Lídia Jorge, the Portuguese diaspora, and the memory that nations cannot afford to lose

There are newspaper articles we read simply to remain informed, and there are others that refuse to end when we turn the page. They continue quietly within us, becoming less an article than a conversation, less an interview than a meditation. Such was my experience after reading Lídia Jorge’s recent remarks published in Expresso, where she reflected upon the speech she delivered on Portugal Day in 2025 and observed that, if she were given the opportunity today, she would repeat those words with even greater clarity and even greater conviction. Hers was not the voice of someone seeking to revisit an old controversy, nor the insistence of an intellectual unwilling to relinquish a public position. It was, instead, the calm certainty of a writer who understands that literature and civic conscience share the same vocation: to remember what societies are tempted to forget. Long after I had finished reading the interview, I found myself thinking not simply about her words, but about the deeper question that seemed to echo beneath them—a question not only for Portugal, but for every nation that has ever built its future upon the memory of departure, migration, hospitality, and hope.

There are moments when writers cease merely to describe their countries and begin instead to illuminate them. They become less observers than custodians of memory, holding before their fellow citizens a mirror that reveals not only what a nation has become but also what it risks losing. Such moments are seldom comfortable. They rarely produce unanimous applause because they ask societies to look beyond the reassuring myths they have constructed about themselves. They ask whether the stories nations cherish still correspond to the truths they have lived. Lídia Jorge did precisely that. Returning to the address she delivered during the Portugal Day celebrations of 2025, she remarked that she would now make its message even more explicit. It was an extraordinary statement, not because it challenged anyone in particular, but because it reaffirmed something literature has always understood: truth does not become less true simply because it becomes inconvenient. Indeed, there are moments in history when clarity itself becomes an act of courage.

At the center of her reflections stood a question whose simplicity concealed immense moral weight: What has happened to the Portuguese? How could a people scattered across every continent, whose own history is inseparable from emigration, exile, uncertainty, sacrifice, and reinvention, begin to forget the lessons those journeys once taught? How could a nation whose sons and daughters knocked upon the doors of strangers in search of work, safety, dignity, and opportunity become hesitant in recognizing the humanity of those who now arrive seeking much the same? Hers was not an accusation. It was a lament born from memory. It was the sadness of someone who knows that historical amnesia is among the greatest dangers any democracy can face, for when a people forgets the hardships that shaped it, it also risks forgetting the virtues those hardships cultivated.

For those of us who belong to the Portuguese diaspora, those questions resonate with particular force because they are not abstractions. They are family history. Portugal’s story has never been confined within the geographical limits of the Republic. It stretches across oceans and generations. It lives in the dairy farms of California’s San Joaquin Valley, in the fishing ports of New England, in the vineyards of Ontario, in the neighborhoods of Toronto, Fall River, Newark, São Paulo, Caracas, Hamilton, Johannesburg, Paris, Luxembourg, Bermuda, Sydney, and countless other places where Portuguese emigrants built lives from little more than courage, perseverance, language, faith, and an unshakable determination to offer their children a future they themselves had never known. Every Portuguese family abroad preserves stories of departures filled with uncertainty, of parents who arrived unable to speak the language, of children translating for their elders, of communities constructing churches, Holy Ghost halls, cultural societies, newspapers, schools, and festivals so that memory itself might survive the distance from home. These are not peripheral stories. They are one of the central chapters of modern Portuguese history. The diaspora is not an appendix to Portugal. It is one of the ways Portugal itself has continued to exist.

Perhaps that is why Lídia Jorge’s words unsettled some and deeply moved others. When she declared that “no one has pure blood,” she was not engaging in ideological rhetoric, nor was she attempting to provoke. She was articulating one of history’s oldest truths. Portugal itself is the product of encounters—of peoples, civilizations, languages, religions, migrations, and exchanges that unfolded over centuries. Its greatest historical adventure, the Age of Discoveries, was never a story of isolation. It was, fundamentally, a story of contact. Those encounters produced extraordinary achievements, astonishing cultural exchanges, scientific discoveries, and new ways of imagining the world. They also produced conquest, slavery, exploitation, and suffering. Mature nations do not become smaller by acknowledging both realities. They become larger because they demonstrate sufficient confidence to embrace complexity rather than flee from it. History has never required innocence. It asks only honesty.

It was striking to learn that much of the speech that generated such debate in Portugal had originally been written several years earlier for a European literary anthology presented in Strasbourg. There, reflecting upon Sagres and Lagos, Lídia Jorge had explored the paradox that defines so much of Portuguese history: that one place symbolizes humanity’s extraordinary expansion of knowledge and geographical imagination, while another reminds us that the modern Atlantic slave trade also found one of its earliest expressions upon Portuguese shores. When first published in an international context, these reflections passed without controversy. Yet when essentially the same words were spoken before a Portuguese audience during the nation’s most symbolic civic celebration, they suddenly became contentious. What had changed? Certainly not history. Certainly not the text itself. What had changed, she suggested, was the atmosphere in which those words were received. That realization deserves careful attention, for it tells us something not only about Portugal but about the age in which so many democracies now find themselves.

Across Europe, North America, and much of the democratic world, conversations about identity have become increasingly compressed into simplified narratives that leave little room for ambiguity or historical nuance. Public debate increasingly rewards certainty over reflection, emotion over complexity, slogans over scholarship. The past is often reduced to either celebration or condemnation, leaving little space for the contradictory reality in which all nations have actually lived. Yet literature has always resisted such simplifications. Novelists understand instinctively that neither individuals nor countries are ever reducible to singular moral categories. Human beings are contradictory. Societies are contradictory. Nations contain within themselves generosity and cruelty, courage and fear, wisdom and blindness, extraordinary achievements alongside profound failures. To write honestly about one’s country is therefore neither an act of nationalism nor an act of self-denunciation. It is an act of fidelity to truth itself.

During her conversation at BABELL, Lídia Jorge offered perhaps the most compelling defense of literature’s public purpose. Writers, she observed, invent stories, yet they do not seek to deceive. Fiction openly acknowledges itself as invention. It enters into a silent agreement with the reader: these events may never have occurred, but through them we may arrive at deeper truths about ourselves. That, she suggested, differs profoundly from the “disloyal lies” that increasingly populate public discourse—falsehoods disguised as unquestionable truths, repeated until familiarity itself becomes a substitute for evidence. Recalling the Chilean writer Luis Sepúlveda, she distinguished literature’s “loyal lies” from the dangerous deceptions that flourish through misinformation, propaganda, and manipulation. It is an insight whose significance extends far beyond literary criticism. In an era increasingly shaped by algorithms, instant outrage, and carefully manufactured certainty, literature remains one of the last disciplines that still teaches patience, empathy, imagination, and the discipline of uncertainty. It reminds us that understanding another human being is infinitely more demanding—and infinitely more rewarding—than merely defeating an opponent in an argument.

Her reflections also ventured into the moral inheritance of Christianity, not as a theological argument but as an ethical challenge. She wondered how societies that continue to identify themselves as Christian could so readily abandon the very values that have traditionally defined Christian moral teaching: compassion, hospitality, forgiveness, care for the vulnerable, and the recognition of every person’s inherent dignity. Whether one approaches Christianity through faith or through its philosophical influence upon European civilization, the question remains deeply relevant. What becomes of a society that celebrates its traditions while quietly abandoning the virtues those traditions once proclaimed? It is an uncomfortable question because it refuses easy answers. Yet discomfort has always been one of literature’s most generous gifts. It unsettles us only so that we might think more honestly.

For the Portuguese diaspora, these reflections possess an intimacy that perhaps only emigrant communities can fully appreciate. Migration is never simply a demographic phenomenon or a subject for political debate. It is memory made flesh. It is grandparents who left islands and villages believing they might never return. It is mothers who learned new languages while refusing to forget lullabies sung in Portuguese. It is fathers who worked impossible hours believing that education would redeem every sacrifice. It is communities that built churches, Holy Ghost festivals, Portuguese schools, newspapers, radio programs, cultural organizations, and scholarship funds because they understood that identity survives only when memory is nurtured. Every Portuguese emigrant community knows what it means to arrive as strangers. Every community also remembers the immeasurable dignity that comes when strangers choose generosity over suspicion. Those memories become moral inheritances. They remind us that hospitality is never an abstract virtue discussed in parliaments or newspapers. It is something experienced by ordinary families whose futures depend upon the kindness of people they have never met.

Perhaps that is why the Portuguese diaspora remains one of Portugal’s greatest moral resources. It reminds the nation that migration is not something that belongs only to others. It belongs to us. Millions of Portuguese once crossed oceans in search of dignity, opportunity, freedom, and hope. They succeeded not because history owed them success, but because other societies, despite their own imperfections, ultimately chose openness more often than exclusion. To forget that history would be to misunderstand one of the defining experiences that shaped modern Portugal itself.

In the end, Lídia Jorge was never asking Portugal to surrender its identity. She was asking it to remember it more completely. Not the simplified identity constructed through comforting myths or selective nostalgia, but the richer, more demanding identity forged through departures and returns, encounters and misunderstandings, voyages and homecomings, triumphs and regrets. Hers is a vision of Portugal not as a fortress of purity, but as a country whose greatest historical strength has always resided in curiosity, openness, adaptability, and dialogue. It is a Portugal that crossed oceans not because it feared the unfamiliar, but because it was willing to encounter it. It is a Portugal that discovered itself precisely because it dared to leave itself behind.

And perhaps that is why literature remains indispensable to democratic life. Politics asks us, with increasing urgency, to choose sides. Literature asks us first to understand one another. Politics frequently measures time by election cycles. Literature measures it by generations. Politics often seeks immediate victories. Literature quietly preserves the conversations that civilizations continue having with themselves across centuries. Long after governments change, after controversies fade, after headlines disappear into forgotten archives, it is often the novelist who continues asking the questions that history itself refuses to silence.

Having finished reading Lídia Jorge’s reflections in Expresso, I found myself thinking that perhaps the greatest danger facing any nation is not disagreement, nor even conflict. It is forgetfulness. Countries rarely lose themselves all at once. They do so gradually, each time memory yields to convenience, complexity to certainty, history to mythology. Portugal has always been greater than the boundaries drawn upon its maps. It lives wherever its people carried their language, their labor, their culture, and their dreams. To remember that truth is not merely to honor the past. It is to preserve the generosity necessary for the future. For memory—honest, generous, and courageous—remains the only homeland that no border, no ideology, and no passing season of politics can ever take away.

Diniz Borges for Filamentos