Cody Caetano, a Half-Bad Azorean-Canadian Introduces Himself

Never let distorted realities that make thriving and itinerant survivalists of us all oust you from joy and imagination and from your story.
— Cody Caetano, Half Bads in White Regalia

Half Bads? How should we translate that? “Half-bad,” perhaps. In any case, it is a joyful and perplexing “bad,” a descriptor for characters so singular in our English-language literature that they could only have come from an author like Cody Caetano—the son of an Indigenous Canadian mother of the Anishnaabe Nation and an Azorean-Canadian father, and the grandson of a grandfather from São Miguel who emigrated to Canada in the 1960s. The narrator presents himself metaphorically dressed in white, belonging to a kind of royalty—or to those who survive what we might call a “dysfunctional” family. Enough quotation marks.

Half Bads in White Regalia is labeled a memoir; on the cover, a boy dressed in white holds a stick, surrounded by fields and forests—another instance of Canada’s exuberant nature. In truth, it is that and much more: a novel-like work of creative nonfiction, something that rarely appears among us, a firm act of memory that necessarily invents dialogue to enrich the creation of the characters who surround the narrator or are summoned from the past. We are in the 1990s through the present, when a mother named Mindimooye discovers who her parents and siblings are, after having been adopted—against their will—in the mid-twentieth century, one among the many Indigenous families and children for whom the country now seeks redemption through apologies and reparations.

The narrator’s father is called The Bull; the grandfather, Old Man. Their Azorean identity is implied through chapter titles and narrative turns the boy absorbs and reproduces during childhood. It is the adult Cody who remembers his years as a child and adolescent, with all that implies for memory of days and nights within the unstable shelter of parents, neighbors, and friends: moving from house to house; life among a brother and a sister; from school to school; days of hunger and solitude eating whatever remained in the refrigerator; a father often with beer in hand, coming and going, repeatedly abandoning yet always working here and there; a mother who refuses to live without the love of a man or of her children, yet also frequently leaving them to their own devices.

Here is the family in contemporary societies—far more common than we like to admit—and the all-too-human triumph of survival and eventual happiness. Today, Cody Caetano is highly trained in the humanities and creative writing, and works as a literary agent associated with Penguin Random House Canada. He wrote this book under the guidance of his late and renowned mentor Lee Maracle of the University of Toronto, herself a member of another Indigenous Canadian nation.

I offer these biographical notes because among us it is still rarely understood that great art comes from every human quadrant—no matter how hidden or supposedly improbable it may seem to our persistent Eurocentrism. Here lies the natural literary greatness of a beautiful and profoundly Lusitanian human métissage. For me, Cody Caetano stands in sequence with the Native American writer N. Scott Momaday—House Made of Dawn, The Ancient Child—and with the Azorean-Native American writer Michael Garcia Spring, author of Blue Crow and Inside the Sound (Dentro do Som, in a Portuguese translation by Maria João Marques). This is part of the literature that defines us as the diasporic nation we are fortunate to be—a literature among the richest and most beautiful within and around a Lusophony that, for now, still seems distant to us.

Half Bads in White Regalia excels through its streetwise childhood idioms and through the media culture that Marshall McLuhan identified as the determining message of our and subsequent generations—formed by schools of every kind and denomination, and now by video games, the plasma world, and its accompanying music: an isolated freedom within four walls or out in the streets, the so-called global village. Caetano’s memories are set in small suburban cities in Ontario—Happyland and Sunshine City—with Toronto before and after; geographic names of irony and counter-irony serving as another detonator of this superb narrative’s meaning.

Amid the emotional shocks experienced by all the characters, the word resilience appears in the text itself to define the rest—those who endure everything only to arrive at conventional yet freely chosen lives, at home and across diverse professions. No one is accused or judged; the prose remains both intimate and distant, each character’s fate simply what it is—almost recalling the nouveau roman of Alain Robbe-Grillet.

“Thank you,” Cody Caetano writes in the final pages of his Acknowledgments, thanking all who shaped his life, “to my father. Thank you for building community wherever you are, for your commitment to reconciliation, and for what you pass on to me.” A Canadian family in struggle? I see nothing here that separates it from lived experience anywhere today—in any major metropolitan country, or in an Azorean parish or city. The world at our doorstep; the past, that foreign country, still clouded yet enduring. English splashed with Lusitanian expressions.

Before The Bull was The Bull, Old Man. He met—Cody recalls in a chapter titled “The Bull”—and married Grandma Maria. He was just a native mainland Portuguese who dreamed of better oranges to squeeze and moved to São Miguel to find them. But he himself turned sour and faded into the magma of volcanic faults, a refugee in parishes and towns built from slabs of stone stretched and cooled along exuberant fissures in the earth—hardly his idea of a good life. Because Old Man did not take life by the horns. Old Man was the horns.

In the summer of 1962 on São Miguel, Grandma Maria gave birth to The Bull in a basin, and then the twin in a bedroom. That’s what The Bull says.

The third baby followed a year later. The year after that, on a day of offerings to servants, Grandma Maria flew with her children to Montreal, and then moved into a house on Kingston Market in Toronto. They had the fourth baby two years later.

Something is surely lost in any translation, but the original is available to all with a click. From one language to another, something transforms—never the original meaning, the ethical imperative of any reading. Cody Caetano’s language, like everything else in this prose, is at once hard and tender: the language of pure memory and the poetry of a generous soul, grateful beyond all the tribulations of being alive in our shared, ambiguous modernity.

This book was widely discussed in Canada; sections of it received the Indigenous Voices Award for Unpublished Prose in 2020. A translation in Portugal would not be a favor—it would be a literary necessity for those who understand that Portuguese identity extends far beyond the tragic rectangle and its distant islands, still largely unknown in their entirety. Our inattention is old—no need to choose harsher words. Cody likely knows nothing of our literary passivity when it comes to multicultural themes, of a continuous and pathetic self-denial of who we historically are, and of how we should claim ourselves without complexes or national tics.

Cody Caetano has long kept company with other major Luso-Canadian writers who write in the English of their native country, for whom Lusitanian ancestry is a constant. Erika de Vasconcelos, in My Darling Dead Ones, leads us into the memory of another Canada and of Lisbon and its surroundings. Anthony De Sa, with roots in Lomba da Maia on São Miguel, remains an active novelist—author, among others, of Barnacle Love, translated into Portuguese as Terra Nova. Others may remain outside our radar—for now. The literary anthology Satúrnia: Autores Luso-Canadianos, edited by Manuel Carvalho, records nearly everything we need to know about one of the most vigorous literatures of our descendants in one of the largest and most important countries of our navigations—made, at a distance, into another homeland.

Reference
Cody Caetano, Half Bads in White Regalia: A Memoir. Toronto: Penguin Random House Canada, 2022. Originally published in BorderCrossings, Açoriano Oriental, May 26, 2023.