APRIL’S HOMELANDS By JORGE BETTENCOURT

“We need a homeland, and my homeland is my neighborhood. And when we do not have it, we invent it.” I heard this from Bruno Vieira Amaral, the writer raised in the troubled neighborhood of Vale da Amoreira, in Barreiro, that the family from Angola and the Alentejo Region of Portugal decided, in 1975, to exchange for the slum district in Lisbon – one of the various movements that resulted from the settlement into the newly constructed empty buildings that followed the April 25th revolution.

He was referring to his homeland, his place of belonging, which was not his grandmother’s homeland; hers’ was still Montalvão, in the Alentejo. In Barreiro, the grandmother felt out of place, uprooted. As out of place and uprooted as many Portuguese emigrants driven by necessity have felt for centuries in many parts of the world. As out of place and uprooted as my grandfather when he came to work as a marquis in Lisbon, as my grandparents from Madeira when they went to Mozambique, as my mother, born and raised in Lisbon when she lived in Inhambane and Quelimane, or as my Mozambican father when he was forced to come to Portugal.

I am out of place and uprooted, as are almost all who consider themselves Portuguese, whom I met throughout the world, whatever their nationality.  Millions whose homelands, whose places of belonging are built, regardless of the place where they were born or grew up, with a culture they know from what was passed on to them by their parents and grandparents, with a religion professed so much by those who pray in the church of São Pedro in Malacca as in the Five Wounds Church San Jose, California. With language that many barely now know but was the language of their ancestors.  Homelands that they love, although they might be, as the Portuguese writer Miguel Torga wrote, “a strip of land bordered by the sea”, often blurred or imagined, in a mountain range in Trás-os-Montes, in an Alentejo plain, in an Azorean crater or in a Madeira basin. “The tellurian and moral, cultural and affective space where each native is fulfilled humanly and civically,” as Torga defined it.

Yes, these multiple, diverse green and red homelands were liberated by the April 25th revolution.

Yes, these multiple and diverse homelands, with the Color of Freedom, overthrew and replaced the unique homeland of the dictatorship, the homeland of my childhood, as I parroted the rivers and the railroad lines of an unknown Mainland in a school in Quelimane; the childhood homeland of the children of the islands and the colonies who saw posters proclaiming, “This is also Portugal”;  during visits by presidents from afar, who were welcomed with pomp and circumstance; the homeland of young men who enlisted to escape poverty and went to fight a distant war; the homeland that stole the health and life of the thousands and thousands of young people who fought in the African jungles. The homeland that was not a good mother but a wicked stepmother for generations of Portuguese, driven to other lands.

These are the homelands that Abril liberated, who, like the Portuguese poet, writer, and scholar Jorge de Sena, collect “nationalities such as shirts are stripped, used and thrown away, with all due respect to the clothes that dress and serve our needs”, that are the homelands of Andrew, Natasha, Sabrina, David, Miguel, Clara, Tomás and Afonso. All of them, “children of the dawn”, the younger generation, who, be it in Philadelphia, Washington DC, Rhode Island, Silicon Valley, or Oeiras, feel the Carnation Revolution as theirs and, collectively, do continue in the continuous transformation of our green and red homelands, with the Color of Freedom, so they can become more humane, free, and just.

THIS TEXT IS WORTH READING AND REREADING! COMMANDER JORGE BETTENCOURT WILL BE OUR GUEST AT FRESNO STATE AND THE CENTRAL VALLEY BETWEEN APRIL 11TH AND THE 15TH. HERE IS THE PROGRAM WITH OVER 200 HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS.