a very progressive government replaces a relatively moderate one, only to find that its support basis is too feeble to resist, thus inviting a yet more radical (reactionary) faction to power. The Portuguese are simply too much ahead of the Spaniards in that respect: we went through the same things nearly two decades before them and without a civil war.

   Another interesting point they make derives from the striking parallel between the Portugal of today and that of the final nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the time the country had had a period of relatively stable growth, mostly fueled by some big investments in the network of infra-structures. Fontismo (from the name of the minister who had put the plan into practice, Fontes Pereira de Melo) may have looked like some sort of avant-la-lèttre Keynesianism, but it somehow failed to put the country on the path of sustainable development. Then, as Portugal collapsed under the burden of debt, a British ship aimed its guns at Lisbon following some clashing territorial claims with our inconstant ally Britannia during the scramble for Africa; the ship (they could at least have dignified us with the sight of a fleet…) didn’t shoot (it didn’t have to) and Portugal was utterly humiliated, its sovereignty badly hurt. The king was a collateral victim of all this (he was shot a few years later), and the monarchy eventually fell amid some mild and merry skirmishes, mostly in the socially conservative, deeply catholic (at the time) northern Portugal. Now, as we try to deal with the consequences of Cavaquismo (a modern sort of Fontismo, from Cavaco Silva’s name, current president of Portugal and prime-minister by the time when Europe was drowning us in money) and other –isms (such as Guterrismo and Socratismo) we don’t have any sovereignty at all and it is Africa that’s scrambling for us. So, given the similarities, why not getting rid of the president (in a civilized manner, of course)?

    As it is implied in the starting lines of this post I’m rather sympathetic towards the monarchic cause, but for different reasons. As a consequence of academic inclinations I have a certain degree of intimacy with British culture. On the other hand, my literary frame of mind renders me quite sensitive to the symbolic aspects of social life. The point is that the Portuguese republican institutions have failed to function as a solid symbolic reference, one strong enough to guide people in times of trouble. We really don’t look up at anything for comfort; we just look at each other, usually in jealousy, suspicion and resentment. The manifesto hints at those reasons, but leaves them largely unexplored, diluting them in the idea that a king is good because he’s not entangled in party politics. Actually it goes much deeper than that: a king is not a political entity at all. Historically and culturally speaking there were kings before there were cities (polis, in the classical Greek sense). When the task was simply to keep a group together people looked up to the authority of a king, and not to the discussions of a parliament. In a slowly fragmenting society, with dissolving social ties and waning points of reference a king could perhaps be the living symbol of the unity of the tribe. With the advantage that since the invention of constitutional monarchy one can have both: unity and diversity, a king and a parliament.  

   Objections to monarchy usually stem from the idea that a king is not democratically chosen by the people: but neither is the country itself. You don’t choose your parents and you love them nonetheless. You can’t choose certain things; they choose you instead. And that’s exactly why they’re so important, precisely because they've made you the object of their preference, thus rendering you important. If everything was a matter of choice nothing would matter much: one could always choose something else. The vague postmodern illusion that identity is a matter of choice entails an uncomfortable moral void which, in politics, is discernible in the general sense of a lack of common purpose. In extremis choosing an identity means having none or, according to the best available option, a second or third-hand identity.

   So, yes, I dream of coming along the Rua Augusta down to the Terreiro do Paço, gazing at a white and blue flag flying over the Arch of Triumph there, mirroring fair Lisbon, the azure sea and the gentle sky.