Much of my family history has been washed away on the river
behind the soap mills in Rhode Island.
That is where my grandparents worked, lived, and abandoned speaking
Portuguese for English, and where they hoped that their children would learn
English, too, but with a Rhode Island accent that misplaced “r’s”. They hoped that their children would learn
math from strict nuns-turned-schoolteachers; that their children would one day
have jobs better than their own. What my
great grandparents had hoped for when they left the Azores was something
better, but not for them.
My family was one of the lucky
ones, for the most part, and each generation was more well-educated, had better
jobs, spoke better English (whatever that means), and some became so American
that they actually spoke it much worse.
As my grandparents passed away, I realized, as many people do when they
lose the history that their parents and grandparents remembered, no matter how
hazy their memories were, that I could not explain why growing up with chourico
for breakfast or malasadas on Sundays seemed the pinnacle of Americanness. Nor could I understand how soaps in the shape
of roses, or sailboats, or sunflowers, which all smelled how they looked--even
the sailboats!--did not play such an important role in the homelife of my
friends; they all bought boring, white soaps that smell nothing like how they
looked.
I will not
pretend that I was interested in the life that my family had left behind, at
least until I was given the opportunity to go to Portugal, to write in some
small apartment with an ocean view in Lisbon, and to eat the food of which my
father had made his own versions--maybe to drink some of that sweet wine from
Porto, too. I had been too focused on
the future to think about how it was built on the possibility of someone else’s
past. Regardless, and perhaps in spite
of a long, willful ignorance of my family’s cultural heritage, I became curious
about the language that sounded like it was Spanish whispered with a Russian
accent. During my research, the colonial
history of the country, the power it once had as an economic empire, and the
current social and political progress it celebrates surprised me, for I held
onto a belief that, since my family had left, it could never have been a
wonderful place, let alone be one today.
It was refreshing and empowering to find out how wrong an impression
could be by questioning it and determining for myself what was and what was not
true.
Much if not
all of what I found was from books like Nobel Prize Laureate José Saramago’s Journey to Portugal, Paul Crowley’s Conquerors, or one of the travel books
on Portugal (Lonely Planet, Rick Steve’s, and Fodor all have great editions),
and I was lucky to be able to use the library’s subscription to Mango Languages
so that I could brush up on my Portuguese before the trip. Of course, so much of tracing my family’s
roots would have to happen on the winding, cobbled streets and in the coffee
shops that brewed strong coffee, but the books gave me a head start, and it
turned out that potash, the word my
father had always used for potatoes, was wrong; it is actually batatas.
Who would have thought?
