A Note from the Publisher: Zida Borcich
Mural of Al Berto, Portuguese Poet from Sines
So, I’m on this epic fifty-year-old dream trip that I’m finally seeing through. Last month in this space I wrote about crossing the U.S. via Route 66, which has been “officially” replaced by a network of wider U.S. and interstate highways that span the continent. But much of the venerable old two-lane is still there, if you don’t mind going through a few ghost towns or taking some really desolate and actually weird and “officially” closed detours (scraped out by some cowboy’s Caterpillar with a blade) that skirt the unrepaired sixty-nine bridges that have been washed out in various floods. Yes, you have to be not in too big a hurry and kind of umm…intrepid to drive through the dry streambeds…but I’m still here to talk about it and dodging the insane truck traffic on 40 was worth the diversion. We made it to the east coast and landed for a couple of weeks in my new favorite neighborhood, Ripton, Vermont. But it didn’t end there! Nope, I kept going east, way east, to meet my friend Theresa at the Lisbon airport for a three-week peregrination of Portugal, where I lived fifty-two years ago.
That’s where I am right now, ensconced in an ancient, tile-fronted apartment building, up a vertigo-inducing spiral stairway to the third floor, which overlooks the Praça de Alegria (Plaza of Happiness). There’s a big poetry festival in Lisbon each June called “Disquiet,” and we are here, among several other missions, to soak up the art form in this place where poetry is revered in a way it’s not in my own neighborhood. Portugal integrates modern life into its towns’ and cities’ ancient bones in the same way it incorporates poetry into its everyday doings.
Sofia Varela, Lisbon Fado Singer
Poetry appears on murals and falls nightly from the lips of Fado singers all over the Alfama neighborhood. Streets are named for the country’s most revered poets, Camões and Pessoa, both of them lionized with enormous statues in plazas, honored in museums, their work taught in high schools and universities and prominently featured in bookstores, and recited in cafes (not to mention quoted in graffiti scrawled across the stone walls of five-hundred year-old alleys!). The pen, essentially, is mightier around here.
Yesterday we attended a lecture by Patrícia Reis, author of a new biography, A Desobediente (The Disobedient, in Portuguese only, so far), of Maria Teresa Horta, the last surviving author of a trio of women who wrote Novas Cartas Portuguesas (The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters), a revolutionary literary work made up of unassigned poems and letters, essays, fragments, and even excerpts from legal documents. The original manuscript, full of topics that were considered “indecent” by the government, was covertly spirited out of Portugal and published in France, in 1972. It caused a scandal and was banned, and all three Marias were arrested, but the situation the book brought to light became an international cause célèbre because it exposed the brutal and repressive fascist dictator Salazar, who had ruled the country with an iron fist from 1938 to 1968. Their book and subsequent global public outcry were instrumental in bringing the dictatorship to a dramatic end. The Three Marias inspired a generation of feminists to stand up to domination and patriarchy. They intended their new work to be a direct challenge to censors, and also, as one critic wrote, “an incitement to insurrection, based on the conviction that ‘when woman rebels against man, nothing remains unchanged.’” They were willing to put their lives on the line to fight for liberation from oppression. Maria Teresa Horta is eighty-seven now and can look back with pride at her legacy of sacrifice, activism, and bravery that in essence saved Portugal, which is again facing a dangerous swing to the right.
Portuguese people understand as well as any peoples anywhere the danger of rising right-wing movements.
They lived under the brutal Salazar dictatorship for too many decades to forget.
Signs like this can be found in every city and village.
With agendas that call for suppression of free speech and women’s rights making headway in the politics of Portugal and many, many other countries, The Three Marias, New Portuguese Letters, is as relevant and as indispensable as it was in the 1980s when my friend and I studied it and used it as inspiration for our own lives and our own poetry.
The title of Reis’ new book means something like “the wayward one,” or “the disobedient one,” and it seems to me these describe the outrage and courage that is needed in this moment as much as at any time in history to stave off the loss of so many rights and freedoms. They say it tends to repeat itself, but for Maria Horta, the history she remembers and was thrown in jail for, the oppression she fought against so ferociously, must never come again. The world would do well to pay attention to her. Really.
