NEW CHALLENGES ”My degree wasn’t accepted here, so I couldn’t get into the RTBF as a film-maker. So I started another career: I drove all kinds of possible vehicles in Brussels: streetcar, bus, taxi. As a result I know this city like the back of my hand!” Pedro dos Santos in club ‘Os Belenenses’ (right)
village folklore from days gone by. Present-day Portugal is nowhere to be found there. I would like to see this celebration transformed into a showcase for contemporary Portuguese culture – not just tourism and gastronomy, but also literature, architecture, design and art. There is so much more to us than just football and sardines!” Being frozen in time, living under a bell jar, in an imaginary realm: oft-repeated criticisms on migrant communities anywhere. And we certainly often heard them about the Portuguese diaspora, which is very large: an estimated five million worldwide, compared to the almost 11 million people living in Portugal itself. If indeed they are “frozen in time”, what do they make of the complex, avantgarde poet, planted in stone in their midst, as a way of representing them? Pessoa is not exactly symbolic of village life of times gone by in the Alentejo. The man is most often described as aloof, recherché and hautain and with his many “metonyms” – the different names under which he wrote his poems – he did more than anyone else to turn multiple personality disorder into a form of high art. What’s more, he intensely disliked the Alentejo. He passed through it once by train, on his way to Lisbon from Durban (South Africa) where he grew up, and was so repulsed by it, that he had to vent his feelings in an (English-language) sonnet:
Nothing with nothing around it And a few trees in between None of which are very clearly green Where no river or flower pays a visit If there be a hell, I’ve found it For if it ain’t here, where the Devil is it? Fernando Pessoa
Pessoa did not think very much of Brussels either. This came to light in 2009, when Dutch literary scholar Michaël Stoker uncovered papers of his in which the great poet gave a clear-cut opinion on Belgium (and the Netherlands as well): “This type of country adds nothing essential to society. They can cease to exist without civilisation suffering from it.” It would also have made a nice inscription on the statue at Flagey...
It should have been in the middle of Flagey Square! Is he the right man to represent the Portuguese community of Brussels? What do the “Lusobelgae” make of the statue themselves? We asked round the Portuguese clubs around Place Flagey. “What I think about that?” answers Pedro Dos Santos, former film-
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technician and taxi-driver, and a regular of Alentejean club Os Belenenses. “That it’s badly placed! This statue is of great importance to the Portuguese community. It should have been in the centre of the Place Flagey!”, he laughs. Pedro Pingo (34) too, who spent his teenage years in Brussels, and then returned to Campo Maior, Portugal, thinks the statue is well-deserved: “I think it’s a good thing for the Portuguese community. It makes them visible, in a positive way. The Portuguese who emigrated to Belgium really deserve it, for they worked hard. It’s a form of recognition and a source of pride. After all, the Portuguese of Brussels are well integrated.” There is an irony here: Pessoa as a symbol for hard work & integration in society? A radical recluse, who worked as a free-
lance translator, so as to support his poetic explorations, which were all-important for him? Joaquim Pinto da Silva, one of those responsible for the statue, didn’t mean it to be in particular an ode to the Portuguese mason or janitor – his hard work and his leisure: football & folklore. Though himself a fixture in the social scene around Flagey, Pinto da Silva feels it is primordial to let Brussels know that there is more to Portuguese culture than that: “The clubs, the bars, the football – it all has its place for me. I love football. It’s just that when the Portuguese community is being written about, it’s always about folklore. The Portuguese in their clubs, they’re all very nice and so on. Everybody knows that by now. But there’s so much more than that! Here in Brus-
sels, we have Portuguese novelists, poets, scientists... Take for instance the novel A Lua De Bruxelas by Amadeu Sabino Lopes, a Portuguese writer living in Brussels. A very well-crafted, subtle novel – I’m currently trying to get it translated into French.” With his bookstore Orfeu, Pinto has organised a cultural event every week for the last 15 years, making it the main Portuguese cultural institution in Brussels: “We’ve already had two Nobel Prize winners visiting us. And not long ago, we had Manoel de Oliveira, the legendary film director. The man is 101 years old, and he spoke for an entire hour, in French. This more highbrow face of Portuguese culture is less well-known with the general public, but it’s certainly as important a part of it as the sardines and the football.”
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