Countries select reference dates to commemorate their history, celebrating battles, acts of independence, cultural encounters, and significant moments that unite citizens and foster patriotic pride.
However, in Portugal, it is the date of a poet’s death that marks the most significant moment of civic unity.
Much has been said about the meaning of this singularity, and it is often difficult to explain that it is not a sign of melancholy, but rather the opposite.
There is an assumption that a 16th-century poet left us such a vigorous body of work that it ended up being adopted in its entirety as an example of the vitality of a people, and that the author’s own biography serves as an example not only of a Portuguese journey, but has become a universal symbol of our Promethean pilgrimage on earth.
The loyalty that Camões maintained towards his homeland, even when he was in remote places, underscores the symbolism attributed to him as an example of the closeness that Portuguese people maintain with their cultural heritage, even when far away.
The country rewards them by recognizing, as it has done for a long time, that Portuguese communities are the essential body of our identity.
But the celebrations in 2025 have a very special character. Firstly, because they are once again taking place in the city of Lagos. In the last century, it was the host city in 1996.
Twenty-nine years later, this city in the Algarve remains a democratic, free, and prosperous place.
What has changed and what justifies its being chosen once again as the venue for the celebrations is the new awareness that Lagos has become an essential place when assessing relations between peoples over the centuries.
It is well known that Lagos, a gateway to Africa and a place of practical trade, has the Sagres Promontory as its complementary symbol.
Just 40 kilometers apart, Sagres and Lagos historically represent a contrasting duality whose role is currently being evaluated.
The digital communication that has become widespread since the 1990s now allows for the wide dissemination of the studies that archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians are conducting in this geographical area known as Terras do Infante.
It was time to once again grant Lagos the status of winning city and to support these celebrations of cultural importance and interest.
But there is another reason why this year’s celebration of this day is special. For two years now, we have been commemorating the birth of Camões, which took place 500 years ago, presumably between 1524 and 1525. This is estimated to be the case, but it is worth reflecting on the fact that, just as we do not know how his childhood unfolded, nor his education, we also do not know the place and date of the poet’s birth.
To be fair about his early life, we can only say what a certain famous conductor said of Beethoven: One day Camões was born and never died. He never died.
This is proven by the way he has been revisited over the last two years, five centuries later. Schools, academia, the publishing world, and various fields of the arts and humanities in Portugal have given rise to a kind of spontaneous and informal celebration of our greatest poet.
New authors have emerged, updating the exegesis of his poems and the accumulated knowledge about Camões’ life.
The young essayist Carlos Maria Bobone recently highlighted the decisive role that Camões played in establishing a new language worthy of a new way of thinking, which would ultimately result in the modern Portuguese language we use today.
He demonstrated how the Portuguese language, maneuvered in all its splendor, resulted in a gift that we owe to the great singer of the ocean, as Baltasar Estaço called him.
For her part, biographer Isabel Rio Novo, in a recent, thoroughly documented visit to Camões’ life, is ultimately moved by the testimonies about the poet’s last days, demonstrating that the stories circulating about certain stages of his life are not legends after all, but truths.
The fear of being romantic should not distance us from the reality that has been witnessed. And so, to me, it would not seem wrong for Portuguese teenagers to know the comment that Friar José Índio wrote in the margin of a copy of Os Lusíadas, presumably given to him by the author himself when he was leaving. The friar wrote: Yo lo vi morir en un hospital en Lisboa sem tener una sábana con que cubriese, despues de haber navegado 5,500 léguas per mar.
That’s how it was, without a sheet. It must have been a friend who sent him the sheet, after he had already died.
I do not think that patriotic or anti-patriotic concepts should be drawn from this. Concepts about human life and its mystery, perhaps.
However, in contrast, thousands of pages have been written about the work he left behind, confirming the extraordinary stature of the poet he was.
Hélder Macedo, one of his most subtle readers, said recently in an interview that if Camões had lived, no one else in Portugal would have been able to write a verse. That hyperbole is beautiful.
It is also comforting to know that teachers in this country continue to read Camões’ epigrams, redondilhas, and vilancetes to children as if they were modern philosophies made of words, which shows that the Portuguese remain deeply in love with their greatest poet.
But suppose the patron of these celebrations is the poet of verbal virtuosity and conceptual love, mannerist love, the poet of philosophical and theological questioning, as in “Sôbolos rios que vão” (Rivers that flow), and the poet of long, emphatic verses about the heroism of sea travelers. When we revisit these verses, written almost 500 years ago, we find coincidences that help us understand that the hardships we are experiencing are similar to those he endured.
Camões, like us, experienced a time of transition, witnessed the end of a cycle, and, aware of this change, in the 1,102 octaves that make up Os Lusíadas, 22 of them contain explicit warnings about the crisis that was then being experienced.
In fact, it is now widely accepted that the epic poem contains a paradox as a genre, the paradox of being an unlimited eulogy to the courage of a people who had brought about the creation of the Empire and, conversely, condemning the practices that, 50 years later, were preventing the Empire from surviving.
In this regard, it can be said that Os Lusíadas, a poem that ultimately justifies why Portugal Day is Camões Day, expresses courageous truths directed at the powers it praises.
It is worth remembering that, between the 16th and 17th centuries, three of the greatest European writers of all time coincided in time for only 16 years, and yet all three produced remarkable works in response to the turning point they were witnessing.
They were Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Camões. In different ways, but in convergence, they proceeded to dissect human dilemmas and, among them, the universal mechanisms of power, a corpus that remains valid and intact to this day: on grandiose power, cruel power, tyrannical power, fearful power, and lax power.
In Camões’ case, what does he complain about when he interrupts his poem on the wonders of history to recall the petty reality that poisoned the present of his time? He complained about moral degradation, mentioning “the vile interest and thirst/For money, which compels us to everything,” and evoked, among the various aspects of degradation, the fact that the men of courage who had faced an unknown sea were succeeded by new, venal men who thought only of creating culture. More than that, he complained about the subversion of thought, he complained about the lack of intellectual seriousness, which then resulted, in practice, in the degradation of everyday acts.
The poet writes at the end of the eighth canto: “This sometimes corrupts the sciences, blinding judgments and consciences. This interprets texts more than subtly; this makes and breaks laws; this causes perjury among the people and makes kings tyrants a thousand times over.”
In fact, Camões, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, in different ways, exposed the intricacies of domination, involved in the historical time of the empires in which they lived.
At that time, it was said that the kings of Portugal, Spain, and England were fighting each other for dominion over the globe. Or more specifically, it was said that the three were competing to see who would end up hanging the earth around their necks like a charm.
The three authors understood well that, at a given moment, it is possible for mad figures, emerging from the field of psychopathology, to seize power and subvert all the rules of good coexistence.
Shakespeare wrote in Act IV of King Lear: “It is an unhappiness of the age that the blind are led by the mad.”
Meanwhile, Cervantes created the brilliant character of the delusional Don Quixote de La Mancha, who remains with us to this day as our mad brother.
For his part, Camões, in Os Lusíadas, did not speak of madness, but life would show him that the pages he had written were prophetic, as a result of madness. The disaster of Alcácer-Quibir, which took place in 1578, was marked in one of the last stanzas of Canto X. It was history, as always, confirming the premonition experienced by literature.
However, the end of the cycle, which is of interest here, is no longer a localized transition that only concerns three kingdoms in Europe.
Nowadays, it is the emergence of a new era that is happening on a global scale. Because we are now different.
We move at the speed of meteors and are surrounded by invisible threads that connect us to space.
But something about that other end of the century, which followed the failed Renaissance, relates to the days we are living in. Insane power, combined with technological triumphalism, means that every day, every morning, when we go to read the evening news, we feel as if the round earth is being fought over by several competing necks, as if it were once again a trinket.
And the citizens are just an audience watching shows on pocket screens. For some reason, citizens today have regressed to the subtle designation of followers. And their idols are ghosts.
It is against this and for this reason that it is worthwhile for Portugal and the Portuguese communities to use the name of a poet as their patron. For this very reason, it is also worthwhile to return to Lagos.
Decisive moments for the world took place on these sands.
At the beginning of the Modern Age, Lagos and Sagres meant so much to Portugal and Europe that myths were created around them that still endure today. The promontory and the silhouette of the austere Infante who dreamed of finding islands and other discoveries as part of an ancient holy war, and who achieved everything through iron determination and entrepreneurial acumen, became a figure of reference as a creator of futures. His figure is associated with a dream that came true and then spread throughout the world, and legend has him meditating in Sagres.
In a somewhat vague reference, but one that allows for its evocation, Sophia wrote: “There we saw the vehemence of the visible/ the total appearance exposed in its entirety/ and that which we had not even dared to dream/ was the truth.”
This idea that an epiphany took place in the Infante’s mind is associated with him as the mentor of a more or less informal team that had the ability to motivate and lead. Sagres thus passed into history and mythology as the symbolic place of a strategy that would change the world.
But there is another perspective, as is well known, and today the prevailing public discourse is undoubtedly about the sin of the Discoveries and not about the extent of their transformative greatness.
It is true that the collective movement that made it possible to establish sea links between the various continents and the encounter between peoples was part of a strategy of subjugation and abduction, the inventory of which is one of the painful topics of discussion today.
It must always be emphasized, so as not to distort reality, that slavery is a cruel process of domination as old as humanity itself.
What has always been the case is that there have been different procedures and varying degrees of intensity.
And it is undeniable that the Portuguese were involved in a new, long, and painful process of enslavement.
Lagos, precisely, offers today’s populations, alongside the magical side of the Discoveries, also the image of its tragic side.
I speak with a sense of justice in restoring the truth and remorse for the fact that large-scale intercontinental slave trade was inaugurated, with supply hubs on the coast of Africa, thus offering a new model of human exploitation that would be replicated and generalized by other European countries until the end of the 19th century.
Lagos exposes the memory of this remorse. It shows how, on a scorching August day in 1444, 235 individuals kidnapped on the coast of Mauritania landed here and how they were divided up and by whom.
Someone we hold in high esteem was on horseback and accepted his share of 46 heads. That horseman was none other than Prince Henry himself.
Lagos does not shy away from exposing this historical truth.
Lagos also shows the place where the slaves were later sold. More recently, it has been reported how they were thrown into the trash when they died without a cloth to cover their bodies. So far, the remains of 158 individuals of the Banta ethnic group have been removed from this dunghill in Lagos.
Lagos shows this past to the world so that it will never be repeated. Perhaps that is why we are here today.
In fact, UNESCO created the Slave Route and included Lagos in the Slave Route, so that we may know how human beings treat each other, even when they are based on religions founded on the principles of love and human rights.
Lagos shows this film and becomes a relative of those who wrote the solemn request on the door of a modern place of extermination: Men, do not kill each other.
It is true that we only know what happened on that day, August 8, 1444, because the chronicler of Prince Henry narrated it. Eanes Gomes de Zurara could not help feeling compassion and commented, in a moving way, on how cruel the arrival and distribution of the slaves were. Fortunately, we have this page from the “Crónica dos Feitos de Guiné” (Chronicle of the Deeds of Guinea) to assure us that there were those who did not think such degradation was right and expressed their dissent.
In fact, we know that there have always been those who completely rejected the practice and theorized about it.
This means that Lagos, the city of the Infante’s dreams, which Sagres is a metaphor for, after all these centuries, promotes awareness of what we are capable of doing to one another. It has thus become a city against indifference.
It is our contemporary struggle.
In Lagos today, the message of Simon Kneebone’s 2014 cartoon, which has been seen around the world, is present in a different way.
The scene is contemporary. It takes place at sea. On a huge ship, equipped with defensive weapons, high up in the tower, a crew member spots a fragile, shallow boat in the distance, loaded with migrants.
The crew member on the large vessel asks: where are you from? From the crowded boat, someone replies: we come from the land.
I suggest that young Portuguese people, descendants of manual laborers, sailors, and seafarers, grandchildren of emigrants who left barefoot in search of work, print this cartoon on their shirts when they go to sea.
It is said that in the 17th century, 10% of the Portuguese population was of African origin.
This population did not invade us. The Portuguese brought them here, dragged them here. And we mixed.
This means that no one here has pure blood. The fallacy of single ancestry has no basis in reality. Each of us is a sum of parts.
We have the blood of natives and migrants, Europeans and Africans, whites and blacks, and all other human colors. We are descendants of slaves and the masters who enslaved them. Children of pirates and those who were stolen. A mixture of those who were punished to death and the merciful who cleaned their wounds.
Awareness of this anthropological adventure may mitigate the revisionist fury that assails us from all sides today, almost everywhere.
Now that we realize we are at the end of one cycle and another is taking shape, the existential uncertainty about the near future challenges us every morning when we wake up, not knowing what the next day will bring.
The question is this: when the institutional, scientific, ethical, and political foundations and pillars of the relationship between humans and machines enter a new paradigm, what place will we occupy as human beings? What will it mean to be human?
I began by saying that Camões was born and never died.
I return to his work to try to understand what concept the poet had of what a human being was. His entire work reveals him as a victim of persecution by all the powers that be. His lyrical work is a response to this essential abandonment.
In line with this same idea, at the end of Canto I of Os Lusíadas, Camões defines the human being as an entity persecuted by the elements: “Where can a weak human being find shelter,/ Where will his short life be safe/ Unless he arms himself, and the serene heavens are indignant/ Against such a small creature of the earth”.
In these verses, we recognize the Renaissance concept of the great loneliness of human beings and their stoic struggle against it, centered on self-confidence.
But in practice, this attitude represented a proud orphanhood that fortune did not easily recognize. Curiously, at the end of his life, Camões’ naked body had only a sheet, the one offered to him, separating him from the earth. Like the fate of his body, this fate is no different from that deserved by the bodies of the slaves here in Lagos.
However, in the 19th century, the right to state protection began to emerge. Essential documents were created to respect citizens. Following the two World Wars of the 20th century, the Charter of Human Rights was drafted and approved. For several decades, attempts were made to implement it as a global reference code. However, there has been a regression with each passing day lately.
The concept of respectable representation of the figure of the Head of State, originating from the Greek people, a principle that underpinned the purifying plot of classical tragedies, later joined by the principle of exemplarity taken from the Gospels, that conduct which meant that the king had to be the most worthy among the worthy, is being subverted.
Digital culture has subverted the rule of exemplarity. The chosen one has become the least exemplary, the least prepared, the least moderate, the most offensive.
A head of state of a great power, during a rally, was able to say, “I love you, I love the uneducated.” And the uneducated applauded.
I therefore ask, what is the concept of being human today? How can we protect this concept, which was effective until recently but is no longer so?
Today, on Portugal Day, the day of Camões and communities, is it not legitimate to ask, without wishing to offend anyone, how we will maintain the notion of being a respectable, free, dignified human being, deserving of access to the truth and the expression of their freedom of conscience?
We Portuguese are not rich. We are poor and unjust. But even so, we overthrew a very long dictatorship and ended the oppression we had maintained over various peoples, establishing new alliances with them and creating a community of Portuguese-speaking countries. And we were able to establish democracy and join a union of free and prosperous countries that desire peace.
That being the case, we certainly do not yet have the answers, but in the face of the unknowns that assail us, we know that we have the strength.
I read Camões, who never died, and I am moved by his fate, because if I have anything in common with him, who was a genius, and I am not, it is the certainty that I share his idea that a human being is a being of resistance and combat. We just need to determine the right cause.
Thank you very much.
A Speech given by the Portuguese writer Lídia Jorge on the Day of Camões, Portugal, and the Portuguese Communities.
Translated as a community service and to bring awareness to the issues facing Portugal, as well as to bring the magnificent writing of Lidia Jorge to the Portuguese Diaspora
Filamentos (artes e letras) 