“Do You Know Who Álamo Oliveira Is?”

By Victor Rui Dores

Translated by Katharine F. Baker

Celebrating eighty years of life (and sixty-five of published writing), José Henrique do Álamo Oliveira is one of the most consequential names in Azorean literature. As a writer, he is represented in more than a dozen anthologies of poetry and narrative fiction in Portugal and abroad, and some of his forty books published to date have been translated into English, Italian, Spanish, Croatian, Slovenian and Japanese.

But what are we talking about when we speak ofÁlamo Oliveira? Above all, about an indefatigable capacity for creativity.

Since his student days at the Angra Seminary, which gave him a strong grounding in the humanities, this Terceira native from Raminho has been a prolific and versatile author, a master of many genres, eclectic writings and all trades. He is a retired civil servant – in addition to being a poet, novelist, playwright, short story writer, columnist, lyricist and essayist (in the areas of literature, sociology and cultural anthropology), Álamo is also a coordinator of cultural supplements, a public speaker, an illustrator and a designer of book covers.

A founding member of the Alpendre theater group in 1976, for which he wrote signature plays, he was long its artistic and stage director, as well as an actor, costume designer, prop manager, theater and visual arts critic, painter, cultural animator, designer, rehearsal director for Sanjoaninas marcha parade groups, and even a lyricist. Nowadays he conducts Raminho’s Grupo Coral – for which I not long ago caught him decorating the parish church. I like to joke that the only thing Álamo doesn’t know how to do is drive a car.

The neologism “escreviver” applies in a thousand marvelous ways to this author, since his life and writing are inseparable in his work. Residing on Terceira, his microcosm of reference, Álamo knows well the nature of island people in all their contradictions and contrasts, vileness and magnificence. With creative imagination, penetrating wit and poetic expressiveness, he describes the island and Azorean diaspora in all their telluric and human dimensions, because literature is nothing more than a search for the meaning of life and a questioning of man. And from Raminho he writes to the world, casting a merciless eye on some of the events that have marked our history and experience over the past sixty years, addressing fundamental questions of the human condition.

An artisan of unique and essential words, always seeking new meanings for them, Álamo Oliveira’s poetic craftsmanship is well known, from Pão Verde (1971), through the excellent Os Quinze Misteriosos Mistérios (1976) to andanças de pedra e cal (2009). There is in this author an islander way of seeing things, of reflecting on them, filtering them, transcribing and transfiguring them.

And there is a totally poetic flow that runs through all Alamoan writing, even his prose. Because he is viscerally a poet, there is already poetry in Álamo’s prose. And always with irony (sometimes caustic) lurking nearby, irony that he uses as a critical instrument to target representatives of well-defined social strata. Read, for example, his two volumes of short stories, and above all his novels Burra Preta Com Uma Lágrima (1982) and Pátio da Alfândega-Meia Noite – settling accounts with the historical past and with the changing present.

Tellurism and social contentiousness are two fundamental themes in Álamo Oliveira’s poetry, narrative fiction and dramaturgy. In the latter category, we have the plays Manuel, Seis Vezes Pensei Em Ti (1977) and Missa Terra Lavrada (1984). I particularly like his novels Marta de Jesus, a Verdadeira (2014), for its intense symbolic charge in his interweaving of biblical text and narrative fiction, that is, the inner tension between literature and religiosity; and, Já Não Gosto de Chocolates (1999) ,about the societal phenomenon of Azorean emigration, here with a literary treatment. Joe Sylvia, no longer believing in the American dream, symbolically also stops liking chocolate. And it’s all there: the resistance and resilience of Azorean emigrant communities, with their maladaptation, cultural assimilation, and generational conflict.

On the other hand, there is this irrefutable fact: Álamo Oliveira’s writing is almost always transgressive and transgressing. Consider how the author openly deals with the theme of homosexuality in Até Hoje (Memórias de Cão), a novel (1986) about the Colonial War, that recounts a romantic male relationship between João and Fernando; and also in Murmúrios com Vinho e Missa (2013), with the same thematic domain and fictional approach, where the characters live in rupture and open conflict with societal norms (which reject and repress anyone who is different) and with the paradigms accepted (and exalted) by the community. They are characters who in a bold and audacious way say no to prohibitions, false moralisms, hypocrisy. Moreover, such amorous boldness was already contained in this author’s homoerotic poetry, Cantar o Corpo (1979), for example.

Like Janus facing in two directions at once, Álamo Oliveira dives deep into the Azorean imagination, only to return quickly to the surface, with his gaze focused on modern fiction – without surrendering to the Portuguese literary fashions of the unspeakable and deconstructon. The poet-writer, unquiet and disquieting, resists this always and forever in his writing, since he knows (having learned André Gide’s lesson) that “good literature is not written with good feelings.”

Long live Álamo Oliveira, a man of his place and time, a decorated citizen – recipient of Portugal’s Comendador da Ordem do Mérito and the Azores Legislative Assembly’s Insígnia Autonómica de Reconhecimento – and, above all, a knight errant for the love of literature!

Originally published on May 6, 2025, as “Sabeis quem é Álamo Oliveira?” at: https://filamentosarteseletras.art/2025/05/06/por-dentro-do-mundo-a-palavra-nos-80-anos-de-alamo-oliveira-uma-celebracao-da-escrita-que-nos-humaniza-5