Interview With Elaine Ávila/ Gávea-Brown
Vamberto Freitas
There is little more that I can say about the writer Elaine Ávila. She currently lives in Vancouver but was raised and lived in Silicon Valley, where, she tells me, she was almost forbidden to be sad.
I understand her fully; my 27 years of life in Southern California were more or less similar. What matters here is her career as a professor and especially as a playwright and essayist. Anything I say here will be an overstatement, for she mines her mind and heart here as a luso-descendant writer as nobody, I believe, has ever done in a conversation such as this one. Pico is her point of ancestral origins, from where her great-grandfather first left in the mid19th century on a whaling boat, his sisters working as farm workers and factory workers in North America (California, Massachusetts), and Canada is now one of her homes. The reach of her writing is now almost worldwide. Portugal is very slow and perhaps reluctant to acknowledge her people in the Diaspora, even though Elaine Ávila has now received attention in Lisbon and, I hope, from this moment on, in the Azores, one of the centers of her personal and intellectual life. The following interview covers the rest of her story and literary works well.
interview was Elaine’s play Fado: The Saddest Music in the World, about the inspiration of Amália, whom she calls in this play the Diva of the divas
Elaine, you’ve been writing for a long time in various forms. What made you “return” to your roots in the writing of Fado: The Saddest Music in The World?
First, I must credit my cousin, Dr. Antônio Terra, who worked for many years as a physician in Macau, which gave him a kind of pension allowing him to take trips, which he and the love of his life, Cristina Rocha, used to gather those of us who descended from the Terra family (Alexandre, b. 1840 and Clara, b. 1865, on my grandmother’s side, from Ribeiras, Pico) into a complex family tree. Genealogy, at first, seemed to me a hobby, but it is a powerful way to bring together what has been severed. Terras are now scattered in Canada, the U.S., the Azores, London, Macau, and mainland Portugal. When I met Antônio, he considered it a great tragedy that I had never seen where we both are from the Azores.
I grew up, almost entirely outside the Portuguese community, in Silicon Valley, a place of extreme American optimism. Sadness was almost forbidden. So, I found Antônio’s deep sentido (feeling) about me not knowing where I was from to be an overreaction at first. But now I believe him to be 100% correct. Knowing where you come from, who your ancestors are, the lands and the sea, and the stories, dances, and songs that sustained your family… all of this is powerful.
What gave an origin for this late coming
Antônio organized a family reunion, in my ancestral village of Ribeiras, on Pico. We had a formal lunch in the Clube Desportivo Ribeirense, and Antônio spoke about how it felt to have re-gathered and
10
re-connected us, an essential part of his life’s work. He said he was grateful that a writer in the family could tell our stories, predicting that I would come back to Portugal many times. Antônio’s endorsement of me as a writer came as quite a shock. (But now that I know how much Azoreans love literature, through your colleague, Dr. Onésimo Teotónio Almeida’s recent online talk, at Diniz Borges’ launch of Bruma Publications about the extraordinary, ongoing record of publication in the Azores, it makes great sense.)
has only recently reclaimed his name. This week, I saw a clip from the television show, created by Henry Gates Jr., called “Finding Your Roots.” Actor Maya Rudolph burst into tears when she saw a ledger of slaves where her ancestor was only listed as a 5-year-old boy. So young. No name. Only this scrap of evidence in a ledger.
Your question touches on something central to life in Canada and the U.S., and to my life in particular. If most traces of your cultural background have been, more or less, effectively wiped out, why did that happen? Who does it serve? What happens when you reclaim them? Or if relatives like Antônio and Cristina come along to reclaim you?
In America and Canada, I’m not the only one who doesn’t know their ancestors, who must fight to, as I call it, for them to “reapparacer.” (reappear). Antônio and Cristina showed me that I could go back, which isn’t always possible for many people. I’ve worked with a director from Iran. When her family came to see my play about Azorean immigrants and oil (Kitimat), they shared that they can never go to their homelands, they well knew the devastating effects the thirst for gas and oil can have. I have an Inuit friend whose name was taken when he taken to go to residential school, and he
11
em cima foto de elaine àvila à direita capa do seu livro “fado the saddest music in the world”
Secondly, yes, Fado is the first time I have explored a character attempting to reclaim her roots. But I have written other plays with Portuguese themes—you know my play Café A Brasileira, which won the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon Short Play Award, but I have also explored food sovereignty and climate change in Portuguese Tomato, which was performed all around the world, but specifically, in Portugal: Sintra, Covilhã/Belmonte and on Pico. I wrote this play after hearing about what the E.U. is doing to break ancestral food ways in Portugal and after learning about the food sovereignty movement, La Via Campesina, founded in Belgium by 182 organizations in 81 countries.
Kitimat, which is about to be published, was performed in Lisbon, Los Angeles, and Western Canada; it is about an immigrant family to Canada from Achadinha. This Azorean family are torn apart, as many families and friends were when an oil company spent enormous sums of money to try and convince them to support an oil pipeline project, offering to transform the fastest declining town in Canada.
The first time I explored Portuguese themes ever was in At Water’s Edge, a title inspired by the Portuguese word—Beira Mar. Ironically, the main characters disavow their roots, but as they build their dream home, their ancestors’ ghosts rise. I have also written other Portuguese plays for my cousins in my collection, Jane Austen, Action Figure, and author Esmeralda Cabral consulted on translating two of these short plays into Portuguese so that we could perform them at the Encontro Pedras Negras Festival on Pico in 2017. I learned from Azorean author Carolina Cordeiro, who read the part of Jane Austen in my play (she mixed her mother’s story with that of
Jane Austen, in her three novels) that life for Azorean women, especially during the orange trade years, in the 19th century, bore striking resemblances to Jane Austen novels.
Plot and character become one, when a woman must depend on the character of a man when she decides whether or not to marry him—immigration multiplying that question by a thousand-fold, as women, like my grandmother, had to leave everything and everyone they knew after they agreed to marry. So, in other words, are some of my plays Azorean or Portuguese, and I don’t even know it?
Terry Costa, Artistic Director of MiratecArts, who runs multiple Azorean festivals, including Encontro Pedras Negras, and author of the charming children’s book, Néveda in Azores, came to my first play with Portuguese themes, At Water’s Edge, on its Vancouver premiere. We’ve been friends ever since. Terry has done so much to uplift my work and to connect me to the community and will be directing the Azorean premiere of my next play, Capotes, translated by Terceiran novelist Diana Zimbron. I’m also indebted to the Playwrights Theatre Centre, who supported my work, writing Portuguese plays, for three years, through their Associates Program.
12
foto de elaine àvila E terry costa
As to why I started writing on Portuguese themes, in some ways, the question is mysterious to me, and I can only say that my Azorean grandparents planted seeds in me when I was young, and they, eventually came to fruition.
Before we get to other significant events in your life, both as a professor and writer, talk about your coming to the University of the Azores as a Fulbright Scholar in 2019 and your decision to write another play on the condition of Azorean women rather than on the condition of Azorean life in general?
I was on a quest to write a play specifically for my ancestors. My play, Fado, is perhaps, not a specifically Azorean story. There are Azorean stories embedded in it, such as the story about Antônio (yes, a character named in tribute to my cousin) riding a bicycle to create electricity to power the projections of movies in his village (that’s how movies were seen in Ribeiras, Pico, my ancestral village) and the experience of living as openly gay in a small Portuguese village are from a close Azorean friend. When I had a reading of part of the play at the Encontro Pedras Negras Writing Festival on the island of Flores in 2019, during my Fulbright, I was utterly astonished at how Azorean the entire play is; the actors and the audience members immediately understood things I could take a lifetime to explain in Canada. The process of de-assimilating myself happened to go through Lisbon, through fado, Lisbon’s song. But fado is also a song sung in the Azores, a song my grandparents sang. Yet I needed to hone in more precisely.
friend, the lawyer, and author Manuel Azevedo from Pico, gave me a book he wrote and asked me to make it into a play. It doesn’t get any clearer than that! The book was about Maria Lopes, the first woman in the Azores to be taken by the Inquisition. So, I knew the next play should be about her.
But then I also remembered that a symbol of the Azores, perhaps of Azorean women, is the capelo e capote, a large cape with a hood, worn in different styles on most of the Azorean islands for about 400 years. Currently, in Canada (and the U.S.) women are being stripped of the burqa and the hijab. In Vancouver, one teenage woman was attacked for wearing a hijab on the “sky train”, our metro, or subway. At the airport, another teen woman was stripped of her hijab by security guards. In Quebec, a new law denies female teachers promotions if they wear the hijab. In Alberta, a woman shared that she lives under fear of constant attack for wearing the burqa in public.
Meanwhile, American and Canadian women are generally expected to denounce women who wear these garments as oppressed. I decided that a garment this divisive, one that is also, more or less, from my own cultural heritage, would also be a powerful inspiration for a play. So, for my Fulbright, I researched Maria Lopes, and went to archives to research capotes (in Terceira, Faial, São Miguel, Pico, and during the pandemic, Corvo, online) and interviewed contemporary Azorean women and men about their experiences of the cape
So, after writing Fado, I thought, could I write a play specifically for my ancestral lands for my Fulbright? How would I do this? Then I remembered that a close
As you know, both men and women wear the capote at the University of the Azores, the only university in Portugal with a hood. There are complex rituals around wearing this academic regalia.
13
In folkloric groups and historical societies, the main speakers about the history of the cape are men.
Maria Lopes, I discovered, went to the most famous 16th-century writers in the Azores for help: Gaspar Frutuoso. Although his background was also Jewish (“New Christian”), he had to turn her away, and she was ultimately, burned at the stake. Her son turned in Maria. So, although my plays started with research into the female characters, ultimately, there are plenty of roles for men.
My Fulbright ended up being an incredible experience. Dra. Graça Borges Castanho was my contact at the University of the Azores. She was recently awarded an “Outstanding Woman Listeners in the World” award, the only Portuguese to achieve this designation (with 25 other prestigious women such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, First Lady Jill Biden, and United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed in being recognized for promoting the importance of listening in achieving equity, inclusion, and justice.) As you likely know, Dra. Castanho has her own television show and at one point, ran for President of Portugal. She introduced me to some of the most prestigious historians and academics of São Miguel and experts in research and traditions, for which I will always be grateful.
the first performances of Fado, I had the privilege of sitting next to a table full of Azorean women in their seventies who came to the play dressed in all their finery. They were so excited to be at a Portuguese play—it was such a treat. As I was joining their table, I tried to explain to them that I was the playwright, but they couldn’t comprehend it. It was too far out of their circumstances. I had a similar experience during my Fulbright, I tried to tell people I encountered that I was there to work. But, as so many Azoreans had to leave the islands to find work, and the majority of those who return become tourists to their own culture, me working in the Azores was incomprehensible to most people. So, if you are doing something new, it may not be seen at first. The expert to answer your question would be Dr. Anna M. Klobucka, who has researched the history of Portuguese women writers.
I attended one of her recent talks, where she pointed out that there is no Portuguese equivalent to Jane Austen—the barriers to women writing in the 18th century were too formidable. She is the current Fulbright Scholar to Portugal and will be doing work on women writers of the early 20th century, including the Azorean Alice Moderno.
Looking at your extensive academic history as a professor of creative writing in various universities in the world and a long list of theatre activity, only we in Portugal had heard little about you. Was this deliberate, or just your personal circumstances of your life in Canada?
I can’t say it was deliberate, so it must be my personal circumstances. At one of
Oona Patrick talks about your colleagues or friends in Lisbon putting on your short play, entitled “Café A Brasileira”, in Chiado paying tritune, I suppose, to the most famous café in that city where Fernando Pessoa used to have his drinks, and (I imagine) getting the mental image of his next poem. How did you react to that surprise?
You are referring to the very generous peritext Oona Patrick wrote for my published play Fado, about seeing one of my plays performed in Lisbon, Café
14
A Brasileira, which was performed by some of Portugal’s most famous actors, at the Jardim do Inverno at Teatro São Luiz in the Chiado at the Disquiet Literary Program in Lisbon, which, annually brings together Canadian, American, and Portuguese writers. Oona writes exquisitely about the performance, how close we were to the actual Café A Brasileira, Fernando Pessoa’s favorite haunt, how the city seemed to be giving me gifts, the sound of the trams, for example, the guitars strumming outside the cafe. It was also hilarious, how everywhere we went, for days after, we’d see the same actors on television shows or commercials —I still see some of them in Portuguese films and series, including the new one about Natália Correia, “Tres Mulheres.”
Café A Brasileira, much to my surprise, won the first Portuguese playwriting contest I had ever seen, and was created by Disquiet. The play was inspired by stories Antônio and Cristina told me about Pessoa’s heteronyms, and the reunion they organized. How do you explain your country, the one where you live, to a cousin? What if you tried to become a heteronym of your country?
My biggest surprise was when a primo from the Ávila side of my family, José, and his wife, Lina, came to the performance. I didn’t know him well, but as soon as José spoke, with the exact same accent as my grandfather, I started crying. José was my grandfather’s nephew. José and Lina told me that they had been too poor for theatre, so they had to try and find the theatre the night before, so they wouldn’t get lost. I was nervous that day, but José told me to sit up straight, to be “proud,” and my nerves melted away. After the show, José said, “at last, someone from our family is an artist.” Him saying that was better than any award I will ever receive. I can’t tell you why two sides of my family are happy
that I’m a writer, only that it moves me profoundly. It’s a testament to the barriers of poverty, class, and education, so many Azoreans faced and how they worked to overcome them for generations.
You were born in Cheverly, Maryland, grew up in San Jose, California, and now live in Vancouver, in western Canada. Was there a time in your life when your Azorean roots were forgotten or pushed to the side of more extensive and significant professional and literary goals?
I grew up as an assimilated person, so I didn’t know enough about being Azorean, or Portuguese, to be able to push it to the side. I became a writer because I noticed that too many stories were missing from our stages, and I sought every opportunity to become as good as I could.
When my grandfather immigrated from Pico to California in the 1920s, he wanted to attend university. He got a job as a farm hand on Prusch Ranch, then as a dishwasher at Santa Clara University, and quickly realized that he couldn’t be a farmworker by day, a dishwasher the rest of the time, and go to school. Instead, he went into the tuna industry in San Diego. I could never push aside the fact that he wrested giant tuna from the sea, broke ribs, and earned money to send his son and daughter to university, (my aunt and my father). It’s made me grateful for every chance I get.
15
“(...)as so many Azoreans had to leave the islands to find work, and the majority of those who return become tourists to their own culture (...)”
How much did it affect you being invited, both as a guest and as creative writing faculty in the Lisbon annual event “Disquiet”, which of course, refers to one of Fernando Pessoa’s most known books outside Portugal?
Meeting the writers at Disquiet, both as a prize winner and as Creative Writing faculty, was oxygen, lifeblood to me. Reading their work still invigorates and inspires me in vital and profound ways. I’ve collected Oona Patrick’s essays, available online, including her interview with you, into a homemade book because I refer to them so often. I hope someone will publish them one day, as they are essential, especially to the Lusodescendant community.
I found it amazing that Fado: The Saddest Music in the Word was staged and directed by one of your Mexican colleagues, Mercedes Bátiz-Benét, who shared, beyond friendship, your existentialist condition in Canada, with her second-generation son, also born there. Does geography or national origins matter at all in a multicultural society, or is it the human heart, what we usually call “universality,” that brings all of us into the fold of humanity?
Undoubtedly, the affinity between immigrants, we “citizens of diaspora,” as Mercedes calls us, helps us, the invisibilized, reappear. When I met Mercedes, I immediately felt I’d been waiting for her to show up for years. (For a long time, I had been the only woman playwright, the only woman director, the only one with an Iberian sensibility.) Mercedes even has a grandmother who lived in Lisbon!
For me, that’s one of the most beautiful aspects of art, when the ones you have been waiting for, arrive. I feel that way about
our interview. It’s such an honor to speak with you about my writing, about Border Crossings, to answer your questions, written by someone who has such a big heart for and deep understanding of writers in our Azorean Diaspora, who knows our literature so well.
As I read about your artistic, dramatic productions and bibliography, the universities where you have taught, and the awards you have received in various countries, including in Continental Portugal and the Azores. I am stunned by how long it took us so many years to notice. But now we have. Are you surprised by our critical lack of attention to your creative work? I am.
Thank you. I’m honored and delighted that this is happening now and excited to see how it impacts my work in the future.
I know you have written in various contexts about climate change. Do you feel engaged with the world’s current situation?
To answer your question about engagement with the world and the climate crisis, please allow me to give you a bit of context. Thank you so much for asking about this aspect of my work.
I am the co-founder, with two playwrights in New York, Chantal Bilodeau and Caridad Svich, of the Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA), now in its 4th iteration, with two anthologies published by York University Press, which involves 50 playwrights, 200 venues, and now, until Chantal’s leadership, it reaches over 40,000, worldwide. Last Fall, I directed a CCTA production for the University of the Fraser Valley, in Western Canada. We filmed a selection of the plays, then invited several of the playwrights to
16
speak to the audiences via zoom: an Algonquin playwright, one from lutruwita (Tasmania), and one from Uganda. At one performance, the playwright from the Yukon and from Mumbai also joined us.
There is much “talk” about “hearing directly” from the people (and nations) who are most affected by the climate crisis, but this Fall, I learned that the CCTA is quite effective at doing exactly that. There are many, many issues intertwined with the climate crisis. The plays were about government inaction, propaganda that makes us feel powerless, and the need for citizens to take certain matters into their own hands. The play from Mumbai was about the Jal Saheli, a movement of women who helped solve drought in over 200 villages in India, averting starvation for an entire region, despite the climate crisis issues. These women are not formally educated or used to leading, but they did it. I believe they will inspire me for the rest of my life. https:// www.firstpost.com/long-reads/ jal-sahelis-how-women-acrossbundelkhand-are-reviving-waterharvesting-techniques-6548851.
html
There were plays that encouraged me regarding the climate issues facing the Azores. Angella Emurwon, the Ugandan playwright, spoke about learning from her grandmother, a humble woman who took impeccable care of her land, recycling/ composting food and tending her plants. As you know, in the Azores, many places got electricity, roads, and running water so late (for some, not until the 1980s), so there is much ancestral knowledge about how to live without these things, in what we now call a “sustainable” lifestyle. While on my Fulbright, I heard some people in the Azores are gathering knowledge from elders about how to use
and care for endemic species. We have such a marvelous climate in the Azores, with trees, animals, birds, and plants that aren’t found anywhere else. But we are in danger of losing this knowledge, the kind Emurwon celebrates in her play.
During my Fulbright, I became curious about the sustainable practices on the specific piece of land that nurtured my ancestors for 500 years. Historically, Ribeiras was one of the only places on Pico that had land, and fresh water, and villagers grew fertile fields of bananas, yams, and corn. (Other parts of the island had to import soil to grow anything. On the neighboring island of Fayal, some workers were literally paid in barro, or earth.) What’s happening with the land in Ribeiras now? They have been told to grow bananas to export. Now they have to import food. I learned about this in a short film available online called “The Banana from Pico.” So, as you can see, this beautiful play from a Ugandan writer taught me how far we in the Azores are from the “sustainable,” in terms of our cooperation with the land. It’s complex: it seems that Azoreans were, pre-pandemic, successfully courting tourist dollars and cruise ships to come in order to survive.
On the other hand, Azoreans are innovators: successfully using geothermal power. Lisbon now has ten all-electric ferries. Joana Ávila, on Terceira, has recently designed a capelo e capote, for today, out of upcycled Marine plastic.
Do you feel you belong to two nationalities, Canadian and Portuguese?
Belonging is complicated. There are many places I belong. I feel an affinity with the Azores, although I would say I very much felt like an outsider at the beginning of my Fulbright, and even though it was only
17
three months, I would now say that the experience changed me forever: I feel a sense of belonging in the Azores that I have never felt anywhere else. As you know, I am an immigrant to Canada. Each year I am here, I see more and more that I did not grow up here and that there are some understandings I will never have. Yet when I return to America, everyone thinks I am 100% Canadian. So, I’ve got that “neither here nor there” feeling many emigrants share.
Being Azorean/of Azorean descent is also a fascinating condition. As Natália Correia says, “In America, I learned I was European.” For me, this means that an Azorean isn’t naturally 100% European, we’re the beginning of the Americas, and we are a mixed place, even if some of that tends to be denied, with a long connection to Africa, people coming and going from Brazil, the U.S. and Canada. Is Europe/ Portugal the oppressor of the Azores? Was the Azores a precursor of what would happen in the Americas?
Do you read your Portuguese-American Colleagues? I see that the great Katherine Vaz has a critical take to on your back cover. What about Canadian writers?
Katherine is our Queen of PortugueseAmerican writers. Like her, I was raised in California, so her work speaks to me on many levels. I met her and her husband, the marvelous Christopher Cerf, at the performance of Café a Brasileira in Lisbon. She humbly introduced herself, and I said, “oh, I know who you are!” Then in a great rush of feeling, I said, “without you, so many of our of voices would have been lost.” She got tears in her eyes. We’ve been friends ever since. So yes, I read Portuguese- Americans, Canadians, Portuguese, Azorean, Brazilian, Angolan, Cabo Verdean, Mozambican writers.
Some of the reasons for our vast Diaspora can be glorified, and some reasons are criminal, but as you know, it has given us literature that reveals much. Maggie Felisberto, whom I met at Disquiet, is getting her PhD at UMass Dartmouth, specializing in new literature of our Diaspora. She is an emergent scholar and writer to watch. If Portuguese speakers have curiosity about Azorean writers, I highly recommend your borderCrossings, and Diana Zimbron’s new radio show, Dálhe Corda, available on Mixcloud.
You are one of our major writers that has received little attention in Portugal, something you fully deserve. I have no explanation for this. Not your fault; it is entirely ours. How do you feel about this?
Having this attention is a great and unexpected gift because, when your work is reflected back to you by a perceptive literary critic, it can help enormously. For example, after reading my play Fado, you wrote, “e a voz dos outros ou outras se torna a nossa.” Roughly translated (I quote your original Portuguese because it’s so clean, like a perfect math equation), you are talking about my desire to explore what happened, to those who stayed in Portugal, and those who had to leave, using the long lens of history, and you say, roughly translated, that “the voice of others can turn into our voice.”
On the day you sent this to me, I was wrestling with a new piece of writing, trying to achieve this “nossa voz,” thinking it was impossible. Then, maybe it’s funny even you pointed out to me, that I had
18
“Being Azorean / of Azorean descent is also a fascinating condition.”
already done it. So why was I suffering and struggling? If I did it once, I could do it again. This gave me a kind of precious confidence to keep on going, to go into new places, which, as a writer, I love to do.
Are you the first member of your family to choose this literary path? Did you get the family support we Azoreans and some of our descendants wish for?
Yes, I am the first writer. It was my grandmother who made me a writer. She died a painful death from cancer when I was fifteen. I looked young for my age, so she would say, “you not forget Vavó,” over and over, and I tried so hard to convince her, to try to remember everything, knowing that scrawny, fourteen-year-old me was likely not that convincing. As far as shivers through my bones, I only recently realized that her desperate cry to remember her was not for her sake. It was, for me, a gift from her. Her presence lights my way. On my Fulbright, my friend Dorothy Gist said I had better bring my grandmother’s embroidery. I agreed, even though I had no idea why, until the bordado expert of São Miguel, Cristina Borges, met with me and read the messages encoded in my grandmother’s embroidery, the stories, the unique creativity. There is so much there, and Cristina taught me how to look.
While on my Fulbright, I heard many stories of the bitter jealousies between those who left and those who stayed. Those who left often pretended things were better than they were. Imagine rejecting your identity to survive—it can’t lead to supportive environments. But stories can heal and reveal these things, making us feel less alone, even if the pains are deep. And yet, you have what my cousins, José and Antônio, of the generation just before I said, to lift me, “at last,” “a writer!”
Maybe the support we dream of comes when we least expect it. Our ancestors have undoubtedly worked for generations to overcome class, education, and poverty barriers so that now, some of us, can even consider going into the arts.
I know this is not the question for you, but I’ll ask it anyway. How have you reacted to your wonderful writings, particularly your plays, being presented everywhere?
Thank you for allowing me to tell a few stories. I’ve had so many great experiences, including seeing my plays premiere in Panamá City, in Spanish, and loving all the sentido and understanding Panamanians had for my plays, something the director, Ted Gregory, wrote about so poignantly, in the introduction to my first book, Jane Austen, Action Figure. For me, plays are conversations, and I love it when the conversations continue. Ted Gregory, the Fulbrighter in Panamá City, walked me through the neighborhoods in monsoon-like rain, knowing that this would be one of my favorite things to do, sharing the Panamanian views on my plays. Again, it concerns hard living, feeling, desperation, passion, and the kind of laughter that knows hardship.
I love walking in places where writers have worked out stories, which I did all the time when I lived in Greenwich Village, in New York. During my Fulbright, I loved walking in Alice Moderno and Natália Correia’s footsteps in Faja de Baixo, which you know is near the university residence where I stayed. Another highlight was having my play premiere in London, seeing Shakespeare’s theatre, walking in his footsteps, and in those of many writers I love. I now live in a place where Indigenous groups exchanged stories for 9-10,000 years, where I now share and mentor stories with my writing students.
19
It’s incredible how this breaks isolation in our pandemic.
When Kitimat was performed at the Academia das Ciências de Lisboa, which has been there since 1779. Teolinda Gersão, one of my favorite writers based in Lisbon, befriended me. We spent the rest of the day talking about life and art, dipping into the Museu do Farmacia. Her ancestors were pharmacists, and the parallels between dolling out medicine from large, exquisite ceramic jars and writing were inescapable.
When I began writing my play, Kitimat, which, I believe, is one of the first Portuguese plays by a Luso-American (or Canadian) to be performed in California, I found a restaurant called Nuno’s. (Many Portuguese establishments in Canada and the U.S. used to hide under names like “European Deli” or “Latin Market,” all part of the hiding. At the time, Portuguese cuisine was starting to be embraced.)
When the brother of the owner found out I was writing a Portuguese play, he came over and dumped his pockets out on the table, his Portuguese identity card, his escudos, the first American dollar he’d ever made, and he started pouring out his heart to me, his stories, his struggles. He knew all about Kitimat; even though it was thousands of miles away, near Alaska, he had relatives there. I invited his entire family to opening night. This experience with Nuno’s brother is why I write; it’s one of my most treasured experiences. Stories are swapped, expanded, and grow, like bruma (Azorean mist), sweeping us in.
poetry, history, and visual art. I’ve done some profiles where archeologists and people using historic printing presses have brought me into their worlds, their day-to-day existence, and how they dig, think or create, and I wonder why I get to lead such a fabulous life with windows into other lives.
Writing about a book by Dr. Darlene Abreu-Ferreira, Women, Crime and Forgiveness in Early Modern Portugal, was fun because the legal cases were mainly from the Azores. The Portuguese can be meticulous scribes, so it was fascinating to read what cases were brought to court in the 15th century, literally reading our ancestors’ exact words.
Have your Portuguese roots become a constant part of your future writing, or does this depends on other factors?
Yes, it is a constant part of all my writing, an integral part of who I am, even if I write about other things. In retrospect, maybe it always was.
Do you realize that from this moment on, even when you write in English, your literary production will be considered both Canadian and Portuguese?
You have a diverse bibliography. Regarding your essays, what interests you most in literature in any genre or form?
Thank you again for the chance to tell a few stories. I love writing about theatre,
You are bringing this to my attention, and thank you, it’s a great honor! Perhaps I had to wait to take up this mantle. In my play Kitimat, I wrote about emigrants from Achadinha, for example. If, at the time, I had known that the people inspiring me also inspired the great writer João de Melo, maybe I would have been. too intimidated to begin. You speak about our writing being from the margins. A footnote inspired my first play. Perhaps in this interview, the margins speak to footnotes, with the dream of moving more of our writers to the center of the page.
20
Your Fado: The Saddest Music in the World sends shivers through my bones. We can’t help it; our mothers and fathers made sure to instill all this in us. How were your moments of entertainment in the best moments of your home family?
Thank you so much! For me, this is a question from your Azorean side. As a child, in my home family, we didn’t have moments of entertainment, certainly not like the folgas of Pico! It was my friends. We’d make up books and put on plays and puppet shows. Now, my husband is a musician, and my teenager writes and makes art, so we have live music in our home, read poems, and hang up recent creations. We’re likely as lazy as anyone, especially during this exhausting pandemic, but I’m grateful for these precious times when we entertain each other.
At one point, I rescued my grandparent’s guitars from rotting in their basement years after they died. The guitars were made in the Azores in the 1920s and 1930s: a viola da terra, a Portuguese guitarra, and a parlour guitar. There is a picture of my grandmother and her sisters, dressed in men’s suits, for carnaval, playing these guitars, when they were young. On the back, she wrote about the beautiful days that would never return. I cleaned the guitars, treasure them and display them in my home. One neck is in the shape of a whale’s tale; another guitar has the design of a wine casket as they use at folgas on Pico on the front. The guitars are a powerful symbol for me: my grandparents had to stop singing when they immigrated. My grandfather tried to teach me the chamarrita, but how could he do it, without a village?
Latin America. How did this come about?
The performances in Panamá, came about through the advocacy of a Latino writer and professor, Tlaloc Rivas. We served on a panel together in New York City, and grew up 50 miles away from each other. On this panel, I realized that I had never seen a Portuguese play, or met a Portuguese playwright, and I’d better keep on writing about Luso themes. Because the Chicano and Latinx literary and theatrical traditions in America are so strong, I would be lost without my Latinx colleagues’ love, inspiration, support, advocacy, and understanding
Regarding my plays being performed in Costa Rica and Peru, we have been working to translate the Climate Change Theatre action plays into other languages, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, so far, as our costs allow, to create more solidarity and understanding. Diane Zimbron has been translating my plays, and I’ve been translating her short story, and it’s a great new adventure for me. I am learning more about the Azorean “maneira de ser,” or way of being.
You’ve had your plays performed in Spanish in various countries, including
I just read your truthful, relevant, and funny play “Café A Brasileira”, in the context of the now historic gathering Disquiet in Lisbon, in the Teatro São Luiz, the exchange between the two main characters, João and Amália speaking from the Other World. But the passage that stays with me is hilarious, in both its truth and a kind of anomaly concerning the statue nearby of Fernando Pessoa, in front of one of his favorite Cafés, where women always sit in his legs and crotch, something I don’t think the great poet would appreciate: “…my dream friends, with whom I have enjoyed so many brilliant conversations in imagined cafés, have never had a space of their
21
own...” What a laugh full of sadness. The fado at its must truthful poetry.
Thank you, yes, I quote the great Fernando Pessoa here--”…my dream friends, with whom I have enjoyed so many brilliant conversations in imagined cafés, have never had a space of their own...” I’m honored you call the play “a laugh full of sadness.” That’s a great description.
You are the perfect example of what I call my own essay writing “borderCrossings”. Sorry for the self-mention here. But the question for you is relevant to our readers and me: how do you feel about the new politics of racism and restrictions for immigrants from everywhere who wish to look for a better life in the New World?
First, thank you for saying that my work exemplifies the aims of “borderCrossings,” which, if readers don’t know, is an extraordinary series of books, now in volume six and also available online. As your colleague, Ernesto Rodrigues said at your most recent launch: “Diverse in processes and the linguistic and geographic objects under study, Vamberto Freitas becomes, in this decade, the main Portuguese literary critic. However, without abandoning the indispensable intermediation of the literary thing, he can offer us a portrait of being divided between languages, territories, and landscapes. Double privilege, we will all gain one more step in the march of humanity.”
families of immigrants and emigrants, one would hope that we would be good and welcoming hosts, but the reality is complicated, and this is, obviously, now far from the case. But the reality is also simple: the climate crisis means any of us could suddenly be a climate refugee. The least we can do is take someone in, and welcome them if we can. Regarding the children imprisoned at the U.S. border, I wrote a short play as part of a benefit for funds to help reunite them. These children, some of whom tragically died, were separated from their families, have still not been reunited. It’s all a vergonha of the lowest order.
Returning to your “Café A Brasileira”. You write forcefully: Canada: My goodness is fragile/It might stand in the way/I took you in to give you a better life/ And now I see you, immigrants/Are not so sure… Portugal: We are silent/ Because we had to be.
Thank you! That’s when the cousins try to become heteronyms of their countries. This is the cousins’ second attempt. It’s funny, but it’s also, as you know, heartbreaking, in many ways, that our family was separated by migration in the first place.
Your grandarents immigrated from Pico. Do you know about their history, perhaps of their desperation in what was then a very poor and “marginal” region and country?
You are inviting me into a literary conversation with this interview, which has been happening for many years, and I’m grateful to be a part.
As to the question of the new politics of racism and restrictions for immigrants, it’s alarming, terrible, and criminal. In the Azores, the U.S., and Canada, we are
They protected me from it. My friend Cynthia Duarte taught me the phrase they use on the island of Flores, “fomos criados debaixo de um cesto,” which as you know, means that, to keep a family safe during a dictatorship (and perhaps during the Inquisition, as Maria Lopes’ son turned her in), you raise children under a giant basket, keeping certain realities secret.
22
My grandparents, of course, knew about life under the dictatorship but didn’t talk to their descendants about it. They also protected me from poverty. My grandmother loved Disneyland and took me on her favorite ride, “It’s a Small World After All,” but the ride always made her cry. Maybe because every nationality is represented, except the Portuguese, perhaps because she could no longer go back to her village life, the world, in reality, is not that small. I had a dream, many years later, that I sailed along the shore of the Azores, during their lifetime, it was all in sepia tones, like an old photograph, and I saw that everyone was very, very poor and, in the dream, I asked why they never told me.
But they didn’t keep me from all the hardships they endured. My grandfather told me the story of how he worked most of his life to own a small portion of two tuna boats, so he wouldn’t always have to be at sea when his children were growing up. He had a great deal of self-discipline, generosity, and foresight. But WWII broke out, and the war effort confiscated these boats and returned in an unusable state. He was so bitterly disappointed that he couldn’t even go to the docks for two years and ended up working assembling aircraft. And, of course, he had to go to sea and be away while his children were growing up. I will never forget how he told me this story. He had the perspective of a 90-year-old. Despite all the grief and disappointment, he shrugged his shoulders and was gracious, a gentleman. It gave me a lesson on how to endure disappointments, and sorrows, which come to everyone.
As a professor, I am very dedicated to the next generation of writers and theatre makers. I adore them! It gives me a precious window into what’s going on in the community. Last night, I taught students from the Middle East, Cypress, Israel, El Salvador, and Indigenous cultures; I have students from Argentina, Nigeria, Uzbekistan, and Russia. I view teaching as passing on gifts that I have been given. Our generation has done/is doing what we can, and it’s up to them to do what’s next. Motivation is a fascinating question, especially during the pandemic. Theatres, for the most part, are shut. What are playwrights writing for? Even novelists and nonfiction writers, who I might consider to be the introverts of the literary world, complain about isolation these days, the lack of book launches, tours, and ways to gather. Yet literature and writing continue to require faith and provides solace and magic, even now. This is why I am enormously grateful to those who do the work of gathering us online (Diniz Borges of the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute, Terry Costa of MiratecArts, Arquipélago de Escritores, MalAmanhados (the Azorean T.V. show you were on!), my publisher, Talonbooks, Fulbright Portugal, the Calarts Alumnx Seed Grant, which helped me make short (and beautiful) videos of some of the cape monologues with colleagues in Canada, the U.S., and the Azores.)
Finally, a professor is always driven by a kind of mission and dedication to the next generations. What motivates you to continue writing?
I write because I believe each of us has something to contribute. It can be a life’s work to figure out exactly what that is. Writing stories that are missing--from women, workers, the climate crisis, and the Portuguese, especially Azoreans-is what I’ve got to give. Thank you so much for this interview; it’s a big gift to contemplate your questions; it helps to keep my sentido alive.
23
24
ao lado: imagem da peça de teatro “fado” de elaine àvila Em baixo: foto de vamberto freitas
