Filamentos-artes e letras na diáspora by Filamentos-PBBI-FresnoState

Instituto Português Além Fronteiras

Bruma Publications

Editorial Board

Diniz Borges (Director) PBBI, CSU-Fresno

Linda Carvalho-Cooley, CSU-Fresno and Reedley College

Eugénia Fernandes, UC Davis

Emiliana Silva, University of the Azores

Michael DeMattos, University of Hawaii

Advisory Board

Onésimo Almeida, Brown University

Duarte Silva, Stanford University

Teresa Martins Marques, University of Lisbon

Renato Alvim, CSU-Stanislaus

Debbie Avila, CSU-Fresno

Manuel Costa Fontes, Kent State University

Vamberto Freitas, University of the Azores

Irene M. F. Blayer, Brock University, Canada

Lélia Pereira Nunes, Pontifícia Universidade, Brasil

Bruma Publications is the publishing project of the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI) at California State University, Fresno, dedicated to disseminating works, including translations, of enduring educational and cultural value foregrounding the Portuguese-American experience in California and the Western United States, its connection with the Azores and the Portuguese Speaking world. Bruma will extend PBBI’s mission to a community of readers across the globe.

Bruma Publications

Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute

California State University, Fresno

5245 N. Backer Ave. M/S PB-96 Fresno, CA. 93740

ARTS AND LETTERS IN THE AZOREAN DIASPORA

Printed edition of Bruma Publications’ digital cultural magazine to accompany Jénifer, or a French Princess: The (Truly) Unknown Islands

by Joel Neto Diniz Borges, editor

Title: Filamentos (arts and letters in the Azorean diaspora)

Author: Diniz Borges, editor

Edition: ©Letras Lavadas edições

Ħ letraslavadas.pt

Typeset and Printed by Nova Gráfica, Lda.

Publication, February 2024

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Tel.: 296 630 080 / Fax: 296 630 089

E-mail: publicor@publicor.pt / www.publicor.pt

Bruma Publications

Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI)

The Press at California State University, Fresno

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

In a few Words

When I read Jénifer, or a French Princess, by Joel Neto, I knew that this book needed to reach an English-speaking audience because of its humanistic power and ability to look at some of the vicissitudes of our modern society. Literature has long been a powerful tool for addressing society’s ills, shedding light on pressing issues, and advocating for change. Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations” is a classic example of literature’s ability to critique and challenge prevailing social norms. Through its vivid characters and intricate plot, the novel explores various aspects of 19th-century Victorian society, exposing the flaws and injustices that plagued the era. Literary works have long served as mighty echoes for societal change, reflecting the ills and injustices that prevail in different epochs. Through compelling narratives, nuanced characters, and thought-provoking themes, many works of literature have stood as beacons, inspiring readers to question norms and advocate for transformation. There are ample literary works that have delved into society’s ills and acted as catalysts for change. Joels Neto’s novella is undoubtedly such a work.

With the translation of a story centered in the archipelago of the Azores, located in the North Atlantic, the reader English reader will indisputably be able to connect with many other areas throughout the world where these challenges exist. From poor regions to wealthier countries. Also have many pockets of poverty and social issues.

To accompany this work of fiction, Bruma Publications and Letras Lavadas, agreed to publish this small compendium of texts from both sides of the Atlantic, including an interview with the author, that can bring awareness to any reader and can also serve

as a learning tool for those who will be fortunate to have their teachers include it in their curriculum, from Azores Cultural Courses, to World Literature Courses.

Much like George Orwell’s “1984” Published in 1949, a dystopian masterpiece that paints a chilling picture of a totalitarian society where individual freedom is sacrificed in the name of state control; Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” confronting societal ills, particularly racial injustice; Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart,” a seminal work addressing colonialism’s impact on traditional African societies, and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a potent commentary on gender oppression and the dangers of religious extremism, Joel Neto’s “Jenifer or a French Princess,” will also rise above the temporal and cultural contexts, resonating with readers across diverse backgrounds, acting an echo for change by shedding light on shared ills facing modern societies and challenging readers to confront uncomfortable truths.

Through the artistry of storytelling, literature has the power to ignite conversations, inspire activism, and foster a collective commitment to building a more just and equitable society. Literature can be a beacon of change, encouraging humanity to strive for a better, more compassionate world.

Diniz Borges

The chameleon of hopelessness

Which, to those who can’t see because they don’t want to, must be given a cane so as not to bump into the Who we will fight, in any field, poetic indifference and spirit savers; That, not sympathizing with accommodating individuals, However, we see them as the fruit and foundation of reality, with which we are not equally sympathetic;

[...]

That reality is, as it stands, an insult to the intelligence, a lot of the time, we don’t existing; [...]1

Looking at the latest statistics on the “state of the nation” leads us to the inevitable realization that, in many areas, the Azores are among the poorest territories in Portugal and Europe. This worrying evidence of human underdevelopment in the archipelago is only surpassed by its performance in environmental quality indices compared to most other regions in Portugal. This environmental factor, possibly distinctive, has been the tourist attraction of the islands of happy cows and living and (come on: almost) untouched nature. Undeniably, you might say. The Azores are a natural blessing on our (not always) muchloved planet. But the nine islands that make up the Azores have been officially inhabited by people for around six hundred years. During that time, the populations have lived through the rigors of an outermost land, often forgotten by those outside and those

1 PORTO, João Pedro (2014). Blue door to Macau. S/L.: Letras Lavadas. 62-63

inside, a forgetfulness that has been proven to eradicate any human development.

In addition to the publicized natural beauty sold for tourist revenue, there is an entire human existence in which inequalities of comfort and well-being reign. The islands are a beautiful place to live for those who can afford it. And those who don’t? Who has been concerned about these disparities? Of course, some do, although others also turn a deaf ear and a blind eye.

Joel Neto has spoken and written about poverty in the Azores, for which there seems to be little or no strategy. Because, in the words I once read to him in a private conversation, “[a] marring the Azores begins with worrying about the diseases that could wipe them out.” His most recent achievement on this subject can be found in Jénifer or a French Princess: The (Truly) Unknown Islands), a book that is essential for awakening consciences, which has earned this Portuguese writer from the Azores the honor of being included in the list of works that make up the National Reading Plan, an initiative of the Portuguese government to promote books and reading.

In the Portuguese edition, published in February 2023 by the Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation, the cover suggests this dichotomy between seeming and being. When we look at it (see https://ffms.pt/pt-pt/livraria/jenifer-ou-princesa-da-franca-ilhasrealmente-desconhecidas), we notice one of those magical tourist promotion images: the view from the top of Serra da Ribeirinha reaches Mount Brasil, at the foot of which lies the Azorean heritage city of Angra do Heroísmo, on Terceira Island. Opening the back cover, we stretch the image, and the magic expands. A late afternoon sun still warms the pastures and the sea. It’s the same photograph as the postcard we discovered in the seventy or so pages of the Portuguese edition. But there are plenty of clues on

this dreamlike canvas: the sky doesn’t have the blue of the island’s summer, but clouds that cry out for rain dance in it; the western part of the city of Angra is absent from the landscape; the sun is bending towards sunset, soon giving way to darkness...

Then we stop at the title, a promise of a fairy tale that the subtitle deconstructs. The fact that we won’t unravel it will be a certainty later; instead, we’ll have in our hands a tale that has nothing remarkable about it because the lines of the text will bring us a story that goes to the heart of specific everyday experiences and enlightens us about how, on the Azorean islands, the lives of many people are massacred or, rather, how some make it profoundly unsustainable.

Although some books can be mere entertainment and invest mainly in a playful purpose, I tend to prefer those that, like this one, are (pre)concerned with the improvement of the human being, with the solidity of their dignity, with the glorification of humanist values, those that contribute to a more profound sense of Humanism. Despite toying with the reader on various levels, this book earnestly fulfills that humanist purpose, just like Joel Neto’s previous works. Jénifer or a French Princess is a fictional narrative (note!) that aims to be a civic denunciation (therefore political, but free of partisanship) of the conditions of poverty that, in the 21st century, still plague the Autonomous Region of the Azores, based on real cases that illustrate the severe levels of poverty in this island territory. It’s not so much the poverty that, for example, Vitorino Nemésio denounced in Mau Tempo no Canal (Stormy Isles-An Azorean Tale-translated by Francisco Cota Fagundes) because that came from hunger, from the lack of resources that allowed it; here, in a well-woven and magnificently well-written plot, Joel Neto alerts us to intellectual, moral and sentimental poverty, which enhances the rotten spirit, and to the

vileness of the human essence, in which, like Vieira’s fish, men run over each other.

In fact, human ugliness is revealed throughout the text by a narrator who is very involved in events and interpersonal relationships. Basing the story on the account of a somewhat professional relationship (which evolved personally and socially) with Jénifer, a ten-year-old girl living in one of Angra do Heroísmo’s most deprived neighborhoods, Joel Neto weaves a story that reveals the failure of the public system and institutions (shriveled by inertia or delays in solving social problems, such as school absenteeism or biased patrolling), political corruption (evident in the buying of votes through the promise of survival allowances), community promiscuity (from alcoholism and constant and even early presence in taverns to drug use and trafficking; from domestic and dating violence to sexual abuse and pregnancies of young girls; from multiple cases of unemployment to prolonged illness and disability; from insults between children to verbal disrespect between parents and children), in a series of scenes that depict the social corruption that not everyone knows about (nor wants to know about) and the ruin of human dignity, which is sliding into a muddy ditch, cheap and always thirsty for more manure.

In this environment lives Jénifer, who is consistently absent from school during compulsory schooling, without any significant consequences. Despite this absenteeism, her intelligence and how she talks about the world are frighteningly mature. Jénifer knows about life. Jénifer knows about the world, not because she has traveled (not at all!), but because she was born into a community where experiences are a catch in the mouth, no matter how much you want to be free. Jénifer is the tree, flower, leaf, stem, and root of the community in which she lives. She has learned what school could have taught her through everyday life: critical thinking,

problem-solving, creativity in inventions, storytelling, and dreams and goals for her future life. She knows how to take care of animals and does the work of the fields, but she also has the empirical knowledge to develop dialogues about the Social Integration Income2, about her family’s financial problems, and how to solve them without being dependent on this subsidy, which, according to one of the characters, is the social evil caused by politicians who have fed the habit of inertia and ineptitude, who (for their benefit) have accustomed the population to not working, condemning them to live off subsidiary crumbs, without giving them the tools to get out of this whirlpool. This factor swallows them up in dishonorable and degrading alternatives.

“No one keeps a secret better than a child.”3 This sentence from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables is the second of those that Joel Neto chose as the epigraph for his book. And it is, in fact, a phrase that is also indicative of the actions of Jénifer, a girl who is magnetic not only for the narrator (who cannot control a protective affectionthe “brotherhood” that unites them - acting as a kind of possible savior of a young human being who still has the opportunity to see the light at the end of the tunnel) but also for the reader (who tries to understand how this girl survives so sanely in that place).

2 Social Integration Income (RSI):

"This support is designed to protect people who find themselves in a situation of extreme poverty:

• a payment in money to ensure that their minimum needs are met, and;

• an insertion program that integrates a contract (set of actions established according to the characteristics and conditions of the household of the applicant for the benefit, aiming at a progressive social, labor and community insertion of its members." (In https://www.seg-social.pt/rendimento-social-de-insercaoconsultation held on January 16, 2024)

3 NETO, Joel (2023). Jénifer, ou a princesa da França: As ilhas (realmente) desconhecidas. Lisbon: Manuel dos Santos Foundation. 7

But appearances can be deceiving, confesses the first epigraph4 . The unexpected, unsettling, and surprising ending is an explosion of reality, an awareness of many inefficiencies, and a bucket of cold water for our hopes of a better world. Jénifer is more than she appears to be: she’s a princess, but one we cowardly prefer to know, in a hedonistic way of looking at reality - not least because, says a resigned character in this tale, we’re living on an island, where things are forgotten in a flash because that’s “the only way to move time forward”5 .

Jénifer is like the girl on the cover of the American edition of this book by Joel Neto: being an enigma - because of the contrasts in luminosity (the bright air of her sociability versus the gloomy air of her plans and resolutions), the glimpse of the twilight and gray horizon, savoring the various (mischievous) possibilities it bringsher truth frightens us because, despite her age, this is a girl who is mentally, strategically, calculatingly adult in her (dis)hope. Like a volcano - which, apparently serene, hides geological whirlwinds that could lead it to a surreptitious but abrupt eruption - the narrator distracts the reader with cinematic events, makes them reflect through their cogitations, entangles them in Jénifer’s sweet gentleness, and then makes them realize the soul magnitude of the deception. Nobody would have guessed Jénifer’s chameleon-like ability... Is it time to seize it for the revolution that is necessary in the making? Me, you, all of us: let’s not miss opportunities when they can change the world.

Paulo Matos - writer (translated to English by Diniz Borges)

4 "In autobiographies and biographies, as in history, there are situations in which the facts don't tell the truth." (Ibidem)

5 Idem: 72

“We are cynical and vain survivors – starting with me”

Interview of Joel Neto by Literary Critic Vamberto Freitas

Açoriano Oriental, March 2023 (revised and corrected version)

Translated and edited by Katharine F. Baker

Joel Neto emphasizes that Jénifer, or a French Princess is “a book of fiction,” and that the best proof of this is that “it took these concerns to a completely different place.”

“Stories have an unassailable power, a transformative force without equal,” he says. “Literature will not change the world, but it is the best way to fail.”

Vamberto Freitas: Shortly before Jénifer, or a French Princess came out, you published a long essay in the weekly Expresso on poverty in the Azores that impressed many readers in the islands. Do well-known writers like yourself feel the need to become more involved in our society?

Joel Neto: More than the need, they feel the obligation. Or ought to. As I have already written, silence is an accomplice, so writers are never accomplices. Evidently it is our constitutional right as people to stay silent, whether for personal convenience, laziness, or any other reason. I don’t say this moralistically: I believe in both passive and active citizenship. Each of us does as we wish – to me, even not voting is as legitimate a democratic exercise as any other (although, on a larger scale, it’s also a sign of social inertia). But when writers stay silent in the face of injustice, they are also resigning from the role of writer. They stop being writers.

I will not stop being a writer, given the reality of poverty in the Azores. The numbers are grim. Regularly and permanently our region ranks nationally as:

• First in incest, sexual abuse, domestic violence, teenage pregnancy, physical assaults, and the rise in violent crime.

• First in illiteracy, failing grades, early drop-outs (more than four times the national average, the highest rate in Europe), and shortage of participation in cultural activities.

• First in alcoholism, childhood obesity, diabetes, youth suicide, child mortality, and the making and taking of recreational drugs.

• First in unemployment, poverty (twice the national rate), risk for poverty, inequality, income distribution, social exclusion, and lack of opportunity for upward mobility.

• First in dependence on the RSI [Rendimento Social de Inserção], welfare and subsidies in general.

• The leading region in the country in terms of nonvoting rate, and lower women’s civic participation.

• Last in life expectancy, three to four years shorter than for the average Portuguese population.

For those reasons we call it “poverty,” but it’s far more than that. It’s the economy, education, health, violence, civic participation – and each one of them in its most varied dimensions. Note that I’m not talking about subjective assessments. These are not my personal impressions: they are official statistics, collected or reflected in studies by the Azores Regional Statistics Service, the National Statistics Institute, Pordata, Eurostat, the OECD [Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development] and UNDP [United Nations Development Program]. They appear in newspapers daily, but are scattered. For years, no one linked or

systematized them. So it can be said at minimum that we have not yet managed to overcome this paradox: the Autonomy of the Azores corresponded to everything except the autonomy of the Azoreans – of the people (or of many thousands of people).

We have the youngest society in the country, just as Africa has the youngest societies on the planet. One in four of our young people aged 15 to 34 do not work or study. Meanwhile, drug addiction grows unchecked, violence grows unchecked, corruption grows unchecked. Seven of the nine islands are officially in a demographic emergency – there are no people. And I will not look back, when I become old, and say of myself, “You got used to material comfort and society’s praise in your time, but were quiet as a mouse.” Not even my newborn son will look at me one day and say, “You were quiet as a mouse.”

In short, it is the kitsch that Kundera spoke of, “the absolute denial of shit, of everything that is essentially unacceptable in life.” If we ignore shit with all our might, it could seem less true. But at a time when we are making great strides toward the 50th anniversary of April 25th, and after that towards the 50th anniversary of Autonomy, let me at least ask how far have democracy and autonomy brought us? Being a democrat and an autonomist also means demanding better democracy and better autonomy. Neither of them can be reduced to a constitutional proclamation. How far has this exercise we are doing them taken us?

Well, in many ways it took us to a new place. Many people live much better in the Azores today than in 1974 or 1976. Infrastructure alone makes a huge difference, and it’s not just that. But at the same time, only a few have the path to this new life. There are thousands of families for whom there’s still no way out. The Azores are the best place I know for the middle class to live; obviously the rich live as well in the Azores as anywhere else

in the world; being poor in the Azores is fatal, a condition you simply cannot escape. Because, on top of that, the electoral cycles are very long.

The truth is that thousands, tens of thousands of children, teenagers and young people on these islands will never be able to rise above their parents’ social status. There is no upward mobility. And this is all the more absurd given that we have had a tap gushing European money in our backyard for almost forty years. A money pipeline coming directly from Brussels. For what? Precisely to undo inequalities: inequalities between the Azores and the rest of the Portuguese and Europeans (inequalities that continue to worsen); and inequalities among Azoreans themselves (which are, at best, stagnant). I’ve been writing about this for more than ten years, and for a good eight years no one has cared.

Meanwhile, I feel relieved that the issue is finally entering the region’s political agenda. I even tipped my hat to José Manuel Bolieiro, who made it a campaign plank. But words are always the easiest part. We were left to take the remaining steps, and in a short time the party clientèle and politicians’ personal agendas had reduced this demand to cynical and cruel electoralism.

VF: To me, your extensive fictional work has the great novel Arquipélago at the center of the literary canon of an entire generation that followed mine. Does fiction once again have to address social themes in artistic languages?

JN: I’m grateful for the assessment regardless of who it comes from. It’s not a view I dwell on, but it obviously moves me. Arquipélago is a book of great significance for me because it:

• Is the book that, deep down, I was already working on along with all the books I had published until then.

• Catalyzed my return to the Azores, the best personal decision I’ve ever made.

• Gathered a community of readers around my work that still follows me to this day.

• Is above all where I try to decipher further what this landscape, these people and their looking to me mean. The fact that it has attracted attention from media and critics is, let’s say, a (very) happy compliment.

Yes, my social concerns are already there. Throughout the book, in particular at an infamous lunch where, determined to understand the islands he’s originally from and to which he now returns, José Artur Drumonde meets with lawyer João de Brito and suggests this:

“And now, professor, you will get home, turn on the computer and open the Instituto Nacional de Estatística. website. You will check all the rankings of human underdevelopment that come to mind: illiteracy, alcoholism, sexual abuse, domestic violence, early pregnancy, school failure and dropping out, unemployment, persistent poverty... And then you will see which Portuguese region currently leads in all of them. (...) It is on these islands that you propose to live. And I just want you to understand what this place is like and what the system is currently fed by. Or society, if you prefer a euphemism. Read a little about the history of Corsica to see how it all began.”

But of course those novels are long, and much more crosses the paths of both José Artur Drumonde and the reader. In a way, part of what I’m doing now with essays and in Jénifer is isolating

that material so I can limn it properly, because unfortunately the numbers are even more disturbing today. Some of them worsened in absolute terms and nearly all the rest relatively. In general, the Azores are today even more clearly behind the national averages. The financial crisis delayed us, and meanwhile the health crisis accentuated this delay, as shown by the latest data about the socalled risk of poverty. So what will happen with the inflationary crisis is not hard to guess.

Whether literature really has to reflect this, I’m not sure. The writer, while being a writer – I repeat – cannot be indifferent to it. The books themselves are always beyond the writer. Fiction books belong first to their characters and last to their readers. The writer is an interpreter, a vehicle, the operator of that diabolical machine that could perhaps be called intuition. However, sometimes characters make the best decisions. That’s what I think Jénifer did. As soon as I found myself in possession of enough outlines, I put my feet up against the wall and proclaimed, “I’m not leaving here until you tell my story.” I did well. I’m convinced that she’s one of my best characters and that this is one of my most important books – on a par with Arquipélago, the volumes of A Vida no Campo and Meridiano 28.

It is a fiction book. A cousin to works of narrative anthropology perhaps, but a book of fiction. The proof is that it took these concerns to a completely different place than my essays had managed to take them to. Stories have an unassailable power, an unparalleled transformative force. I’ve always believed that, and this book made me believe it even more irreducibly. Literature won’t change the world, but it’s the best way to fail. And sometimes, one day it really changes.

VF: What motivated your return to the Azores after several good creative years in Lisbon, leaving a journalistic work in some of our

best national periodicals, which you maintain from the island of Terceira?

JN: I came above all in order to write Arquipélago. Portugal was sinking in the infamous financial crisis of 2008 (between us, 2011), when I suddenly looked around and asked myself three things:

• How long will I, as a writer and journalist, be able to maintain a lifestyle that forces me to earn five to six thousand euros a month, while working in fact in a permanent state of frenzy?

• Was I really interested in living in Lisbon with less money, not properly enjoying the city, perhaps even forced to move to some nondescript suburb?

• Isn’t this the moment I was waiting for to pen the novel I promised myself to write so long ago, and which I have been replacing with books that are more or less scattered and lacking coherence among them?

That’s what I did, and it was worth it. I began to dedicate myself entirely to writing (although including newspaper articles), and the results showed. My books followed one another, readers appeared, critical praise grew stronger. Meanwhile, I never stopped getting commissions from national newspapers and, although I later added some radio (Antena 1), some television (RTP Açores) and a lot of podcasting (different projects), I’ve always managed not to depend on the local economy or public administration.

During these eleven years I have done a job or two for the private sector and (as far as I remember) one for the Region, but fortunately I have always gotten the bulk of my support from the national market. This has afforded me a great deal of freedom,

including of action and thought. And, as if that weren’t enough, my personal life has also taken a quantum leap: I married Marta, the most incredible woman I’ve ever met – a Terceira native from Fontinhas (imagine, your village!) – and last autumn the two of us became parents of a beautiful, healthy, cheerful baby.

It’s a miracle, all of this. A miracle that I owe first and foremost to this landscape. And I don’t plan on leaving again. I am very happy on Terceira, tending my garden, writing my books and taking care of my family. The only thing I don’t forget is that a few yards above me live dozens of people in extreme poverty. And that a few meters below me live not dozens, but hundreds of people in absolute destitution.

I’m at an advantage being from Terra Chã, and in fact I was born into a lower-middle class family that over the decades became impoverished. I know from neighbors, even family members, different degrees of poverty, which in several cases exceed the limits of indignity. I can’t be indifferent. I couldn’t, even if I tried.

VF: What distinguishes your literary generation in the Azores? Do you feel there is a continuity with writers of my age? Do you want to mention names that are references for you?

JN: I won’t name names in my generation. We’re big fish only because we swim in a very tiny pond; if we moved to a large pond, our smallness would soon become very evident. For that reason we have every interest in supporting one another, but we should not be more than coordinated waves for each other.

Our reference points must be the great writers in the history of humanity. The founding classics. The great narrators. Authors with courage. Salman Rushdie was stabbed twenty

times and lost an eye as the target of a fatwa for writing what I deem an inoffensive book when, after a decade on the run, he had decided to live freely in New York without security or fear. We, on the other hand, don’t even raise our voices against the injustices of a political and social system whose results are the latter – so as not to make enemies, lose a tribute, be left without a subsidy.

From a literary viewpoint, I don’t know exactly what distinguishes my generation. I’m not critical, and I’m also an anarchic reader. The systematizing I make is in favor of my work, which is fiction, insanity. If there’s a pattern I find, it’s this.

Azorean writers of your generation resisted a dictatorship, albeit in an unequal way, and then committed yourselves to building an entire thematic, melodic and even lexical edifice which in essence resulted (in part) in the very consolidation of Autonomy, of which you were both bards and composers.

We’re all heirs to this, for sure: to this universe of which Antero is the grandfather, Nemésio is the father, João is the prodigal son (etc.). Besides, we’re cynical and vain survivors – starting with me. But I still want to change the world. And I will make plans to my dying day.

VF: Is there room in your thinking and writing for any optimism with regard to the direction of Azorean society? Are our social media developing their role in civic discussion about these problems that concern you?

JN: By definition, social communication is always the result of the society to which it communicates. With the impoverished society we have, we couldn’t have better social communication. In many respects our social communication (or, come on, part of our social

communication) is even better than we deserve. But only now after great effort are we starting to wake up to this urgency. Hope, I have. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t bother: I wrote my books and did the rest. But at this moment we are experiencing an authentic collective hallucination. After forty-seven years of autonomy – and with the human development rates we have achieved with the thousands and billions of euros Europe gave us – the only thing we can think to do is demand the reinforcement of autonomous powers. “Strengthen autonomy,” we say. The Regional Legislative Assembly takes unanimous votes – unanimous, imagine: we wish poverty could deserve unanimous condemnation –and even creates committees. I don’t think we’re right in the head.

VF: Does autobiographical fiction, or autofiction – a term that has become very popular recently, and for which the Nobel Prize was awarded last year to Annie Ernaux – tell you anything? Which novels of yours, if any, would you place within this critical and thematic classification?

JN: All of my books are to a great extent autobiographical fiction. All literature is to some extent autofiction. Everything I’m working on right now is to a very great extent autofiction.

An Uncomfortable Truth of a (Truly) Unknown Paradise

If I hear one more person tell me how delighted they are to be going to the Azores on holiday I’ll, proverbially, scream! In the last few years, the discovery of the magical beauty of the Azorean islands, now unshrouded of its mythical aura through thousands of posts on Instagram, Facebook and Travel blogs, has stirred a desire in the average tourist, Portuguese descendant or not, to make a trip, minimally, to São Miguel, the largest of the archipelago’s nine islands of the Azores. An outcome of this influx of tourism has been an increased demand for accommodation, in its traditional form of hotels and small pensions, and as of recent times, through the offering of Airbnb’s not only in the city of Ponta Delgada but even in small towns and villages.

I should be thrilled that after spending my youth trying to convince my Canadian friends that the Azores was a real place, everyone now looks at me with a sort of envy – how lucky is Emanuel for having roots there! But back in the 1970s and 1980s, even those in cosmopolitan Toronto had not heard much about these “exotic” islands, lost somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

I should be happy to finally have the saudade I felt for most of my life for my home of origin validated and celebrated by the countless social media posts and “likes” that affirm the beautiful landscapes of Furnas, Sete Cidades, and other places of interest throughout these beloved islands.

But the truth is that the mystery and novelty of coming from such a treasured part of the planet, special as it may be, no longer allows me to remain in a perpetual state of mythical saudade for a geographical home. It did, for a long time, but I worked out my feelings of ambivalence over my family’s immigration to Canada

in later life, through many visits to São Miguel over the last twenty years to both my home town of Ponta Delgada as well as my father’s village of Achada in Nordeste. The familiarity of spending time with both the land and the family members who still live on the island shed away the fantasy of longing for the home of my childhood.

All this preamble is to demonstrate that I most assuredly would not be open to write a reflection on the theme of poverty or of any of the other social ills many who live on the islands face, if I was still under the spell of saudade. The danger of this state of mind and heart is that it sees the world through a rose- tinted glass. It’s like the curation of the best Instagram posts to promote a world that, beautiful as it shows, is also plagued by serious social challenges. The pretty photos on “Insta” diverts our attention – first generation immigrants and luso descendants alike - and makes us feel good and proud to belong to these islands, even if the Portuguese language is no longer part of everyone’s heritage.

It is with this personal current state of awareness that I was receptive to read Joel Neto’s novella, Jénifer, or a French Princess: The (Truly) Unknown Islands, translated by Diniz Borges and Katharine F. Baker from the Portuguese, Jénifer, ou a Princesa da Franca: As Ilhas (Realmente) Desconhecidas.

The author inserts himself in the story, reporting documentary-style, to reveal a side of Azorean island life few wish to acknowledge: the persistent presence of poverty in all its disturbing and uncomfortable truth set against a backdrop of breathtaking geographical beauty.

In his raw yet compassionate look at lives ruined or unsustainable due to economic want, resulting in systemic and generational poverty, Joel Neto follows the life of Jénifer Armelim, a young girl of almost eleven, who sits on the stone fence across

from her housing project, rather than go to school. Jénifer dreams of being a French Princess. She was told by an aunt that she had genealogical connections with the French, based on her surname; but I think this is her way of imagining a way out, of getting up from the fence which keeps her nowhere. Jénifer also wants to be a unicorn when she grows up or an astronaut or a whaler. In other words, she’s dreaming big of a way out of her confined life of poverty on a small island.

The French Princess ideal could be a substitute for the American Dream so many Azoreans have followed for generations. It’s a looking forward to a place that will bring opportunity, wealth, status, a place in the world. If nothing else, a new car and a house to call one’s own.

Certainly, when the wave of Azorean immigrants came in the thousands to the USA and Canada in the 1960s or earlier, as did my family, they hoped for a better life and for the majority, thankfully, they found it. But the conditions and opportunities for those willing to work any job was to be found in North America, and moving up the economic ladder was a real reward, whether you were educated or not.

In fact, education from a people whose highest academic achievement was mostly the quarta classe, was not pursued well into the future generations of immigrant children. Our parents focused on work and saving and buying a home. My father worked in construction, on a Tabaco farm, and at Neilson’s Chocolate factory until his retirement. My mother went to work in clothing and toy factories, as did my paternal grandmother and my two aunts on my father’s side.

The immigrant children either attended school or dropped out, usually to work. It made sense to these early immigrant families fleeing the clutches of poverty or close to it, to pursue

economic success. If you could make a living off the trades, then why waste time getting a university or college education? One of the faults of the statistical findings in Ontario over the years is the persistent belief that the Portuguese did not participate in higher education. Perhaps many did not, but the alternative was still a productive membership in society, through work. In my close family circle of first cousins, all of them completed some form or higher education. In my case, I dropped out of high school near the beginning of grade nine. Like Jénifer, I learned to skip school from grade 6 until I formally abandoned school. The reasons in my case had to do with my mal-adaption to coming to Canada and it wasn’t until my late teenage years that I found a way back into formal education. But at sixteen, I told my parents that I did not want to stay in school so the only other option my father allowed me to pursue was work. And work I did. My first job was on an assembly line and later I worked for Eaton’s, a major department store in Toronto. I learned the value of money and saving up, all before I was formally educated with a high school upgrade, a college diploma in Accounting, and ultimately a university degree. I mention this because if my parents could not force me to pursue education while I was in my early teens, they guided me to the next best thing, and luckily, the education followed. However, most of the western world, Canada and the USA included, is now very different from 60 years ago and the opportunities for any new Azorean immigrant of 2023 are more challenging that in the past.

I have a young prima, a cousin of 19 years of age, who just left her family in São Miguel, with the dream of making her life in Canada because there are limited opportunities for her back in the Azores. But she will face the problem of an exorbitant rental market in Toronto and, without any work experience and only a

High School diploma, I wonder how soon the dream will become a sour reality. For her sake, I hope she makes it. I have known her most of her life, seen her every time I have gone back to visit family in Achada, a small village in Nordeste, where my father’s family comes from and where some still reside. It is very strange to meet her on my own turf in the city of Toronto. Seeing her for the first time here, I was reminded of my own immigration to Canada.

I was nine years old then, when I came to Toronto with my parents in 1968. We were the last of our immediate family to leave Ponta Delgada, the city where I was born. My father’s family, his parents, and his two sisters with their children had already left. On my mother’s side, her brother went to Fall River, Massachusetts, USA. My father first went to stay with family in New Bedford before going to Toronto to be with his parents and sisters, saving enough money to later bring my mother and me.

Our family left the Azores for a better life and, I am glad to report, that they did find it. Through hard work and persistence, they provided for their children and gave them the opportunity for a life better than they would ever had, had they stayed on the island.

None of us was poor before immigration but we were not rich either. However, growing up in the Azores, I knew that poverty existed, albeit on the fringes of my modest yet comfortable life in the city of Ponta Delgada. My mother used to volunteer once a week with a charitable organization to hand out milk and bread to children who lived in the neighbourhood of the Bairros Novos, so close to where we lived on Caminho da Levada. I knew of it but I was sheltered from it, and certainly did not visit it as a child.

Yet, poverty was all around me, I realize now, but it wasn’t spoken about. It was acknowledged, at least by my maternal grandmother who would take in a poor neighbour and offer her

a free lunch, or give away a pair of shoes received in a container from relatives in New Bedford or somewhere in California. My mother remembers that once in a while, a shipment of clothes and other items would arrive from the land of abundance, and everything was gratefully received and shared.

If we were not officially poor, why did we leave? Why did so many relatives on my father’s side leave their lives in Achada for lives in New Bedford, Massachusetts or Toronto in Canada? On my mother’s side, to Fall River, Massachusetts, Sacramento, California, and even Bermuda.

In my parent’s case, my father had owed more money than he could ever repay and the only solution to be solvent was to immigrate. He managed to pay off all of his debt before saving enough money to buy a house here in Toronto. Back home, my father had a grocery store. He gave credit to everyone, I suspect because many could not pay. But their inability to pay resulted in his insolvency.

I know that money problems had been very much on my father’s mind when he dared write a letter * to António de Oliveira Salazar, believing that Portugal’s president of the Estado Novo would miraculously come to the rescue of those citizens in need. I don’t blame my father for his naiveté because when I was growing up, I had learned in school that we could, and should, trust our leader as a benign father figure who cares for his children.

My father had left his home in the countryside as a young boy of fourteen and came to work in the city, Ponta Delgada. That was his opportunity for economic change. His parents owned some land, vineyards and had their own house, a house that now would be the dream of a thousand tourists who would love to have a view by the ocean but which my cousin, who inherited it, holds on to it as part of our family heritage. It’s where I stay when I visit

Achada and soak up the views of the Atlantic Ocean below, grateful to my family for having roots in this part of the world.

My maternal grandfather had been a successful serralheiro. As a blacksmith he did well until that business began to disappear with the replacement of the car. His son, heir to the business, made bad investment choices, so my uncle and his family left for Fall River, USA.

I don’t know what would my life had been like had my parents not immigrated to Canada. But I think I can safely say that all the opportunities afforded me in Canada, would not have been matched by the social conditions of the time back in the Azores.

I’m in touch with young relatives who still live on the island and they tell me of the struggles and challenges they face; lack of job opportunities and the high cost of buying a house are some of the reasons they might even dream of leaving. But if they leave now, where can they go with assurance of a better economic life during such an unstable time, everywhere.

Today, my mother helps out a young family in São Miguel who live in Feteiras with money which she and a group of her elderly friends send every month. This family simply can’t make ends meet. The husband is unemployed, has a work disability that went uncompensated for, the children have multiple health issues, and their own family are not in a position to help them financially. But the funds my mother and her friends provide are not sustainable as a means to keep this young family solvent. My mother is 90 years old! One day she, as well as her friends, will stop contributing to this family’s economic well-being, and then what?

Doesn’t the local government care? I don’t know the answer to this question. I do hear a lot about local politicians celebrating the old immigrants, those who have made it across the pond, and now send money or whatever else immigrants do to repay their

old country in gratitude for their success. But relying on gifts and the generosity of those people bound by feelings of nostalgia and saudade is an unsustainable and false way of meeting the needs of a people. It’s a band aid solution that keeps the poor entrenched in their poverty in the guise of well-intended charity.

My family was shocked years ago when we began to hear through the newspapers that there was a drug problem on the island. And watching the recent Netflix series, Rabo de Peixe, which tells the famous story of how drugs one day appeared on the island, and ruined a generation, was unbelievable to see. It was so strange for us to think of São Miguel as a place where the infiltration of drugs could be a reality. Young boys stealing old earthenware pots and bedroom Redomas with statues of Saints from their neighbours to sell to antique dealers in the city to support a drug habit.

Yet, we also knew the trouble of drugs here in Toronto. Many families had at least one son addicted to something. But there was vergonha in everyone’s mind and out of shame, no one was willing to admit to, or face head on, issues of drug addiction and family violence in all its ugly permutations.

That things were going from bad to worse was unthinkable to those of us now living so far away from the Azores. Not that Canada was or is free of its own ugly truths about poverty, drug addiction, and family violence. I remember the shock I once felt while visiting Vancouver, turning the corner of a street and seeing a multitude of the unwanted of society on the other side. I simply turned back and walked again on the pretty, safe streets of the city.

And I suppose that’s what is done everywhere: a turning of our backs, a quick refresh of the Instagram page will keep assuring us that our lives are good, that there is only beauty in the world; that it’s better to see that beauty and walk away from what is also the ugly, disturbing, and wretched other side of all the tourism

slogans, be them to champion the small Azorean islands or the big cities of the world.

There are now food banks near my upscale neighbourhood and I see huge line ups of people, many who no longer fit the stereotype of the down and out. Since the pandemic, many have lost their jobs and haven’t regained them. They, too, need to eat, but the price of food in Toronto keeps going higher, as does everything else. Are there any Portuguese people in those lines? I don’t know. What we do focus on is mostly on those things that will build us up as an ethnic group: the success of mobility into the suburbs, economic stability, a mortgage free home, money in the bank. The truth is that Azorean immigrants brought with them a strong work ethic, and for the most part contributed to the building of cities like Toronto. There is no reason not to feel proud of “us” as a group. But there will always be those who remain disadvantaged for all kinds of reasons.

Poverty and homelessness is not unique to one place but has become a shared global phenomenon. But it’s always particularly shocking when it occurs close to home. It’s when we start to pay attention even if we don’t do anything about it.

It pains me to look at the uncomfortable truth that many people who live in the Azores, our little bit of paradise, as one of my cousins refers to our home in São Miguel, struggle to make ends meet while all this beauty around them is being celebrated by the government and the tourist. I have no solutions to offer. What I have tried to do here is provide a snapshot of a family’s journey of immigration with economic necessity as a motivating fact for leaving to new lands. Sixty years later, my cousins’ children are doing fine. All this built on the foundation of our parents’ and their decision to leave the Azores, a place we still continue to look back to, never really breaking away from it.

Jénifer, the young girl in Joel Neto’s narrative, represents so many of those who, like her, wish for the title of Princess of France; or some other mythical, hopeful title that stands for security, shelter, food, the good life. I hope that all the Jénifers who live constrained by poverty find their France in these unknown islands.

* for my father’s story of letter writing to Salazar read https://thetorzorean.com/ 2016/04/25/my-fathers-25-de-abril/

Emanuel Melo – writer and transaltor

Who is the fairest of us all?

A reflection on Jénifer, or a French Princess, a novella by Joel Neto

Imagination is infinitely malleable. The creative individual with a strong imagination can shape it however she likes.

Jénifer is creative. She had a strong imagination. And she doesn’t hesitate to bend it to her will, a kind of refuge, a shelter from her grim existence.

Jénifer is blond. Few girls in the Azores have blond hair. Perhaps, therefore, she is not really Azorean.

Jénifer’s family name is Armelim. Few people in the Azores sport such a name. Perhaps, therefore, she is not really Azorean and her exotic name provides a clue to her origins.

One of Jénifer’s favorite fantasies is that she is a French princess in exile. Perhaps someday her “real” family will rescue her?

Jénifer’s current family is oddly put together. She and her older sister Mara have different fathers, though both have blond hair that presumably comes from their mother. Perhaps her mother’s current partner is her biological father, but nothing is certain.

While wild fantasies can provide a kind of cushion against cruel reality, Jénifer also had notions that brush close enough to the real world to contemplate as potential realities. The writer and narrator cannot take Jénifer seriously when she claims to be a unicorn, but only her fabulist tendencies raise a caution against believing her when she says she has a godmother in Faial. Why shouldn’t she have a madrinha in Faial? But she says she is going to live with her godmother, which is a little more questionable. And Jénifer adds that it was her godmother who identified the family name as French, thus supposedly providing the girl with evidence that Gallic royalty lurked in her background.

Jénifer is a craftsman. Everything fits together. She doesn’t hesitate to retool things. One of her favorite devices is names. It takes her several iterations to finally favor the writer Joel with his actual name, after first addressing him as Cajó, Manel, Zé Pimpão, and Chico. She is inexhaustible. Apparently he has to earn it. The writer is a native Azorean who has been away from the islands for several years. He is often struck by the beautiful vistas familiar from his childhood, but also with dismay by the widening gap between the prosperous Azoreans and the impoverished. This gap has been institutionalized. Despite generous funding for poverty programs from mainland Portugal and, particularly, the European Economic Community, the money pipeline has been meticulously directed in a very specific direction. Sometimes social workers slip small packets of money into the hands of the poor, which may well be the most effective of all their measures. The big money goes into the public housing projects that blossom in season with elections, just to remind people who must get their votes. The process has become so refined over the years, that the oldest housing projects have gone to rot and are now concealed behind more recently constructed endeavors. Jénifer and her family live in one of these old hovels because they cannot qualify for a new one.

Jénifer has picked up some skills in her young life other than telling tall stories. She prevails upon Joel to accompany her with Jota and his dilapidated tractor. They leave early in the morning (6:00 a.m. is very early for the writer). They work all day, milking cows, mowing hay, picking corn, and herding calves. Jota attends to the milking machines, but Jénifer does her part. Perhaps she could be a farm girl? But why bother? Jota regrets that he has no doubts; he tells Joel, “She’s sad, this little one.” The farmer gets a little carried away with his denunciation of the R.S.I. (Rendimento

Social de Inserção), the wonderful program that is supposed to reinsert the poor into society. “But when you look, “said Jota, “how many were ‘reinserted? How many did the government really want to put back on their own feet again? None. They’re just sitting there, saved for election day. That day they take their cell phone, snap a picture of their ballot, send it to someone in the party, and there’s another year of guaranteed welfare income.” Jota sees no way of avoiding it. Although he prefers to work on the land, among the crops, and within the livestock, young people on the dole see no need. Their older sisters are lured into prostitution (or simply raped), their brothers are in the drug trade (selling or buying), and the tougher boys can find roles as thugs or enforcers.

When Jénifer’s sister questionably achieves the pinnacle of success, Joel is profoundly shocked, but is subtly warned away from the “celebration” by the young men on guard. And then Jénifer reacts, but in a way that is certain not to save her sister or herself. The full arc anticipated by the narrator has come to pass, even if he was startled by its conclusion.

One more thing: In the novella, the narrator gives up. He surrenders to the inevitability of the grinding poverty of the island and the unavoidable doom of the burdened poor. He will not write about the looming disaster of the islanders. Except —of course — he does. The real-life Joel will not abandon these people without documenting their plight. He writes what he sees. Pay attention.

Anthony Barcellos – Writer

* * *

Jénifer, once again

First, there is the literary greatness of Joel Neto’s novel, Jénifer, or a French Princess. To be great, this genre’s fiction must obey specific theoretical protocols. It has to be able to tell a short “story” with a beginning, middle, and end, creating characters that the reader can fully understand, their interiority, and their total reality as if they were someone we had crossed paths with or identified with immediately. It’s one of the most challenging genres for a writer to achieve. It has to be brief, know how to manipulate its languages, and make the reader feel they know everything about the invented (reinvented) beings. A writer never starts from nothing - he begins from within himself and his experiences. He starts with those close to him or whom he has observed carefully, with whom he has had relationships; each starts from knowing his society, history, and happy or unhappy belonging. Joel Neto’s novel is his vision that reminds us, recreates us, and confronts us with our past and contemporaneity. Literary art is, above all, our reactivated conscience, everything that allows for the so-called pleasure of the text. There is no literature without this memory, without the testimony of a time, there is no literature without the collective anguish, there is no literature or any other form of art without splashing the human misery or anguish of being and being in a time and place, without their sufferings, without their happiness and unhappiness lived or imagined. Jénifer has the Azores as her geographical, historical, and political background, just as she could have any other island or more extensive land. Does it offend? All the better if it does. Jénifer becomes our character; her story is our shame; her life and half-millennium-old dreams

confirm what the Azores and their people have been. Paradise on earth for some - and what about others?

Jénifer, or a French Princess, has caused a stir among us. No wonder. I, for one, read the novel straight away without any complexes. Some thought it gave a “bad” image of the Azores as if reality could be hidden from everyone forever. Great fiction has this other characteristic - it’s the absolute lie, the reinvention of what we’ve lived and seen, of what we know. The smallness of any community is when it accuses an artist of anything. Except that Jénifer is born from other very reliable sources - the intelligence of a great Azorean writer, one of the most distinguished of his generation and all of us, and another that comes from his own daily life and a study by one of the largest and most prominent foundations researching Portuguese reality today, no less than the prestigious Francisco Manuel Dos Santos Foundation. Everything that Joel Neto fictionalizes - he bravely presents himself as the narrator of his novel, nothing new in universal literature - is grounded in reality. Jénifer represents the victim of our history, the intelligence of those who have always suffered in their time and our day, those who have suffered in the land of the capitãesgenerais, the capitães-donatários (the so-called original owners of these islands), whose only use today is to have herons and blackbirds land on the heads of their statues in our municipal squares. The tremendous Portuguese literature, especially that of the 1930s and the literature of all our years of a brutal dictatorship, transfigured Portuguese society. In the case of the Azores, the writers also dove into the supposed noble founders of ours, always and still figures who never set foot on our islands, received, inherited lands that were not theirs, and recreated here the aristocratic fiefdoms of the supposed mother country.

Are the men and women who govern us today any different?

Yes. They are our leaders, now legitimized by a democracy centralized in political parties. It remains to be seen whether their imagination could go a little further than the centuries of the foundation - of the caravels that arrived here with the unfortunate men and women from the banks of the River Tagus and with no other choice in the kingdom. They were the fallen in the kingdom. I don’t know about other islands. I know mine, more or less, like everyone else. What I know of the past is my Azorean parish, where almost everyone who could would leave. It was the 1950s, with muddy roads, untreated water in tanks for those who had the slightest possibility of this “privilege,” electricity that I still saw reaching the streets and then the houses of a middle class that was always on the dole, a small elite that I didn’t know in the “city.” Now I understand that I didn’t want to understand, from a year at the National High School in Angra do Heroísmo, without knowing that I was destined for the crimes of that same class, almost all of whom were in the service of the then National Dictatorship. Without knowing what it meant, I wore the Mocidade Portuguesa (a Young Portuguese fascist movement put forth by the Salarar Regime) uniform that I put on at the age of twelve - it was so that I would be just another criminal of the regime dominated by a rural citizen who wore black boots and had come from some village. I’m grateful to my generation for dismantling this farce in literature, which was all too universal, not just Portuguese. I’m even more thankful to the generation that follows us for not having forgotten or given any respite to any of this history, now in a democracy that is also vitiated, opportunistic, corrupt, ambitious, and wanting to own it all, as is now being said of another very “honorable” family figure, very well known among us, and who no longer remembers anything.

Joel Neto’s supreme novel, Jénifer, or a French Princess, is subtitled The (Truly) Unknown Islands. It underlines what Raul Brandão and Vitorino Nemésio had left to say. They wrote what remains today for the beloved and welcomed tourists - nothing wrong with this prose of discovery and nostalgia for the 1920s and 1940s. But my generation and the new generations of writers have other projects and ideas in everything to do with our land and our sea, the land of others who want to live it with us for a few days or their lifetime. Our new elite will no longer go unnoticed, in one case or another respected, or simply as characters to be laughed at and scorned.

This is the reason for art – all forms of art. To recreate what we have as a reality, to reinvent the other reality that the majority desires and that a minority ignores for their benefit, our new capitães-generais. Jénifer, or a French Princess: The “Truly” Unknown Islands, is one of the most eloquent and beautiful testimonies of the shame of my generation.

Vambero Freitas, literary critic

In BorderCrossings from Açoriano Oriental newspaper on January 26, 2024

Praise for Jénifer or a French Princess

“Assertive, forthright, courageous, Joel Neto offers us a strong libel against injustice and inequality. He does so in his style, in beautiful writing, speaking in the voice of a child whose innocence, as we shall see, has already been lost. A must-read book.”

JOAQUIM MARGARIDO

“Joel Neto shows, in a fantastic way, how horizons can close for many people. It’s a challenge to think about society as a political problem, and it shows it all in 70 pages. Highly recommended.”

TOMÉ RIBEIRO GOMES

“In a moving way, Joel Neto touches the wound that hurts my generation. We haven’t been able to eliminate the endemic poverty in our islands. We were able to build airports and ports and to build highways, health centers and hospitals. We have created an autonomous regime that we are proud of. But we haven’t solved the crucial problem.”

LOPES DE ARAÚJO

“A portrait that goes to the “bone” of the island that doesn’t appear on touristic postcards. The Azores are the most unequal region in the country. It is through this social tangle that Joel Neto’s work unfolds at a disturbing pace.”

RUI PEDRO PAIVA

“In the background, an explicit critique of the political and social system that not only allows these realities to continue but deliberately feeds them. These criticisms may have been the source of the polemics resulting from the work. But more than that (or even before that), it was simply that someone was writing about the subject.”

TIAGO SIMÕES SILVA

“An alert to Azorean society to the problem of poverty. And a stirring of consciences in a world where money from the European Union is pouring in.”

LUCIANO BARCELOS

“Talks about endogenous poverty on an island in the Azores in a raw, naked, and very harsh way. A great little book.”

MARGARIDA DE BEM MADRUGA

“Every page is a gut-wrenching confrontation with the reality of so many Azoreans. Over the last two decades, my fellow teachers and I have encountered two or three ‘Jénifers’ in our classroom.”

TELMO NUNES

“Joel Neto seeks to give some light to the intense darkness.”

JOSÉ CARREIRA