The most valuable and enduring yet fragile legacy of the former Portuguese empire is its language. Five centuries ago it was confined to a small and marginal European country. Today, between 190 and 230 million people speak Portuguese throughout the world, in South America (Brazil), Europe (Portugal), and Africa (Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Angola, and Sao Tome and Principe). The language ranks eighth among the most commonly spoken languages in the world (third among the western languages, after English and Castilian). Portuguese also has a presence in Asia, but in a vestigial (Goa) or decaying (Macau and East Timor) form. The transition to independence of Portugal´s former colonies in Africa and Asia was a disaster, not atypical of the dismantling of empires, but Portugal has a lot to answer for. The war in Africa for the control of the colonies, lead by Portugal´s dictator Salazar and continued by his successor, had a flavor of anachronism and hopelessness from the moment it started, in 1961.

“Zé Povinho”, a Portuguese character created in 1875 by a Portuguese artist named Bordalo Pinheiro, became the unofficial symbol of our people. He is an ugly but kind man who lives a simple life and mocks the powerful. Except for this disrespect of the powerful, which in Portugal tends to be common but not overt, Zé Povinho is a fair representation of the Portuguese.

With the independence of all major colonies, Portugal reassumed its role as a small country (administrative control of Macau for a few more years was irrelevant) and the burden of the ‘discoveries’ continued to crash down on the generations to come. This is perhaps the time to confess that in high school, I only learned the history of my country until roughly 1640. The curriculum was so bad and unbalanced that we did not have time to cover the last 350 years of the nation´s history. I thought this was tragic. Having decided to fix the problem on my own, I plunged into books from international sources, mostly thematic (on the arts, the sciences, and so forth). To my surprise, I came to the conclusion that it was as if Portugal did not exist during that period. Yes, the Portuguese colonies were mentioned, but always as if they were a passive achievement. Fine, there were references to Port wine, but Port wine is essentially an English creation on Portuguese soil. True, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake was vividly discussed by intellectuals like Voltaire and Rousseau, but it would be insane for the Portuguese to take credit for a natural catastrophe that killed 90,000 people. In short, it seems that my high school teachers were accidentally right. Why bother to study the history of the nation if the Enlightenment, the French, American and Industrial Revolutions, and even the Second World War were followed from a distance, receiving no direct contribution from Portugal?

Let me give you two examples. Take philosophy. Portugal´s seminal contribution to the field occurred in the XVII century, when the parents of the yet to be born Spinoza were kicked out of the country and headed to Amsterdam. Since then Portugal´s only input to the world of ideas has been the term ‘desenrascanço’, loosely translated as ‘disentanglement’ and defined by Wikipedia as “an ability to solve a problem without the adequate tools or proper technique to do so, and by use of sometimes imaginative resourcefulness when facing new situations”. Now, consider the Nobel Prize in science. As you scroll down the list of laureates and their findings, it is striking how the vast majority of the prized discoveries did not fade away into irrelevance. A clear exception is Egas Moniz, Portugal´s only laureate scientist. Moniz got a shared prize in 1949 for pioneering lobotomy. Today, this is a tragically obsolete technique that has helped no one, the arguable exception being Jack Nicholson, who played a neurotic lobotomized-to-be in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and won an Oscar for it.

Is it all bad? Of course not. Just focusing on more recent times, the Portuguese revolution of April 25, 1974 was a defining moment in our history. Only in Portugal could you witness a military coup like ours. First, almost no blood was shed. A total of four people were killed, by gunshots fired from the windows of the political police headquarters. This was a tragic event, but by any criterion the death toll for a revolution was low. Second, in less than two years the power effectively moved from the army to the people. The transition was not easy, though. Indeed, in 1975 the country risked a Marxist-Leninist takeover. However, on November 25, 1975 an attempt to seize power by the radical leftists was blocked by more moderate military forces, and that day marked the end of the political and social turmoil. Since then we have been living quite peacefully.

It also seems clear that the Portuguese have a remarkable capacity to respond to punctuated challenges, even when skills that we traditionally lack—organization, to name one—are required. For instance, we managed to successfully organize the Expo 1998, an enormous exhibition of cultures from all over the world, and more recently the 2004 European Soccer Cup was a success, just ask the Greeks. This capacity is probably best illustrated by the display of pragmatism of the Marquis of Pombal (1699-1782), prime minister to King Joseph I, in the aftermath of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. What is remarkable in his famous quote, “What now? We bury the dead and feed the living” is that he actually meant it. A third of the city’s population was lost and Lisbon was heavily damaged, but no epidemics followed and within less than one year the construction of the world’s first quakeproof buildings began. The Portuguese can indeed achieve great things and are not intrinsically lazy or incapable. The problem is that we are procrastinators by default. Unless the situation is life-threatening, the typical Portuguese will not abandon the couch and the remote control.

Every nation’s people, no matter how collectively mediocre, includes a few exceptional individuals. Some of my favorite countrymen are local politicians and cheesy singers, hardly geniuses and definitely non-exportable stuff. Luckily, we had a handful of talents in the last century. First and foremost: Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), a poet second to none, with the arguable exception of Luís de Camões (1524?–1580), author of The Lusiads, our great epic. Pessoa was actually a small crowd of poets trapped in the same body. His rationalized schizophrenia gave rise to five major writers, each with his own biography and, more importantly, an individual style and poetic universe. He was an admirer of Whitman, who took the multiplication of the self to an extreme level of complexity. More recently, two Portuguese novelists have gained wide international acclaim: José Saramago (1922-) and António Lobo Antunes (1942-). According to Harold Bloom, Saramago is “the most gifted novelist alive in the world today.” Lobo Antunes would probably say the same about himself. In a puzzling violation of the rules of logic, both may be right. Saramago´s talent lies in his capacity for constructing a plot around a bright and clearly defined idea—the Iberian Peninsula detaches from the European mainland and starts drifting in the Atlantic Ocean; a girl in Portugal´s Baroque period can see people’s souls; Jesus struggles with Christianity and his condition of martyrdom; everyone except a woman goes blind—and in delivering it in an almost paragraph-free, compacted and intricate prose, which at first scares the reader but has seduced him by page 20. Lobo Antunes is also a virtuoso of the language but in a different way. His novels tend to be more psychological, less plot-oriented, and offer a sad, though at times tender, portrait of the Portuguese social classes in contemporary Portugal. These two big egos have produced an impressive body of work and almost any of their novels is worth reading.

As far as music goes, Amália Rodrigues (1920-1999) is Portugal’s voice, and rightly so. Admired by everyone within the country and abroad, from Charles Aznavour to David Byrne, her phenomenal singing and personality single-handedly made the Fado popular all over the world, from Japan to New York. Incidentally, this city fascinated her and she spent extended periods of time here. Probably less well known to the reader is Carlos Paredes (1925-2004), a virtuoso of the Portuguese guitar. Paredes was a prodigious melodist and interpreter of his own pieces, and someone who breathed through the instrument with an intensity I have never found in another musician. This extremely modest and decent man has some collaborative pieces with the double bass Jazz player Charlie Haden, but his solo work is by far his best legacy.

Switching to painting, two names come to my mind: Amadeo de Sousa Cardoso (1887-1918) and Helena Vieira da Silva (1908-1992). Sousa Cardoso was a modernist born in the wrong place, who died at the wrong age of 31. From rural Portugal, he headed to Paris when he turned 19 and became a close friend of Modigliani. During his lifetime, his paintings were received with moderate success in Europe and the US, but his work has more recently gained international repute. Like him, Vieira da Silva also went to Paris as a young woman after spending her youth in Lisbon. In a sign of how disturbed our dictator was by talented people, she was refused Portuguese citizenship in 1940 and spent the rest of her long life outside of Portugal. Vieira da Silva became famous for her paintings of complex compositions and fragmented spaces. In recent years the country has somehow made peace with Vieira da Silva by building her a museum in Lisbon. Fortunately for everyone, this international artist is represented in several collections of European and US museums, and her career did not depend on Portugal’s guilt-assuaging actions, which came a little too late.

This brings me to the last of my remarkable countrymen: Aristides Sousa Mendes (1885-1954). Sousa Mendes was a Portuguese diplomat living in Bordeaux when the Second World War began. Portugal remained neutral during the war but our dictator was a supporter of Hitler’s actions. Sousa Mendes put his job at risk when he issued around 30,000 visas to Jews and other persecuted minorities, helping them to escape to Lisbon from where they eventually reached the US. He saved many people but could not save himself from Salazar, who put an end to his career. This Portuguese Oskar Schindler died in poverty in 1954. Israel first, and later democratic Portugal, have honored him posthumously.

Self-deprecating humor can be a sort of preemptive criticism that disarms potential external critics. I guess this applies here. This piece itself is the ultimate example of how unreasonable Portuguese tend to be when analyzing themselves. Part of the nonsense you’ve read reflects my own shortcomings but is ultimately a testament to my nationality. The other limitation is intrinsic to this type of exercise, as we tend to consider as idiosyncratic traits that foreigners could easily claim to be elements of their own culture as well.

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