Scott Edward Anderson
Açorianidade and the Radiance of Sensibility
“One can be born on an island in two ways,” wrote the Angolan Azorean poet and novelist Eduardo Bettencourt Pinto. “From the body of a woman or from the radiance of sensibility.” Like Pinto, I’m feeling the “burning torch” of connection to the islands of the Azores and find myself growing deeper and deeper entwined in the cords of my tangled roots there. And, it seems, the more I try to resist it, the tighter those cords bind me.
“They’re calling you ‘the Azorean Son,’” my wife Samantha says to me after a call with one of our friends in São Miguel. “O filho açoriano,” I laugh, and yet, I admit, there’s something wonderful about that apelido, that nickname. I’ve just been helping the Azorean writer and critic, Vamberto Freitas, polish his English version of a poem by a Portuguese mainlander, after spending the morning collaborating with Pinto on a translation of my book-length poem, Azorean Suite. It’s certainly starting to feel like I’m “born” on these islands—or, at least, born to them.
Sensibility, according to one dictionary, is the ability to appreciate and respond to complex emotional or aesthetic influences and, sure enough, the growing influence the islands are having on my life is stirring up some complex emotions, radiating out to encompass so much of my mindshare as well as my aesthetic capacities. I’m starting to feel at home on the islands. And, even when circumstances like the Covid-19 global pandemic and a delayed passport renewal keep me in Brooklyn, New York, some 2,561 miles away, I long to be on the islands again.
Just prior to the time this pandemic hit our shores in March 2020, Vamberto called me to let me know I’d won an award given by the Azorean publisher and bookstore Letras Lavadas, in conjunction with P.E.N. Açores, for my book, Falling Up: A Memoir of Second Chances.
“We had a lively discussion about your surname,” Vamberto says to me. “I defended you, telling them that despite your Anglo-American name, you are indeed a card-carrying member of the Azorean diaspora.”
“I’m deeply honored,” I tell him. “I can almost feel my ancestors here in this room, looking over my shoulder, beaming with pride.” Indeed, I can feel their presence, hovering behind me, listening in on our conversation—physically, I feel a damp, humid chill just behind me on my left. It is a somewhat eerie, yet quietly comforting feeling. “To be honest,” I say. “I’m not sure I deserve it for this book—it has very little to do with the Azores and mentions the islands only briefly.” Nevertheless, Vamberto reassures me, “the book is deserving of the award.” A few months earlier, he’d reviewed the book in Açoriano Oriental, the islands’ daily newspaper, calling it “a poem to the possibility of change, it is a testament to hope for us all.”
Covid-19 conspired to prevent the awards from being handed out at a ceremony that would have brought me back to the islands for a second time that year. In lieu of an in-person event, the organizers put together an online celebration, announcing one of the five award winners every thirty minutes or so on Facebook on a Saturday afternoon in mid-April. In turn, I record a video acceptance and send it to them for posting. Then, the following Monday, as I’m watching Açores Hoje, an RTP Açores television program dedicated to arts and culture, which I’ve been watching to brush up on my Portuguese and become more attuned to the micaelense dialect, I suddenly hear my name and see my photo, as the hostess, Vera Santos, interviews Luís Rego from Letras Lavadas about the awards. “What a dream come true,” Santos acknowledges, for someone from the Azorean diaspora. I couldn’t agree more.
**
There’s a powerful sense of fate in the Azorean psyche and I am beginning to feel it, a pull, like an undertow destabilizing my sense of self: who I thought I was is not who I am becoming. Perhaps, however, this sensibility has always been there, an undercurrent, finally rising to the surface, as if about to breech like a whale in the surrounding waters of what should rightly be called an “aquapelago”—there is so much water surrounding the nine islands of the archipelago. More likely, this sensibility is thrusting up within me like a volcano to form another tenth island, taking up residence within me.
**
I keep returning to the work of Vitorino Nemésio, the great twentieth-century Azorean poet, who invented a term for azoreanity: açorianidade. Nemésio characterized açorianidade as a “type of drunkenness caused by isolation…Five centuries of existence on volcanic tuft, under clouds looking like birds and birds looking like clouds…” Forty-six years after Portugal overthrew its authoritarian regime with a bloodless revolution named for a peaceful red flower, as my home country came under attack from its own increasingly authoritarian would-be dictator and felt perilously close to the edge of a bleak future, I found myself looking across the Atlantic more longingly than ever. Samantha, too, is feeling the pull of the Azores and we begin to make plans to divide our time between the States and the islands—at least for part of the year—it’s a dream that we’ll only be able to realize after all our kids have graduated high school and moved out, but it’s a dream we build on daily.
This “drunkenness caused by isolation” is metaphorical as well as physical, perhaps even metaphysical. Indeed, all my life I’ve harbored just such feelings of isolation and longing and searching for home and, more specifically, for an island home. As a child, I always felt at home on islands—in Maine, on the Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence Seaway, and Rhode Island, my birthplace, which is only part island. As an adult, my work in conservation took me to Ecuador’s Galapagos and Indonesia’s Raja Ampat archipelagos, and to islands in the Caribbean or Bering seas. Even that heady Italian idyll, Capri, where I visited my late friend, the Italian writer, Francisco Durante, himself born on Anacapri, islands have long been a part of my psyche and of my life. And, from our first trip abroad together, to Sicily for a friend’s wedding, early in our relationship, Samantha and I traveled to islands together: we got engaged on Bermuda; took a “mini-moon” trip to Vieques, off the coast of Puerto Rico, and, later, a ten-day honeymoon on the Greek islands of Kefalonia and Ithaca in the Ionian Sea. Two summer vacations up in Canada, on Grand Manan, New Brunswick; a Labor Day weekend on Martha’s Vineyard and a week on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, with our blended brood; a weekend on Block Island, a holiday on Curaçao, off the coast of Venezuela, and another on St. John in the Virgin Islands; and, thus far, five trips to the Azores. We’ve sought-out island experiences for as long as we’ve been together.
**
In his 1956 travelogue, Corsário das Ilhas (Corsair of the Islands), Nemésio wrote:
Sou ilhéu; e, tanto ou mais do que a ilha, o ilhéu define-se por um rodeio de mar por todos os lados. Vivemos de peixe, da hora da maré e a ver navios…
I’m an islander; and, as much or more than an island, the islander is defined by being surrounded by sea on all sides. We live on fish, the time of the tides, and watching ships…
Born on Terceira Island towards the close of 1901, Vitorino Nemésio Mendes Pinheiro da Silva, who went by his two given names, was a difficult student, expelled from secondary school in Angra do Heroísmo, and forced to repeat his fifth year of studies. Not exactly a promising start for someone who would go on to have such a long and prosperous academic career. In May 1918, Nemésio traveled to the district capital, Horta, on the island of Faial, where he attended high school and stayed in the city through the month of August. On 13 August, the newspaper O Telégrafo featured a small notice about a book of poetry, Canto Matinal, by the young poet, which he had published in 1916, when he was not quite fifteen.
Horta in 1918 was a lively, cosmopolitan center of maritime commerce, a regular port-of-call for ships to refuel and replenish supplies, and home to the offices of the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable company, for which Faial was the relay station between Rockaway, New York, and Malaga, Spain. The teenage poet absorbed the sophisticated atmosphere, which he would later draw upon for the setting of his novel, Mau Tempo no Canal (published as Stormy Isles in English). Thirty years later, Nemésio recalled his time in Horta, referring to it as his “first refuge of patriarchal hospitality and gentility in everything, or for everything.”
Returning to Angra, he worked towards completing his studies, published work in the school newspaper, Eco Académico, and helped launch the magazine Estrela d'Alva: Revista Literária Ilustrada e Noticiosa. Influenced by his friend and mentor Jaime Brasil, the young poet attended literary, republican, and anarchist-unionist meetings in Angra. Then, in 1919, he volunteered for military service and traveled outside the Azores—to continental Portugal—for the first time in his life.
The early 1920s found him in Lisbon, where he worked as a reporter for A Pátria, helped found the newspaper Última Hora, and published a play, “Amor Nunca Mais.” Two years later, he enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the University of Coimbra, and published his second book of poems, Nave Etérea. In 1924, he traveled back to the Azores by way of Madeira, by happy accident meeting the continental Portuguese writer Raul Brandão aboard ship, embarking on his trip from Lisbon to the archipelago that would become the context for the elder author’s As Ilhas Desconhecidas (The Unknown Islands). The age difference between the two writers, Brandão was thirty-four years Nemésio’s senior, gave them a sort of master and disciple relationship. “Your personal influence on my life is the greatest,” Nemésio wrote to his mentor in a letter dated 14 November 1930, just a month before Brandão’s death. “It is, in a certain sense, the only one: from no one did I receive such a strong suggestion from you as to live, and to live lovingly and passing me by, as if they were human, all the things around.” They traveled the two days together from Lisbon to Madeira, spent a day on that island, two more days to São Miguel, and a day there, and the overnight trip to Angra, before Nemésio disembarked to spend the rest of his holidays on Terceira. Seeing the islands through the elder author’s mainland eyes must have helped him see them anew, for he used this fresh perspective later in both his novel Mau Tempo no Canal in 1944 and his own travelogue, Corsário das Ilhas, from 1956.
In 1932, the centennial year of Cabral’s “discovery” of the Azores, Nemésio coined the term açorianidade, which he would explore in two important essays, and which would become the subject of much debate over the years. There are those who see the term as somewhat limiting: describing as it does a specific, fixed set of qualities of the island condition—insularity, for example—that belies a greater dynamism in the spirit of the islanders. Nevertheless, I think its usefulness as a term is somewhat expanded when we look at what Nemésio himself said about it, reflecting the entirety of his term rather than one dimension of it. Instead of limiting its truth as a descriptor to what it’s like to be born on the islands, Nemésio asserted that it was appropriate, too, for those who emigrated from the islands, as well as those who later returned.
The term, wrote Antonio Machado Pires in his essay, “The Azorean Man and Azoreanity,” “not only expresses the quality and soul of being Azorean, inside or outside (mainly outside?) of the Azores, but the set of constraints of archipelagic living: its geography (which ‘is worth as much as history’), its volcanism, its economic limitations, but also its own capacity as a traditional ‘economy’ of subsistence, its manifestations of culture and popular religiosity, their idiosyncrasy, their speaking, everything that contributes to verify identity.”
“The Azoreans have created, by isolation and by the difficulties and misunderstandings of a distant power,” according to Pires, “a kind of black legend of abandonment and misunderstanding, a traumatic consciousness that can lead to what we will call traumatic Azoreanity.”
This idea of a traumatic consciousness makes me think of Nemésio’s words from his original essay of 1932: “Like mermaids, we have a double nature: we are of flesh and stone. Our bones submerge in the sea.” This double nature is expressed as a restlessness, of always being between “flesh and stone,” as Nemésio put it, between land and sea. He also said, “there will always be a hushed hurt” in the life of the islander, by virtue of the fact of their isolation. That hushed hurt, that traumatic Azorean consciousness, travels with the emigrant as much as with the islander who stays put or the islander who returns.
There are, as Pires points out, “many examples among the emigrants of fidelity to family life, to festivities, to the religiosity prevailing on their home island.” So, too, “for the returning islander there often remains a strong bond with the lands to which they emigrated and where they triumphed professionally. This can lead to a state of mind marked by a certain dissatisfaction, an uprooting that sociologists call ‘double exile.’”
Thus, a double nature and a double exile rest within the heart of the Azorean islander, the emigrant, the returnee and, I’d wager, the inheriting generations that follow. “Azoreanity is,” according to Luís Ribeiro, to whom Nemésio dedicated Corsário das Ilhas, “the soul that transports itself when we emigrate, as well as what is expected of each of us when we live outside.”
Nemésio’s goal in his coinage of the term, in the essays wherein he expounded on the term, and even the conference he organized—at the tender age of twenty-seven—to further explore its meaning and relevance, was to bring awareness to the world of his islands, to raise the Azores from what he felt was “a limbo of obscurity.”
**
When my wife Samantha first started referring to me as Azorean or saying to people we met there that her husband was “from here,” I was extremely uncomfortable. I spent most of my life in the dark about my Azorean roots—thanks to my grandfather’s first-generation desire to assimilate and be American—and only came to understand my connection to the islands when I first visited in 2018 through Disquiet International’s Azorean residency. The claim to such heritage felt false, or at least pretentious; as if, somehow, I didn’t deserve it. Now, as I grapple with what it means to me to be Azorean—to truly own that appellation and embody its full meaning—I’m brought back to Pinto’s words about being born of a “radiance of sensibility.”
Neither of us was born on the islands, and yet, through some depth of feeling, some lingering ancestral blood or plasma with its concentration of salt and other ions remarkably like the surrounding ocean waters, through a cragginess of personality evocative of rocky basalt, or by way of some specific strands of DNA, even those of us several generations removed are born to these islands. Moreover, should we choose to embrace it, this Azoreanity manifests in us, as Pinto puts it, in “the discovery of a deep and unequivocal sense of presence, reinforced over the years by an unalterable passion, like a vivid burning torch,” binding us to the Azores forever.
**
“A quick question regarding Nemésio’s Corsário das Ilhas,” I write to Onésimo Almeida, the Azorean writer, critic, and professor at Brown University. “Is there an English translation or one planned?”
“Regarding Corsário das Ilhas, there is no translation,” he replies. “Why do you ask? Are you willing to give it a try? I would be delighted...”
And suddenly I find myself embarking on a new Azorean adventure, translating the great poet’s account of the islands, and this time, it’s not only my ancestors looking over my shoulders, but Nemésio as well, whispering his own words from one of his essays: “In this, the circle of life tightened around the Azorean, until the seduction of the surrounding sea became stronger than him.”
Scott Edward Anderson is an award-winning poet, memoirist, essayist, and translator. He is the author of Wine-Dark Sea: New & Selected Poems & Translations (2022), Azorean Suite/Suite Açoriana (2020), the Nautilus Award-winning Dwelling: an ecopoem (2018), and two books of nonfiction, including Falling Up: A Memoir of Second Chances (2019) and Walks in Nature’s Empire (1995). He has been a Concordia Fellow at Millay Arts and received the Letras Levadas/PEN Açores Award, the Nebraska Review Award, and the Larry Aldrich Emerging Poets Award, selected by Thomas Lux. He is currently the Poet Laureate for the Ryan Observatory at Muddy Run, PA and divides his time between the Berkshires and São Miguel Island in the Azores. Habitar: um ecopoema, Margarida Vale de Gato’s translation of his book Dwelling, was published in September 2022 by Poética Edições in Lisbon, Portugal, and his translation of Vitorino Nemésio’s Corsair of the Islands will be published by Tagus Press. Find him on various social media platforms @greenskeptic