No Other Histories

(written at the Geographer's Café during repeated power failures surrounded by day trippers from Kuala Lumpur and Singapore taking refuge from the continuing rain)

Another of those strange Southeast Asian links. I have googled Kota Laksamana which to me is a neighbourhood in Melaka - built on reclaimed land right next to the old city centre - and it turns out that on a Phillippines island there is a place with exactly the same name. Yet most Malaysians seem to think about the Philippines as a country they have hardly any connections with. Postcolonialism has made us all stupid. When I was growing up in Brasil I had no idea there were people in Malaysia who spoke Portuguese as their mother tongue - or in Sri Lanka for that matter or, until very recently, in Kerala as well. In the days of the military Portuguese was taught to me as língua pátria, namely the fatherland's tongue. I also learned in history classes about the ethnic origins of the Portuguese. I still remember they are supposed to have come from the Phoenicians, Romans, Celts, Iberians, Celtíberos (a mix of the last two), and then the Visigoths, suevos (a kind of 'Swede' I guess) and so on and so forth. No mention of Jews or Moors, let alone sub-Saharan Africans (Lisbon had a substantial black slave population already in the sixteenth century. Through a strange demographic quirk blacks would only disappear some time along the nineteenth century to resurface again as African students and (former) colonial subjects in the twentieth century). No wonder later I would become interested in Scandinavian languages as a teenager in Brasília. I remember I even naively called the letters department at Universidade de Brasília to find out which Scandinavian languages they taught there...Scandinavia was the ultimate European homeland.

Everybody seemed to be back then blissfully unaware of any contradiction especially the glaring one of praising a fatherland or motherland whose ultimate roots could only be in the Iberian Peninsula (minus Jews, Arabs, Berbers, and Africans). I was literally being taught - under a nationalist dictatorship - that the nation was ultimately elsewhere and that we were at bottom just a colony in spite of having got rid of the Portuguese as early as 1822. There were other contradictions too: the history of the Celtíberos was of course not the only history I learned. I also learned about the ancient world, for instance, which back then did not include anything beyond Egypt as the source of Greek and therefore European civilisation (and at a further remove of our own civilisation in Brasil). Of course there was no notion back then that Egyptian history might also be somehow African history. Asia was distant and its history very hazy. Besides, I was also taught about Indians - indigenous Brazilians - and Africans (as slaves only). The indigenous Brazilians were very interesting: they were clearly depicted as primitives who had given us a few food items besides some interesting crafts, and also as the people that ultimately lent authenticity to Brasil as a separate nation. At home I was also taught that I descended from Indians though I was never provided with any specific details as to dates or names of tribes (interestingly I was also never provided with any details about where exactly in Portugal my mother's family had come from and when. To this day I have no idea when they crossed over and where they orginally came from). We learned little about the rest of Latin America except something about Spanish colonialism and the fight for independence in the continent (we learned something about the United States too but next to nothing about Canada). The Caribbean made an appearance only in the chapter on the sixteenth century and then never again. Pre-Columbian history was not taught except very briefly in what concerned Brasil only. There was no African history worth the name. Instead, we had bookloads of European history and of course national history as well. I had Japanese-Brazilian, Jewish-Brazilian, Chilean, and even Yugoslav-Brazilian classmates but I never once had a black classmate in my private school. I don't remember blacks working even in subaltern positions at the school let alone as teachers.

Historic Centre with Lamborghini, Cape Town

Nowadays I wonder what kind of lasting imprint I have carried over from my past. I am now in Melaka where there is a Portuguese community. Our link to each other is therefore via a remote colonial history - the colonial history which was hammered into my young mind a long time ago in São Paulo (and that never included any reference to Melaka). I guess in local eyes I can be a kind of South American Portuguese. Brasil has a strong identity, however. People know therefore I am not Portuguese. Yet the language is there, and here as in Brasil it is called Portuguese (some intellectuals in nineteenth century Brasil wanted a local language, say an indigenous lingua franca such as Tupi, elevated to the status of a national language, but nothing ever came of it). Noel Felix calls himself Portuguese without any problems. But then he lives in postcolonial Malaysia, and Portuguese power was expelled from Melaka by the combined forces of the Dutch and Johoreans back in 1641 (interestingly locals seem to have deleted the Johoreans! It probably feels much more prestigious and cosmopolitan to have been invaded only by the Dutch than by the next town down the road as well. Of course the Dutch and the Portuguese are also at best distant stakeholders nowadays. Not so the Johoreans). I cannot easily call myself Portuguese as I have the backing of a strong national historiography and national identity I imbibed very early on. It is however part and parcel of that historiography and identity to identify covertly and not so covertly with the Portuguese. Therefore, if Felix is Portuguese, on some level so am I, Celtíberos apart. Yet we are also not Portugal's Portuguese. In fact it is clear to both of us that we somehow stand closer to each other than either of us do to the Portuguese. Eerily it is language that reminds us of that closeness once again: we have an easier time understanding each other as each speaks in his own variety of Portuguese than might be the case had the Portuguese been involved in the conversation. The Melaka Portuguese in fact find Portugal's Portuguese too 'deep.' I also find it a little deep - and full of words I seldom or never come across in Brasil. Just as with Australians and British English I guess our Portuguese employs far fewer words than European Portuguese. We have spoken the language for centuries but being of various creole, indigenous, slave and immigrant origins, we navigate through the language in a very different way. It is ours but somehow we are detached from it: it remains at a certain level the language of the Portuguese, especially when it is the standard, written language (which we all learn at school as it is hardly spoken on the streets. Instead, people use several varieties of semi-Creole or vernacular Brazilian Portuguese which are all more than slightly different from standard Portuguese). They own it at some very basic level. Yet their ownership is also fraught with paradoxes: Portugal is a small country in Europe (in fact, far smaller than West Malaysia, which in turn is by far the smaller half of this country). Melaka - and the Portuguese settlement - may be tiny by comparison, but there is nothing remotely small about Brasil, Angola or Moçambique.

History's Dumping: Bhagavathy Temple, Kodungallur, Kerala

Therefore, lusofonia arises from within a conundrum: luso- points to Portugal, and yet it is never really said that the Portuguese are Lusophone. This last is usually reserved for people who speak Portuguese but just like Noel and myself are not exactly Portuguese - even though it may be equally hard to say they are definitely not Portuguese either. I should add that there is little that is 'racial' here. The Angolan super-rich, for instance, will buy their stately mansion in a centuries-old Portuguese sea resort such as Cascais even though they might as well have bought a similar place anywhere else in the world. Many people in Macau also keep empty houses in Portugal that cost them a good deal of money in yearly taxes, even though they have spent most of their lives outside the country. Therefore, the fulcrum of lusofonia remains somehow the 'motherland' but this last is not a conventionally powerful centre in spite of its admittedly prestigious location in Europe. Rather, Portugal acts more like a symbolic historical powerhouse though it can be comparatively little revered. In fact it can be often derided as well as the enormous stock of piada de português - jokes about the Portuguese - in Brasil shows. The Portuguese therefore have secured a lasting place for themselves in the Lusophone postcolonial world; yet that place remains somehow a far cry from that of France or England, for instance, amidst their former colonials. Here there is a contradiction at play: Portugal is Europe, but it is not Europe as in France. It is a kind of lesser Europe. It is too small, too lacklustre. The Portuguese even had to immigrate to Brasil, Africa, and Macau for a living (and continue to do so in largish numbers as I write this). Looking back it was more than a little peculiar to be taught about the ancientness and greatness of Portuguese history in the classroom only to come later across the neighbourhood Portuguese bakery or grocery owner. The impression was that Portugal might have been ancient and great but it certainly was not glamorous. France was. In fact, even Spain has had at least in recent times a better claim in that regard (may be that is why many Brazilians who go to Europe feel much more at home in Spain than in Portugal. Not unlike a couple of Brazilian cities, large Spanish cities are also cosmopolitan hubs).

Brenda Fassie's School, Langa, Cape Town

Of course Noel was not taught Portuguese history in the classroom (at least I assume he wasn't. Melakans know their history through oral retelling and reading of books). He went to Portugal together with Don - in a trip paid for by a Brazilian donor from São Paulo. The man who paid for his trip must have understood at some deep level the identity issues at stake here as well as acknowledged a like-mindedness. Namely, Don and Felix had a right, so to speak, of access to the motherland - a country who currently cannot afford to spare a penny to the Melaka Portuguese, as Noel and others complain. Noel is therefore aware of Portugal's relative lack of international prestige and real economic clout. Yet all the same it remains a motherland it is important to travel to. Without it the Melaka Portuguese would be Malaysians like everybody else. In fact what we could call the Portuguese mystique is at bottom quite powerful: even non-Portuguese Malaysians are caught by it. The museum of the sea in Melaka for instance is a replica of a Portuguese nau. The coming of the Portuguese to the city - which is considered to be the cradle of Malayness and therefore the ultimate origin of postcolonial Malaysia - is clearly a major event in local and national history as set out in museums and history books,  and not only because it started the colonial era. Most of the charm of today's Melaka is actually due to Dutch colonial architecture and Chinese readings of it; yet the Dutch are not locally as glamorous as the Portuguese. There are no Dutch ships anywhere, whereas there is yet another replica of a nau coming up near Porta de Santiago in town (a new extension of a shopping mall). If the Melaka sultanate was the founding moment of Malaysian history then that starting point is clearly powerfully filtered through the Portuguese conquest even in the eyes of the postcolonial state. I find that more than a little paradoxical. It is also at bottom not entirely different from what I lived through as a child in São Paulo: namely, the nation and the colony cannot be dissociated, nor can the link to the metropolis be severed. In Malaysia, however, the paradox is compounded in my eyes because there are other colonialisms which lasted longer and were arguably more important (first and foremost of course British colonialism).

Dutch Colonial Heritage: Portuguese Church, Melaka

By comparison, we were taught that colonial Brasil suffered 'foreign invasions' in the hands of the Dutch and the French, though calling Dutch Brasil a foreign invasion even though it was a short-lived colony requires something akin to a sleight of hand. It soon became a full-fledged cosmopolitan colony full of Jewish inhabitants (most of which would  have to flee for their lives when the Dutch left. Some ended up in Curaçao and other parts of the Caribbean, taking with them the sugar producing technology of colonial Brasil). There is also the Spanish period, when Portugal and Spain became one kingdom under the Spanish crown (just as that joint kingdom ceased to exist Melaka was lost to the Spaniards' eneny, namely the Dutch). The joint kingdom was apparently much less important in Asia than in Brasil (Macau in fact didn't even bother to acknowledge its sovereignty: it kept itself virtually autonomous throughout until the return of Portuguese power). The message was that the colony was basically and essentially Portuguese throughout. Strangely the message in Malaysia also seems to be that the Portuguese were more important than either the Dutch or the British even though they stayed for a shorter time than each of their successors and never extended their territory beyond the port enclave (in fact during their time Melaka was basically a harbour town contained within the walls of the Portuguese fort itself with a few extensions outside). In reality it is difficult now to wade through the shallows of this old history. Its traces are somehow long lost and yet are still powerfully present all the same. I confess not to know what to do with that history - a history that is supposed to be my history and yet it is also not exactly mine because I have roots in another continent with another, different history. A continent that is neither Europe nor Asia and that has besides a troubled relationship with Africa (from where about half the ancestors of today's Brazilians came from).

Almost all my life I have enjoyed reading good historiographical work. Now I am wondering whether it has really made any difference. We all seem to live within postcolonial mystifications of one kind or another. I don't really know what the value of historiography is any more. It all ends up being disseminated and taught in modes that are more akin to that of myth than history. In fact I now strongly suspect historians themselves are at the root of a good deal of mystifications. What in fact authorises us to speak of a Portuguese colonial world or even a Portuguese America? An old political colonial tie? I have always suspected that what made Brasil what it now is has been largely Brazilians themselves, whether immigrants and slaves born elsewhere or the locally born inhabitant of European, indigenous, African or Asian ancestry. Of course we would have been a different country now had we been colonised by say Denmark; but I doubt very much we would have been so totally different. Slavery would have existed all the same (both indigenous and African slavery that is); there would have been indentured labourers after slavery too (in the case of Brasil they were mostly Chinese, Japanese and Italian, whereas in Suriname to the north they were Chinese, Caribbean, Portuguese, Indian, and Javanese); considering the size of the country, a local elite of varied regional origins and attachments would have certainly come up. That elite would have claimed power for itself eventually just as its counterparts did in the rest of the continent, following the precedent set by the United States and then Haiti (this last however had at one point a much more promising and popular independence movement. A truly revolutionary one). Yet in spite of all this I had to imbibe throughout the many details of Portuguese history, European and colonial. Research is still inevitably being carried out through the use of archives in Portugal (what else could we do as these remain the most important archives to this day both in what concerns Brasil and sixteenth and seventeenth century Melaka?). Of course the language of the archives is mostly or only Portuguese under its various historical forms, and the points of view of the documents are also Portuguese.

I wonder whether perhaps we are not eternally prey to both the fluidity and the confinement of language(s) here. My feeling is that no matter how broad our perspectives and how sophisticated our scholarship if we do history then we will have to straddle the barriers of the archives and the languages of the archives - perhaps only to find ourselves yet again wading in the waters of national history under another guise. It is therefore more than a trifle ironical that decades later and having crossed half the globe I now find myself confronted with, alas, the history of the Portuguese. In a way I have therefore not moved an inch from the school bench where I first came across it.

Observing History at the Cape      Source: বারগুল

(first published on 20/03/2011)