Devin Meireles’ ‘The Scars Saudade Wrote’ may be among the last book you will read depicting from living memory the authentic Portuguese immigration experience in Canada. The great diasporic migrations of the 50s/60s/70s are over. Portugal is now both a tourist destination and a country receiving immigrants from its own former empire, the European Union, as well as trans Mediterranean refugees. The inner cities of Lisbon, Porto, Faro, Funchal, and Ponta Delgada have been ‘Disneyfied’ for mass tourism. But the ghosts of all the Little Portugals remain the grist of diasporic literature from Laura Bulger to Anthony de Sa, and still resonate with young writers like Devin Meireles. Toronto’s ‘Little Portugal’ is now little more than commemorative street signs, but there once thrived, in the heart of Canadian and American cities at the height of the cross Atlantic migration, a vibrant ethos of cultural endurance within the crucible of every Portuguese family.

In “The Scars that Saudade Wrote,” Meireles, a millennial Toronto writer, mines his family’s experiences with care and reverence. Although many of these stories took place before he was even born, it is evident that the writer was compelled to reduce to writing stories he heard around the Sunday dinner table, when forebears indulged in the Portuguese pass time known as ‘Recordar é viver’ (to remember is to live).

The short stories are linked loosely together and involve the experiences of different members of a Portuguese family in Toronto. The following descriptors are teasers, not spoilers, offered to provide some measure of the book’s scope: “Valley of Faith, Horizon of Dreams” depicts Azorean rural life, and Fatima’s choice to move to a bigger town on another Island.”Distant Threads” tells the story of a woman who leaves her beloved brother behind to emigrate to a better life in Canada. “From Island to Ice” is a short story about a young woman’s emigration journey from her austere island life to join her husband in the metropolis of Toronto in 1960. It clearly details the tribulation of logistics it once was to board an airplane for the first time, accompanied by rambunctious curious children, and travel to Canada in the middle of winter.  “Across the Atlantic” tells the story of a man’s journey across the ocean, in the sole company of other men, then across the North American continent to end up labouring on the railroad through the British Columbian bush. “Outgrowing the Boy” deftly balances a boy’s adolescent identity crisis with the loss of his beloved grandmother. “When God Plays Cards” painstakingly unravels the tragic outcome of a young man’s divided loyalty to his devoted mother and unfaithful father. “Beneath the Popcorn Ceiling” is the story of a kid’s mandatory dressing up to visit his grandmother on his birthday, when his true desire was a party at Chuck E. Cheese. The lesson being that: “Special occasions were for family. Birthdays didn’t exempt us from tradition.” “Red in the Pew” comically and counterintuitively depicts how inadvertent sibling violence on the way to Sunday mass leads to unresolved theological questions, the fear of corporal punishment, and eventual reconciliation over needing to share the video game console.

“Whistling Against the Wind” is a powerful story about the last days of man left behind on his Azorean farm, estranged from his family by his choices.  “Between Dundas and Destiny” tells the story of a woman walking herself to a downtown Toronto the hospital for childbirth, so as to save taxi fare and avoid troubling her neighbours. “Brothers on Yonge Street” takes place on the sin strip where the Eaton Centre shopping, arcades, record shops and bars of which acted like a magnet to youth in the 1970s and 1980s. This story achingly depicts a coming of age through the pain a petty crime imposes on a family: an experience that marked the lives of so many of our youth. “The Weight of Blue,” one of the strongest stories in the collection, details a man wrestling with his alcoholism in his post office workplace. It is gritty and realistic in its depiction of what it takes for a functioning alcoholic to quickly becomes non-functioning.

“That Night” the strongest of the stories in the book, tells in carefully written spare emotional prose how a young couple’s dark night of the soul unfolds as they deal with a miscarriage. Expect to feel their pain as you read it. “Inheritance of the Sea” is a lyrical Madeira travelogue displaying Meireles’s chops as a travel writer in the tradition of Paul Theroux. “The Distance Between the Shores” the collections only poem, is also it’s weakest offering. While heartfelt and sincere, it only stands out in “The Scars Saudade Wrote,” because it feels like like unrooted lyrical sentiment in a very well grounded collection of stories.

Meireles’ writing is earnest and authentic, although sometimes over reliance on figures of speech in the prose distract from the import of a sentence. The book would have benefitted from a tighter edit. Nevertheless, there can be no question of the trustworthy provenance of the stories in this collection. These are not stories researched in an archive, online, or gleaned from secondary readings. This is naturalistic kitchen table stuff, closer to the oral tradition than high literature, and this is Meireles’ obvious intent. Every story is an engaging, unpretentious, and an elucidating read, unquestionably rooted in family remembrance.

In the opening essay “The Inheritance of Home,” Meireles describes the intangible sentiment of ‘Saudade’, now almost as ubiquitous a denominator of Portugeseness as the pastel de Nata, thus: “Anyone can fall in love with Portugal, but when the love is inherited, it feels less like a discovery and more like a reunion.” He goes on to write: “And so when I say: ‘Portugal is my home away from home, what I really mean is: It’s always been my home. I just wasn’t born there.”

He wasn’t born there, but Devin Meireles most certainly lives and engagingly writes the Portuguese experience like a palimpsest of family memories. In “The Scars Saudade Wrote” Devin Meireles views the homeland from the diaspora through a lens rapidly growing opaque as living memory fades, then disappears.

Humberto sa Silva, writer