Our encounter with History: what does it mean to be Portuguese today?

“I speak of millions of men torn from their gods, from their land, to your habits, to your life, to life, to dance, to wisdom. I speak of millions of men in whom they wisely inculcated fear, inferiority complex, the trembling, the genuflection, the despair, the servility.”
Aimé Césaire, in “Discourse on colonialism”. [prefácio Mário Pinto de Andrade]. Cadernos Livres Collection, n. 15. Lisbon: Livraria Sá da Costa Editora, 1978.

Countries built – build – their identity based on historical events that were significant for their collective life as a community. And there are events that, due to what they represent, factually or symbolically, are central in the definition of this identity matrix. A narrative is often constructed around these events that tends to glorify the deeds and the protagonists as representatives of the community’s desire. The narrative is absorbed, creating myths that stick to our skin in such a way that it becomes difficult to free ourselves from them. Which prevents us from having a more detached look at our own identity. I think this is the case with all countries. And Portugal will be no exception. What, I believe, differs is the way in which each country relates to its History, namely with the founding events of identity, the way in which that History is transmitted and what configuration the new generations absorb from the collective identity in a world that has become global, close and perhaps more distant from the past. In other words, how we accept our History, with its good, less good and even bad aspects, in our relationships with the people we encounter.

History is not limited, as we were taught during the Estado Novo, to the enumeration of facts and their glorification, but it requires that we have a critical, interpretative look at them, without this diminishing or erasing them. The consequences that resulted from them could have been different if the options had been different. But in their context they were one and not the other. Such a vision will not raise major problems, except when it comes to fundamental facts of the identity matrix. When it comes to what we think is our identity, any criticism is seen by some (many?) as a defilement. What does it mean in today’s world to be Portuguese? What image do we have of ourselves? The absence of, as Eduardo Lourenço recalled in Labyrinth of Longing“a critical discourse on the images we have forged of ourselves”, created several misconceptions in Portuguese society that oscillate between the desire for grandeur and a kind of subalternity syndrome.

We see ourselves not only as different – ​​which is normal – but as better, superior: independence, a struggle between masters with Freudian touches, became the desire of a people and a territory that did not yet exist as entities; the Estado Novo was not as cruel as other dictatorships, it was even a mild fascism, almost a non-fascism; we tried to humanize Portuguese colonialism by believing that, unlike others, we even mixed with the colonized (did those who mixed have alternatives?); As for the slave market, it always existed and others profited more than us; April 25th was an idyllic revolution to the point that we almost forgot (omitted) its four dead and fifty injured; There is no racism in Portugal, although there are those who are. These are some of the ideas that permeate our society and that show, in a way, that we continue to think of ourselves as if there were no other interlocutors, as if History were a solitary path and not a dialogue with other realities different from the one we idealize. . We tend to take no responsibility, because the important thing is the rules and whoever follows them, whatever they may be, does not deserve punishment. It’s just us with our History. We are the ones protected by the divine hand and not so much by human art and knowledge. A balance between the superiority complex and the inferiority complex.

The problem is that reality sometimes imposes itself on us suddenly without us wanting it and then the mess is spilled. The advance of populist radicalism, the revival of retrograde ideas out of time, enslaved immigration in the name of dubious needs and lack of responsibility, difficulty in discussing our recent history in the name of a homeland for so many stepmothers… And now the discussion about reparations, compensations, returns or whatever. We feel adrift again without knowing for sure what our place is in the History that we alone adorn without the awareness that there are and always have been interlocutors.

Despite the images of grandeur we created, we never stopped being Sebastianians and this is certainly one of our greatest weaknesses: in the inability to understand who we are and project ourselves into the future, we longingly await the miracle of Alcácer Quibir. It is still curious and a symptom of the disease how parties relate to former leaders or the “people” relate to former rulers.

The idea was created that Portugal is a good boy, with exemplary behavior, who can be forgiven for any missteps. .

Our projection into the future cannot continue to be a solitary walk waiting for someone to give us a hand, but rather a dialogical construction where our knowledge and art assert themselves, but where our interlocutors also have their place in the History that is our.

Isn’t this the opportunity to confront ourselves with our History in order to better understand who we are and what we intend to be?