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Mr. Ferreira asked me to talk to you tonight about what it is like to be a newcomer to the Portuguese community. I will try to do this as honestly as I can, and hope that I can give you some idea of what it is like to have come to know you a little better. I hope you will not laugh at my bad Portuguese pronunciation… I came to this community because I fell in love with a Portuguese man, Luis. We don't have much choice about who we fall in love with - so I was brought to this community by necessity. When I met him I thought he was Czechoslovakian - I didn't recognize the accent - so I knew really nothing about the community. When you love someone, you want to know who he is , what he thinks, what his traditions are. But you can't just sit the man down and say "What is it like to be Portuguese in Toronto?". This doesn't work. Because Luis writes for the newspaper Sol Portuguese, I began to accompany him to the different clubs, associations and cultural events and this began my real education. It has been 4 years now and that has been time to learn some things - I hope that what I have learned will help you to know HOW you teach an outsider. To begin, 4 years ago I had no tools to use - no language and no background to help me understand. But I quickly learned 3 important things: 1) Eight oçlock means 10 o' clock. Two
oçlock means 4 o' clock. This is referred to as "Portuguese
time". If the invitation says that dinner is at 8:00, I eat
before I go, because dinner will be at 11:00. Armed with my 3 tools of knowledge, I began my journey into the community. Since then I have been to a hundred or more cultural events, dinner, folk group presentations, dances, processions, and I have learned more. I have been with people from Terceira, Faial, Graciosa, Flores, Pico, San Miguel and the mainland. I have read Saramago's book "Journey to Portugal" and I have read the Lusiadas. I have read your poets and writers and I have tried to read the Portuguese newspapers of Toronto ( all 50 of them!). I have paid my respects to the head of Luis Vaz de Camoes on College St., and I have visited the Adiaspora website about a hundred times. Slowly, over the last few years, the picture of this community has begun to appear, like a photograph developing slowly before my eyes. Slowly, I have begun to see the form and the shape of this community because you have taught me hat you are made of. How does anyone begin to understand something new - whether it is a new painting, or a new book, or a piece of unfamiliar music? You "read" it - and you gather impressions and you ask questions and you rid yourself of some of the old ideas that you once had. You look for similarities to your own traditions, and you delight in the differences. The Portuguese in Toronto are a group of people living with language, traditions and symbols so different from my own. Some of the things I have seen have been things which you wanted me to see. I have seen your folk dancing which is lively and enchanting. I have watched the processions - so rich and so moving. I have eaten the food, and I even ate the sardines. I remember when Luis asked me if I had ever eaten a barbecued sardine. I said - "one of those little bits from the can??!! Who would barbecue one of those??!!" Since then I've learned that Portuguese sardines are much bigger, and that you should barbecue them far out of town … where the wind blows… I have drunk your wine and listened to Fado. I have learned the meaning of saudade. And I have learned, above all that football is not a matter of life and death - it's more important than that… Many times I have felt like a hopeless outsider, standing beside Luis, unable to understand anything that was being said. But there have been times when I was made to feel very welcome among your numbers. I was at a dinner for the group Asas do Atlantico. On each table in the hall was a large basket of blue grapes. They were a kind I had never seen before and they were wonderful. The director of this group, Mrs. Simas, and her husband came to speak with us for a while. Mr. Simas began to speak in Portuguese and I had to stop him and tell him that my Portuguese was not so good. He said right away "Well then - we'll talk together in English!". I told him that the grapes were wonderful and asked him where they came from. He said that he had driven to Niagara on that morning and picked them himself for this dinner. He told me that they were like a grape grown in the Azores and they were called cheiro. When we were leaving the dinner, he brought me a whole bag of uva de cheiro to take home. I have found that generosity is a word synonymous with the Portuguese - and not just in material things. There is a generosity of the soul and spirit which is brought through in small gestures of courtesy and grace. Another occasion which I remember very clearly is a time when Luis and I were at a commemorative ceremony at the Portuguese Pioneiros monument in High Park. Many people gave speeches in Portuguese and then the Portuguese consulate Joao Perestrello spoke. Suddenly, he began to speak in English, welcoming the Canadians who had come (there were only 2 or 3 of us), and thanking the Canadians for welcoming the Portuguse people here so long ago. Suddenly, in that one moment, I moved from outside the group to inside -part of your group, celebrating with you. I want to thank Antonio and Alice Perinu from Sol Portuguese who have always made me welcome and who have gone out of their way to do so. I have learned that you are a community of poets and writers - and that you care for and treasure these people. I have learned that many of you carry in your hearts the memories of war in Africa: that you have many veterans from that conflict and that you lost more than 9000 young men there. Here in the west, at that time, we were paying more attention to Vietnam, and many Canadians do not realize how great a price you paid in that fighting - how many lives were lost. I have read all their names. I have learned that you sorrow for your young people who may not speak Portuguese, and that you want to bring them closer to you so you can learn from them and teach them. I have sensed that you are, in many ways, a group in the midst of a "meaningful crisis" at this stage and that you are looking at the way you do things, wondering how to maintain both individual and group identity in changing times and in this big city. You are thinking about how you express who you are, and what shape your community will take in the future. I will tell you about another group who experienced the same kind of challenges and hope that perhaps you can learn from the similarities. A few years ago I was asked by a group of Catholic nuns to help them with some literature they wanted to make. As you know, the numbers of people joining religious life hs been in decline over the last 20 years or so. Young people are not joining their community as they once did. They felt that the outside world did not speak their "language" - the language of religion. Like you, these nuns are quiet, self-effacing people and self-promotion did not come easily. One nun said to me " this is an awful job to try to tell people who we are - we're not good at it". They wondered how to bring people to their community, when their community had undergone such radical changes and when many of their external symbols seemed to be gone. They were an aging group, with a mean age of about 70 years. What these Catholic sisters did to find their way through the challenge, was to re-examine the roots of their mission and find a way to still live the precepts of that mission, even in radically altered circumstances. And they have found, by going back to their roots, a way to begin to grow again. Where they used to teach by the hundreds and work as nurses in hospitals, they now work in crisis centers and soup kitchens. Where they used to live in large groups, now they live in smaller groups. But they are still a "group" and still living their mission. Now - if the Portuguese community here finds itself as a group of more than 60 associations and clubs, wondering who you are and what you need to be doing, you might find it helpful to know that other groups have gone through the same kind of thing, and have found their way by re-discovering the reasons why the associations formed in the first place. As I understand, you formed your groups to make newcomers to Canada feel welcome and to provide places where you could speak your own language, keep your traditions alive and learn together to get through the difficulties of being new in Canada. You have done so well - look at your community full of doctors, accountants, artists, professors and writers. You have helped them all. But if it is the case that the flow of Portuguese immigrants has stopped, or slowed, and you find yourself an aging community struggling to bring in new people, it may only be necessary to branch out in ways that you hadn't considered before. I hope that one of your groups is thinking about a day-care center, where you can teach your youngest citizens, at the time best to teach, the language, traditions and culture of Portugal and the Azores. These little ones - the children of your children - could have many avos to learn from - just as you had your grandparents to learn from. And they will bring the parents with them to learn the language. You may not have the large groups of new Canadians to help, but you have your old people in nursing homes who need you now. These are the needy people in your community now. The sister said " where I'm needed is my home". Your own poet, Fernando Pessoa wrote "minha lingua e a minha patria" - my language is my home. So as long as you can teach and speak your own language - you will always have your home. A few months ago I was at a church in Brampton, Nossa Senhora de Fatima which was built entirely by the Porguguese community there. You have perhaps all seen this wonderful church. It was filled with people going to Mass, and there was a procession on the day of Santa Cecilia. I was very struck with what I saw behind the altar of that church. Instead of a Christ figure on the cross, there was an empty crucific, with the Christ figured freed from the cross, standing beside it on what looked like ocean waves. This was a very striking image to me , and very representative of the way in which you took an old symbol and re-interpreted it - investing it with new meaning. I learned another thing about you on that day - the Portuguese are explorers. In your great tradition of exploration and your blood of the fearless Fernando Magalhaes and Vasco da Gama - you are people who are unafraid to venture into new worlds and explore new things. I am sure that your fearless nature and your courage will help you now as changes in the outside world produce changes to your community. I am sure that you will reach out and fill old wine bottles with new wine. As long as you can speak Portuguese, you will always have your home. I want to thank you for giving me this chance to speak to you tonight, for teaching me. I have come to cherish you now as part of my own world, and part of the way I live now. Cherish means to hold something dear, to treasure and protect it. Your word is "acarinhar". Parabéns a Jose Ferreira pelo seu website
"Adiaspora.com", que é uma porta aberta
para a cultura Portuguesa. Sinto-me honrada por participar neste
evento, e muito obrigado a todos pela atenção. Laura Pearsall. |
