O meu coração português
In January, I started a 150 hour online course to learn Portuguese to A2 level. It’s the final step in a citizenship program that we enrolled in as a family several years back, as part of an effort to mitigate some of the risks we face in South Africa and to broaden the options and horizons for Meg & Sam, now 21. I’d actually booked to sit the CIPLE exam in Maputo in November, but that got cancelled at the last minute due to the political instability in Mozambique.
This course involves four 4 hour classes from Monday to Thursday every week for about ten weeks. It’s a group class on a zoom-like platform, and to be honest, when I booked myself onto it, I saw it much as one would a chore or something to be endured. As it turned out though, I couldn’t have been more mistaken.
I see teaching is one of life’s wonderful asymmetries – so much more is gained by the students in a group class than what the teacher gives. When you have a gifted and passionate teacher, as our professora Joana is, the asymmetry is amplified further, and I’ve found myself looking forward to the classes every day and especially the last part of the class where we usually take a break from all the palavras, gramática e verbos, to delve into Portuguese culture and history, and what it means to be Portuguese.
In these parts of the class, we’ve meandered through so many topics, from Portuguese filigrana, futebol, fado, and Fatima, to some of the wonderful poems of Camões and Fernando Pessoa, the lost king Dom Sebastião, and the heroes of the sea who fearlessly set out to discover the world more than half a millennium ago. I never knew that saudade – a sense of nostalgia and longing – was so central to and deeply engrained in Portuguese ethos; this feeling that they have fallen and been humbled since the glory days, and still today dreaming of the misty day when Dom Sebastião will return. Of all I’ve learned about the Portuguese, I love this the most.
Isn’t it such a metaphor for many of our lives? For anyone who is even remotely self-analytical and introspective, the bravado and certainty of youth will gradually give way to a more measured and humbled view of ourselves and those around us as life schools us with its many lessons. The more crushing the experience or the deeper the cut, the more acute the lesson, and, if we let ourselves survive and not become embittered, we come out of it more humble and in touch with our humanity than before. Sometimes it seems to me that it’s only through heartbreak and devastation that the most precious seeds in our hearts can take root and flourish as our struggles and suffering define and refine us. We may end up looking back fondly on the heady days of youth when everything was so simple, but who would really want to return when our lives now are so much more grounded and rich than before?
Valeu a pena? Tudo vale a pena Was it worth it? Everything is worth it
Se a alma não é pequena. If the soul is not small.
But there’s a broader metaphor that I can’t help myself seeing, in that like the Portuguese, we humans are ourselves fallen beings. I don’t know about original sin and the serpent in the garden, but I do know that the knowledge of good and evil, however we got it, broke us as beings because it became impossible for any honest person to live up to the notion of perfect goodness that we were given at the same time. Even if we see ourselves as living perfectly good lives in our bubbles for example, Peter Singer’s seminal 1971 essay on famine, affluence and morality showed that everyone who has more than they need in a connected world is complicit to some degree when there are people starving. In a sense, I think this is why the Portuguese notion that it’s good to be poor, resonates so readily – the poor don’t carry the hidden burden of affluence in a broken world.
That this and other moral conundrums we face are impossible to solve is the whole point – we are not capable of our own salvation. Try as we may and should, we will always fall short, as true perfection and goodness are beyond us. In the end, anyone who believes that our lives amount to something more than molecular biology has little alternative but to also believe in the necessity of grace and redemption. That like the Portuguese dreaming that Dom Sebastião will return to redeem them, we too need a Great Redeemer and to know that despite our faults and fallen state, we are worthy of redemption.
So as the course draws to an end I’m left with a tinge of sadness and I know in time I will look back on it with a small sense of saudade. I came for the language but really learned how much I have in common with the people of Portugal. I’m not sure whether I’ll ever truly master Portuguese, but I do know that the words garagem and vizinha will remain forever tainted for me, and if there’s one noun I’ll never forget, it’s what the Portuguese call a ladybird – a Joaninha.
