Each day, a page. Each page, a moon. Each moon, Álamo.

Words about Álamo (mostly about the novel Já Não Gosto de Chocolates-I No loner Like Chosolates)

Translation by Katharine F. Baker (From the website I No Longer Like Chocolates)

Luíz Antônio de Assis Brasil, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul [PUCRS] (Porto Alegre, Brazil):

It’s time to proclaim: Álamo Oliveira is a great writer. I say this to you as one who lives at a great distance so has no other axe to grind than that of esthetics… [This] Álamo of Terceira, of Portugal; this Álamo of the World – a man evermore reflective, who refines his use of language increasingly with each book, who warms us more, who touches our souls more… [and] discloses a new slant on emigration by assuming a clearly intimate discourse. It is a narrative that does not skim the surface, but instead plunges into the complex intimacy of protagonists who cease to be mere emigrants in order to become full human beings.

– Translated from “A narrativa açoriana pós-revolução dos cravos: uma breve notícia.” In Via Atlântica, n.3, Dec 1999

[Álamo Oliveira] depicts the immigration from the Azores to California of José Silva’s family… and he shows in analytical detail how emigrants, despite acquiring comfort and wealth, almost always lose their identity.

– Translated from “A América é um grande chocolate.” In Diário Insular, 15 Jul 1999; reprinted in Vértice, v.96, n.1, Lisbon, 2000

Vamberto Freitas, University of the Azores (Ponta Delgada, São Miguel, Portugal):

The artistic journey of Álamo Oliveira ([in] poetry, theater, fiction) contains a most vital fact within itself: it is a work… unified by an insistent Azorean theme, which is the frightening uncertainty of life on the islands, to him anti-utopian and where there is always an indefinite threat, whether man-made or of Biblical force, that hovers over the beauty of the blue and abruptly loving sea… He is one of our most consistent (and persistent) artists, one of our most conscious and perceptive men of letters, with a most varied work with respect to the cultural genres, but achieving a total unit with respect to thematic and formal structure. For throughout a line simultaneously inventive and traditional in the novel, poetry and theater, he tells, (re)tells and constantly subverts the history and ideology of the political and cultural space that was given to him to live and think in this last half of the 20th century.

– Translated from Diário Insular, Sep 1999

Lúcia Helena Marques Ribeiro, University of Brasília (Brazil):

Álamo Oliveira presents, besides the dramas of emigration, a discussion about human values. Without sentimentality he displays in a brilliant text the pain of loss, of all losses, from geographic to emotional references… Azoreans survive their impoverished origins but not always the loss of values in a culture where superficiality replaces its historical myths, its family and religious rituals, that were sacred to them in their homeland. Their perplexity in the face of the discontinuity of life in another country is only less than the feeling of irremediability that returning is no longer possible.

–Translated from “Já não gosto de chocolates: Um olhar sobre a alma,” in Diário Insular, 23 Sep 1999

In this work, Álamo Oliveira shows what can lie on the other side of the ocean: exile and the false face of personal progress and prosperity. The author offers an examination of old age, loneliness, prejudice, death, AIDS, drugs, the banalizing of human beings, while discussing emigration and its resultant loss of identity… [T]he colonizer-colonized relationship gets reversed: in the ironic one-way street of history, the Portuguese are no longer conquering America but being conquered by her. The center no longer holds: the colony (USA) has turned itself into a world power while the former conquerors, by immigrating, become menial labor for the construction of a nation that grew only thanks to them and the hard work to which they submitted.

–Translated from A emigração e a guerra: as literaturas periféricas e os enganos do pós-colonialismo

VI Congresso da Associação Internacional de Lusitanistas, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Aug 1999

Emigration is justified by more than the mere desire to leave. It is justified by hunger, the profound mark of insularity, ancestral hunger, mythicalness, inherited from the tragic conditions of life since the first settlers, and from the ever-present difficulties for the islander in surviving… Emigration is justified by fear, atavistic, which is born with Azoreans… the physical conditions of the volcanic islands, permanently threatened with seismic floods, and with the uncertainty of the sea… Religion is a magic exit, whose rituals everyone accepts and maintains. Emigration is also justified, in the final analysis, by the search for happiness. Upon leaving, the emigrant thinks he is guaranteeing his encounter with the origin of everything: origin, not repetition. Everything, then, is new, things really happen, rather than imitate.

– Translated from “A questão da identidade da terra: idéia de permanência na obra Contrabando original, de José Martins Garcia”

Master’s thesis, Institute of Letters & Arts, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul [PUCRS], Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1996

Kiwamu Hamaouka, Musashi University (Japan), translator:

[D]espite the sense of place of Tulare… in I No Longer Like Chocolates the theme under treatment is an absolutely universal one which must be more widely read in the world. Now, I’m not saying that other Azorean works don’t deserve to be translated. What fascinated me greatly was that universal sense of place which I still don’t know how to define well, but I can say that it’s something universal and understood.

– Translated from A propósito de Já não gosto de chocolate no Japão: Insulariedade Açoriana, digo “minha,” in “Maré Cheia,” Portuguese Tribune, 15 Jun 2007