A biographical piece from Roteiros Culturais dos Açores

José DIAS DE MELO (1925-2008) is one of the few contemporary Azorean writers to have achieved national renown, not only for the quality and quantity of the books he wrote and published, but also for the regularity with which he did so; and, above all, because he chose themes that only he knew how to develop, touching on the deepest and most universal aspects of human nature, but starting from the reality of the Azores. Dias de Melo is, therefore, a structuring writer in the context of Azorean cultural production, and to this extent, fundamental for anyone who wants to understand the literature produced today by Azorean writers. Dias de Melo’s literary work was built according to two main parameters: the first has to do with our people and their cultural experiences, which so well document the relationship between life and death, presence and absence, love and hate—which for centuries the Azoreans established with the sea, their everyday companion; the second is governed by the writer’s need to reflect on his condition as a man and a writer, projecting his own experiences and knowledge of writing into his books: when he talks about whalers, emigrants, or writers, Dias de Melo draws on what he has learned from life — using an admirable narrative technique, a freshness of language that makes no concessions to easy solutions or folkloric regionalism, and a simple authenticity in the human characters he recreates, thus updating the living echoes of that earthy past, situated far beyond the colonization of the islands, where, as Nemésio asserted, Azorean life is spiritually projected. Among his vast literary work, Pedras Negras (1964) stands out, a narrative of the life, work, and death of two defeated heroes — Francisco Marroco and João Peixe-Rei — written in a style appropriate to the awakening that Portugal was experiencing in the 1960s: the chronic poverty of the islands, combined with news of soldiers killed in colonial wars with no end in sight, had fueled a new wave of emigration to America—no longer by jumping onto whaling boats bound for New Bedford, as before, but by letter of call, or with a “visitor’s” visa, to the dairies of California. We speak of Azoreanity when we speak of Pedras Negras, of the picarota Azoreanity, which is to say, of the soul of a tough people who never allowed themselves to be softened by centuries of “hunger, droughts, cyclones, volcanic fires, earthquakes,” survived on an island of black rocks from which they always wanted to leave (because “the island drives people away”), and to which they always wanted to return (because “the island calls us”) — in a relationship of life and death, presence and absence, love and hate, prosperity and bankruptcy, dreams and nightmares with the sea — everyday companion, sometimes opening up the paths of the world, other times the tomb of man’s dreams (like João Peixe-Rei, whose death in the distant Cape Horn is one of the most poignant moments in the narrative). An Azorean spirit championed by Francisco Marroco, who, after a childhood of hunger in the early 20th century, fled on an American whaling ship, sailing the seas of the world and then the lands of America, earning a living that would eventually bring him back to the island, and here he died. Still, not before visiting his son António in prison, simply because he had dared to denounce the abuses of a capitalism—still in its infancy, but already triumphant—that would forever transform the old art, which the men of Pico knew so well, of intertwining work on land with whaling upon the sea… Dias de Melo, following in this fine tradition of men of two trades, combined his experience as a profound connoisseur of the life, suffering, and death of the whalers—remember his monumental collection of stories related to whaling, published in two volumes under the title Na Memória das Gentes (1985-1991)— with his abundant and varied experience as a writer who also reflects on his condition as an author, which he left us testimony of in the novel O Autógrafo (1999), and, above all, as a man of integrity and hard work who, at a powerful moment in his life, understands the importance of reflecting on his life and work — as is the case, for example, in the novel Milhas Contadas (2002). The expression “milhas contadas” (counted miles), taken from the heroes of the Azorean sea, means that the end of the journey is approaching, that land is already in sight, that our heroes — whether they are the whalers of Pico, the writer who composed their epic, or Pedro António, the hero of this novel — are returning, bringing with them a whole life story to tell to those who never left the island. But also, more prosaically, the miles counted are the poems, novels, short stories, chronicles, ethnographic collections, and monographs that Dias de Melo conceived and published over sixty-four years—and which in themselves represent at least two lives: the personal life of a talented, hard-working, and passionate writer, and the collective life of the people of Pico, who are, ultimately, the true raison d’être of Dias de Melo’s work. Mile by mile — that is, book by book — Dias de Melo built what is, in many respects, including that of “authenticity,” one of the most unique works of Portuguese literature in recent years.