Portuguese voice in U.S. lit celebrated at JFK Library

Daniela Caride

Every culture has its own traditions, and as Katherine Vaz explains it, some traditions die hard.

One day, Vaz returned home to find a votive lamp burning inside her kitchen sink. The lamp was lit by her father in a desperate attempt to protect Vaz’s sister, whose home burglar alarm had been triggered, prompting a call from the security company. But despite being frantic enough to seek help from above, Vaz’s father still placed the votive lamp in the sink, to prevent his own house from catching fire.

Vaz shared the anecdote with an audience of about 200 people at the John F. Kennedy Library on Saturday to illustrate how funny, and sometimes odd, life can get when you live in a Portuguese family. Her talk — part of “Escrita da Vida – Vida da Escrita (Writing of Life – Life of Writing),” a colloquium on contemporary Portuguese American literature — focused on the particular inspiration she drew from her cultural heritage.

That heritage and Vaz’s experiences at home have both found their way into her published works. Her family’s stories, filled with religious undertones and gripping drama, permeate her novels “Fado and Other Stories,” winner of the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Prize awarded by the University of Pittsburgh Press, and “Mariana,” which has been translated into six languages and is now in its seventh edition.

“You know, I consider myself an American writer. But look at that,” said Vaz, a lecturer in fiction at Harvard University, laughing and gesturing on stage as if she could still see the lamp in front of her.

Because of writers like Vaz, Portuguese American literature “is not only fledgling but already thriving,” said Frank Sousa, director of the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and a member of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities (MFH), the event’s two co-sponsors.

Last month, the two organizations announced a statewide project aimed at increasing public appreciation of Portuguese American literature, a vibrant ethnic voice often overlooked both here and elsewhere in the U.S.

The colloquium served as a kick-off event for the project, and will be followed by a reading and discussion series offered by public libraries in Cambridge, Ludlow, Fall River, New Bedford and Taunton. The New Bedford series begins this week, with the first meeting taking place at Casa Da Saudade branch of the New Bedford Free Public Library tonight at 7 p.m.

After two discussion panels featuring four Portuguese American writers, New Bedford theater company Culture*Park will perform “Through A Portagee Gate,” a play based on New Bedford native Charles Reis Felix’s memoir. The Cambridge, Ludlow and Fall River series are scheduled to begin in early 2008.

Authors like Vaz are so vital to spreading the word about Portuguese American literature because they “have the ability to bridge ethnicity with mainstream literature,” Souza added.

Until the 1970s, there was not enough high-quality Portuguese American literary work to establish it as an “ethnic literature,” according to Sousa. But today, he believes, things have changed.

Souza sees the other three authors who participated in Saturday’s gathering, discussing issues like inspiration and the influence of ethnicity in their lives and work, as only a small part of an expanding group of Portuguese American authors who have already made a difference in American literature.

Frank X. Gaspar is one such example.

A native of Provincetown, Mass., Gaspar won the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize in 1988, and has written four award-winning works of poetry. He has also received high marks from The New York Times. Of his novel “Leaving Pico,” the paper said Gaspar had crafted “an expert portrait of the Portuguese immigrant experience.”

At Saturday’s colloquium, Gaspar shared the stage with Canadian novelist Erika de Vasconcelos, whose works include “My Darling Dead Ones” and “Between the Stillness and the Grove,” and American short story writer Julian Silva, author of “Distant Music: Two Novels.”

Taken together, the MFH says, the works highlighted at the colloquium and in the reading series represent the full range of literary genres and demonstrate the important contributions that Portuguese American writers, like other ethnic writers, are making to American literature. MFH Executive Director David Tebaldi sees the authors’ works as instructive not only about Portuguese American culture, but of many more general subjects as well.

“Like all good literature, the five books included in the series skillfully explore universal human themes,” said Tebaldi in a statement. “However, they also illuminate myriad facets of Portuguese American experience in particular.”

But Onésimo Almeida, a professor of Portuguese and Brazilian studies at Brown University and himself a writer and translator, doesn’t share the enthusiasm of Souza and Tebaldi. He believes Portuguese American literature cannot yet claim to have made a real impact, and that it is still too early to see real integration of the Portuguese voice into the American canon.

“It is not significant at all what we’ve done so far,” said Almeida, who also sits on the board of directors of The Portuguese American Leadership Council of the United States, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that represents nearly 100,000 Portuguese Americans across the country.

For their part, the authors seemed less interested in charting progress and affixing particular ethnic labels than in just having audiences to read their work.

“I’m happy for anyone who wants to read my books, and if they want to call me Azorean or Italian or Armenian — which I am not — I am really happy to hear that,” joked Vaz.

“People are such a big combination of things,” continued Vaz, whose mother is Irish and father hails from the Azores, a Portuguese archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean. “[Ethnic diversity] is wonderful for a storyteller because it gives you [an] ambiguity to start with.”

Canadian author de Vasconcelos echoed that sentiment in her remarks.

“I don’t see myself as an ethnic writer … People read the stories because [they] reflect human interest,” she said.

At the same time, however, she believes “it’s important to celebrate our own ethnicities” while embracing the globalized world we live in — which she says brings advantages especially to ethnic groups.

“The future belongs to people who are multilingual and who can navigate … different cultures,” said de Vasconcelos.

As a native of Portugal who has lived in the U.S. since the age of 9, Sousa, of UMass-Dartmouth and the MFH, agreed.

“As a country of immigration, nothing is more American than … valuing your ethnicity,” he said.
For more information on the reading series and upcoming events in Cambridge, Ludlow and Fall River, visit: www.masshumanities.org/escrita.