Still on Jorge de Sena in America

(November 6, 2011)
Vamberto Freitas

I have always said that, in Portugal, if departure were entirely free, what would remain would be a few hundred naïve souls and impoverished beggars, and a few thousand thieves robbing one another.
— Jorge de Sena, America, America

Readers should not allow the opening words cited above to predetermine their reading of this newly published collection of Jorge de Sena’s essays, America, America, nor should they distort their understanding of his lifelong conception of Portuguese citizenship. Few major Portuguese intellectuals of his generation were as profoundly and rigorously patriotic as the author of Sinais de Fogo. His patriotism, however, was anchored not in the State—which so often failed to rise to the historical stature of its people—but in the Nation itself, in its history, culture, and ethical continuity.

I have returned insistently to these essay collections, now published for the first time in book form, because in Jorge de Sena we encounter something unprecedented with regard to Portuguese immigration on the West Coast of the United States: a defender of its literary and cultural legitimacy who was uncompromising, lucid, and dignified. Apart from Eduardo Mayone Dias—another Lisbon-born writer—no one else spoke so forcefully on this subject. When I refer here to “its legitimacy,” I am not invoking Sena’s uncontested stature in the Portuguese literary canon. I am referring instead to his singular position as an immigrant who both was and was not one—arriving late from Portugal and Brazil, already a towering figure in his country of origin, yet fully subject to the daily, material, and symbolic conditions of immigrant life.

There is not space here to fully unpack how Sena understood his own position within the Portuguese diasporic mosaic after leaving Portugal in 1959 for Brazil and, later, in 1965, for North America. What must be stated unequivocally is that Jorge de Sena never placed himself above—or apart from—the largely Azorean community in California. He spoke of us with a characteristic blend of irony, empathy, and a self-deprecating humor that was neither condescending nor sentimental. In his essay “Being an Immigrant—and How,” he writes:

So there you are—you arrive as a full professor, you settle in, you earn what is, in truth, a pittance compared to what a Portuguese man in California will make honestly milking cows that speak no language at all. You live in a so-called intellectual environment; you are not (unfortunately, I am not, in Santa Barbara) in permanent contact with your ‘colony,’ but thanks to democratic equalities, you are exposed to the same discriminations—sometimes even subtler ones—as everyone else.

Written shortly before his death, this text is Sena’s most lucid autobiographical account as an immigrant intellectual navigating foreign universities and cultures. It is also a reckoning with exile—both chosen and imposed—and with the shared condition of those who, like him and his family, fled Portugal during its bleakest and most uncertain years. In an earlier essay of mine on Rever Portugal, I emphasized Sena’s unwavering engagement with community education: his staunch defense of Portuguese-language instruction for immigrant and Luso-American children within California’s public school system; his readiness to participate in conferences, symposia, and public forums addressing our place in the New World; and his constant involvement in debates surrounding Portugal’s political and intellectual life under dictatorship and later during the fragile years of post-April democracy.

To this must be added the personal, lived expression of his loyalty to community life. In his final years, Sena attended events such as the Holy Ghost festivals—one of which I personally witnessed in Artesia, in Greater Los Angeles. I remember vividly his enthusiasm, his genuine joy at being there, immersed in conversation, visibly fulfilled by the vitality of a community he said he had long hoped to see active and self-aware. Any question about Portuguese culture or literature sparked in him an irrepressible generosity of spirit. In that moment, all expectation of condescension vanished. It was then that I most clearly understood the fury with which he addressed Portuguese politicians and literary elites in his essays—figures enclosed within their ignorance and provincialism, particularly when it came to understanding emigrant communities scattered across the globe.

America, America also includes essays that reveal Sena’s deep understanding of American culture—he was, after all, a translator of several major American writers—as well as his reflections on the teaching of Portuguese language and literature at the university level. He writes incisively about Americans and their relationship to history, and how that historical consciousness—or lack thereof—shaped their perception of Portugal. A Brazilian citizen by necessity and by ethical loyalty to a brother nation, Sena once wrote that he was “Brazilian for eight centuries, since Afonso Henriques.” Yet he never ceased to defend Portuguese cultural legitimacy within American universities, particularly against persistent attacks from Spanish departments, Brazilian academics, and so-called “Brazilianists”—U.S. professors, often beneficiaries of federal funding, whose scholarship served strategic geopolitical interests in understanding and managing an emerging Brazil.

Sena responded ferociously to any attempt to diminish Portugal—whether through mockery of accent, claims of linguistic inferiority, or proposals to eliminate parity between Portuguese and Brazilian studies by privileging Brazilian Portuguese as the sole academic norm. His language in these polemics is unapologetically scathing. He names intellectual dishonesty for what it is. Anti-Portuguese sentiment among certain academics provoked in him open disgust, rooted in his recognition of their arrogance and ignorance—Portugal judged through chauvinistic eyes trained only to respect economic and political power.

In Jorge de Sena, they encountered an adversary their superior in every respect: breadth of historical knowledge, democratic rectitude, and an unassailable ethical compass, whether addressing ideas or human beings. I had never read essays so illuminating, so fierce, and so necessary—particularly for those of us navigating institutional life in the United States during the intellectual ferment of the 1960s and 1970s. To read and reread America, America today is to grasp the depth of pain, disappointment, persistence, and moral endurance that shaped one of the greatest poets and intellectuals Portugal has ever produced.

As Jorge Fazenda Lourenço observes in his introduction, Sena’s writing, his lived experience, and his constant movement across borders are inseparable from his poetry. No one wrote us into being with such clarity and permanence—writing himself while writing us. Sena was acutely aware of this when he quoted, in one of these essays, a passage from his monumental poem of exile and migration, “In Crete with the Minotaur,” from Peregrinatio ad Loca Infecta (1969):

I will collect nationalities the way shirts are taken off, worn, and discarded,
with all the respect due to garments that were worn and served their purpose.
I am myself my own homeland.

Few lines in modern Portuguese literature so truthfully and beautifully contain the permanent condition of the migrant—forever negotiating multiple, and sometimes contradictory, loyalties.

Reference
Jorge de Sena, America, America, edited and introduced by Mécia de Sena and Jorge Fazenda Lourenço. Lisbon: Guimarães/BABEL, 2011

Vamberto Freitas at Seventy-Five

The Long Work of Critically Listening to and writing about  Dispersed Voices

Filamentos – arts and letters
Bruma Publications | Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI),
California State University, Fresno

Introduction

For more than three decades, Vamberto Freitas has practiced literary criticism as a form of sustained attention—patient, rigorous, and ethically alert. His work has traced the quiet, often overlooked trajectories of writers shaped by migration, insularity, and memory, especially those of American and Canadian authors with roots in the Azores. At seventy-five, his critical legacy stands not as a monument but as an ongoing conversation: a life of letters placed in the service of literature itself, where reading becomes an act of responsibility and criticism as a way of listening deeply to voices dispersed across geographies, languages, and generations.

Throughout the month of February, Filamentos – arts and letters, an initiative of Bruma Publications at the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI), California State University, Fresno, will honor this legacy with daily segments published from February 1 through February 28. Each entry will revisit, reflect upon, and extend the critical pathways opened by Vamberto Freitas, reaffirming the enduring relevance of his work within Atlantic, diasporic, and transnational literary studies.

Vision

To honor literary criticism as a form of cultural stewardship—one that listens across distance, preserves intellectual memory, and affirms the centrality of diasporic voices within the broader landscape of contemporary literature.

Mission

Through this February series, Filamentos – arts and letters seeks to celebrate the life and work of Vamberto Freitas by foregrounding criticism as a practice of care, rigor, and continuity. By publishing daily reflections, excerpts, and critical engagements, this initiative reaffirms Filamentos’ commitment to literature that crosses borders, sustains dialogue between islands and continents, and recognizes reading as an ethical act—one capable of holding dispersed voices in thoughtful, enduring relation.

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