We are words—long before we are memory or labor or diaspora, we are shaped by the syllables that raise us and the ones we dare to claim. For an immigrant, words become the first true homeland, the map we carry when childhood fades into distance and adulthood grows vast and strange. As a young Azorean boy in California, I learned early that words were not decoration; they were breath, shelter, and sometimes the only bridge back to myself. And then, in my early thirties, I found the writer who revealed that words could be more than survival—they could be revolt, illumination, the quiet architecture of conscience.

Some literary encounters do not merely join a life; they rearrange its foundations. In that wide, sun-bleached Valley where my family from Terceira had planted new roots, and where I clung to Portuguese books as if they were oxygen, I opened José Saramago for the first time. The moment was not casual; it was tectonic. I remember the book resting in my hands, the pages quickly traced with underlines, filled with questions—as if my mind were catching fire. It felt as though Saramago had entered the hush of my immigrant solitude to say: This language you thought you knew—come closer. It has deeper rooms. Let me show you where it can take you.

What I encountered was not merely a novelist but a way of seeing. His sentences, those long riverine currents that refused the tyranny of the period and moved instead with the breath of thought itself, reshaped my own internal rhythm. I felt each paragraph like the movement of an oar dipping into water—slow, assured, deliberate. Saramago was the first Portuguese writer I read who made me feel that literature was not something I consumed, but something I entered. He wrote with the lucidity of an old prophet and the irreverence of a man unafraid of offending the lazy certainties of the world. That combination—moral clarity and cheeky defiance—was my initiation into what literature could be: a classroom for the conscience.

Being an immigrant sharpened that encounter. In the rural corners of California where Portuguese words often survived only in kitchens, in festas, in the cadence of elders telling half-forgotten island stories, Saramago (and other writers before and after him) offered me a different Portugal—the Portugal of intellectual courage, of imaginative audacity, of ethical unrest. I had known the Portugal of sopas, sardinhas, chamarritas, and Holy Ghost processions. I cherished that Portugal, the one that raised me. But Saramago, as well as others before and many after him, revealed the Portugal that shaped me as an adult: the Portugal of questions, skepticism, dreams, irreverence, dignity, the Portugal that does not fear confronting myths—including its own.

And yes, Saramago had his abrupt edges. He had his contradictions. He had his temper and his bouts of ideological absolutism. But who among us emigrants, torn between worlds, does not carry a few inconsistencies in our pockets? If anything, those imperfections made him more compelling. He was not a saint—he was a human being fiercely committed to the sanctity of human dignity. He wrote with the clarity of one who understood injustice intimately, not abstractly. That mattered deeply to me at a moment in life when I, too, was learning to interpret the injustices, the inequalities, the silences of my adopted country.

The Nobel Committee understood this. In 1998, when they awarded him the Prize, they praised his “parables sustained by imagination, compassion, and irony” and his ability to craft narratives that “enable us to see reality with new eyes.” That phrase has lingered with me all these years, because reading Saramago truly is an act of ocular transformation. What he did was push the lens of literature against the world until the world revealed its hidden fractures.

From Memorial do Convento, where the humble and the dreamers become the true architects of miracles, I learned that history is carried more by the calloused hands of the forgotten than by kings. In that novel, one line struck me like a vocational calling: “Somos palavras. A vida é isso. O resto é silêncio.” We are words—that’s what life is.  The rest is silence. I copied the line into journals, wrote it on envelopes, repeated it like a prayer. For an immigrant who had traveled with little more than language as inheritance, those words felt like a homecoming.

From Ensaio sobre a Cegueira, Saramago’s stark vision of a society collapsing under the weight of moral myopia, I learned how fragile civilization is. The blindness he describes is not ophthalmological; it is ethical. And as I watched American political life grow more polarized, more cynical, more overtly indifferent to the suffering of others, I returned to Saramago with the same unsettled question: how is it that we repeatedly refuse to see what is right before our eyes?

From Ensaio sobre a Lucidez, where an electorate votes blank en masse and the government reacts with authoritarian panic, I came to understand the fear that true democratic participation can inspire in those who claim to defend it. That novel felt prophetic in a country where voter suppression, disinformation, and the erosion of civic trust threaten the very premise of democracy.

From O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo, I learned how stories long embalmed in reverence could be cracked open and infused with humanity. Saramago took one of our most sacred narratives and dared to make it tender, ethical, and devastatingly human—reminding me that literature is never sacrilege when its purpose is compassion.

From Todos os Nomes, where a lonely clerk searches for one unknown woman among thousands of anonymous records, I learned the holiness of the ordinary person. As immigrants, we come from lineages of anonymous names. Saramago dignified those names—our grandparents, our laborers, our mothers—by making their invisibility the center of the story.

Living in California’s Central Valley, surrounded by migrant laborers, dairy workers (I too was one part-time and full-time for 4 years), construction workers—many Portuguese, Mexican, Punjabi, Hmong—Saramago’s moral compass became my own. He taught me that the common person is never common. That every life deserves the narrative weight reserved for kings. That literature must lift the silence into speech.

And so, his relevance feels sharper now than ever. In a United States wrestling with inequality so vast it feels biblical, with political cynicism eroding the connective tissue of society, with empathy evaporating under the glare of partisanship, Saramago’s voice returns like a warning bell. He saw how democracies fracture. He saw how nations lie to themselves. He saw how institutions prefer order to justice, obedience to compassion.

But he also saw a path forward—a path of responsibility. He said it plainly in his Nobel Lecture: “Somos a memória que temos e a responsabilidade que assumimos.” We are the memory we preserve, and the responsibility we enact. As an immigrant from the Azores, raised in a working-class family (still a proud working-class person), living in a rural landscape where the fruits of labor seldom match the dignity of the people who bent their backs to produce them, those words weren’t and aren’t abstractions. They were and are a mandate.

The Portuguese diaspora in America often inherits a Portugal of nostalgia rather than contemplation. We celebrate festas, cook the foods of our grandparents, and preserve traditions that have crossed oceans. But Saramago helps us inherit a different Portugal—the Portugal of thought, rebellion, depth, and imagination. Through him, Portuguese-Americans rediscover that their heritage is not only culinary and folkloric; it is also intellectual, politically conscious, and ethically bold. Saramago reminds us that we come from a culture that questions power rather than merely obeys it.

For those in the diaspora who read him in Portuguese, the experience is doubly intimate: reading Saramago feels like being spoken to by the language itself. For those who read him in translation, the ethical force remains intact. In either form, he wakes us.

His work continues to burn because he wrote not to entertain but to elevate. And because he believed, stubbornly and tenderly, in the possibility of human decency—even while exposing its failures. He believed that solidarity is not an ornament but a duty. He believed that literature could expand the moral imagination. And he believed that the common person—the immigrant, the laborer, the anonymous—holds the story of the world.

As I grow older, 36 years after I first read him, I return to Saramago with the same reverence I once reserved for the elders of my Praia da Vitória. His sentences still unsettle me, still provoke me, still point me toward a more just horizon. Reading him today feels like hearing an admonition whispered across the Atlantic: Beware the blindness that comforts you. Beware the silence you call peace. Beware the indifference you mistake for normal.

Perhaps that is why, in these troubled times—of instability, polarization, and democratic peril—we would do well to read Saramago again. He does not offer easy hope, but he provides clear sight. He does not praise us; he summons us. To memory. To responsibility. To solidarity. To the courage of confronting our own contradictions. And to the radical tenderness of being human.

If Portugal gave him to the world, it falls to us—immigrants, descendants, readers scattered across continents—to keep his voice alive. Because José Saramago taught us not only how to read but how to see. And a country, a diaspora, a democracy—any community—survives only if it continues to see.

And perhaps the most fitting homage is this: to recognize that his light has not dimmed. It waits for us in every margin we once underlined, in every question we dared to ask, in every silence we now refuse to accept. We are, as he wrote, “words,” fragile and luminous. And to read Saramago today is to remember that words—when held with courage—can still remake the world, one reader at a time.

Diniz Borges

(These thoughts were written a few months ago, never published, like many things I have in my files, and now adapted to commemorate José Saramago’s 103rd birthday)