By SABRINA SEDLMAYER*
Comments on the present and future of the Portuguese language
1.
It was up to the writer Lídia Jorge to summarize the fundamental points discussed in the bold colloquium “The Portuguese Language: Present and Future”, which took place in December 2004, at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in Lisbon, whose objective was to reflect on the Portuguese language and its forms of teaching. Theoretical analyses, inventories, diagnoses and various testimonies were grouped around six thematic areas that ranged from the indelible presence of the Internet and the emergence of a post-symbolic culture to policies and aesthetic uses of a form of language that has always resisted the pragmatic gesture , communication between speakers.
The writer, who was with us at the XIV Congress of the International Association of Lusitanists in the city of Porto, recovered, at the end of the two days of discussion, some points that are important to this present text, which aims to highlight the presence and relevance of Brazilian partners in this Association, and touch on the complexity of what it means to be a Brazilian researcher linked to a group whose institutional name already carries with it a terminological embarrassment with the idea of Lusophony.
The first point raised by Lídia Jorge would be the existence of languages within the language. A less painful term for enslaved people, defended by Solange Parvaux, would be “languages in Portuguese”. The second, represented by UNESCO, is the recognition of the multiplicity and mobility of languages alongside their cultures, a position contrary to the hegemony of one language over the others.
The third, “that Brazil will play the role of engine for the affirmation of the Portuguese language in the world, through the values of greatness that affects its growing population, and through the place it occupies as an emerging power, eventually, due to the role it may come to play within the framework of the United Nations” (Jorge, 2015, p. 351).
It is known that when this debate took place in Lisbon, Brazilian society, universities and culture had not yet been hit hard by Jair Bolsonaro's genocidal government. There was hope, a significant student and research exchange between Portuguese-speaking countries, as well as an ethical and moral responsibility in reviewing ethnic, linguistic, cultural and gender stereotypes. There was a painful hiatus of four years, permeated by struggle and combat, and today public and free universities are beginning to rebuild themselves. And the XIV Congress of the International Association of Lusitanists was a witness to this effort.
Traditionally taking place in July (school holidays in Brazil and the beginning of summer in Europe), the events open up to diversity. The choice of authors and subjects presented demonstrates mobility and fluidity: Portuguese read Mozambican writers; Angolans read Guinean authors; Italians develop theoretical questions about a Portuguese thinker, Galicians interpret Macauans, Brazilians read Cape Verdeans; Macau people quote verses from poets from São Tomé. And much more.
Of all the congresses of the International Association of Lusitanists that I have participated in, what remains, as a memory, is precisely the power of the diaspora. But a brief check on the list of participants at the next Congress is enough to see how “powdered Latin” (the title of the curious book by colleague Caetano Galindo, released in 2022, anchored in Caetano Veloso's song “Língua”) continues to be disseminated, and how “nothing that happened to the Portuguese language in Europe compares to what happened to it when it set sail” (Galindo, 2022, p.129)
If linguistic spaces and cultural spaces influence each other, the International Association of Lusitanists adopts the task of devising strategies that alleviate this “unthinking colonialism”, as Eduardo Lourenço acutely called it, referring to the gesture of domination and exploitation of other people’s territories, plot that has entangled us since the 15th century. “Lusophony” should necessarily be used with quotation marks, carrying with it all the suspension, quotation and foreignism that this signum citationis implies.
Or rather, when quoting him one must take distance, as Giorgio Agamben warns: “Through quotation marks, whoever writes takes his distances in relation to language: they indicate that a given term is not taken in the meaning that is its own, that its meaning was modified (quoted, called outside its usual field), without, however, being completely excluded from its semantic tradition. You can't or don't want to simply use the old term, but you also don't want to find a new one. The term placed in quotation marks is left suspended in its history, it is heavy – that is, at least in an elementary way, thought”. (Agamben, 2012, p. 99-100).
Associates could propose a new word that does not embrace the Luso-tropicalist vision and the idea of synthesis. But what has been happening in practice, for a long time, is that the International Association of Lusitanists has opened up and moved between different types of knowledge, in a multidisciplinary way, and tried to question the tortuous history of linguistic and cultural violence linked to colonial history that still marks today the lives of Brazilians (and Africans, it is worth adding).
The translation of this ambivalence, despite being described in the form consecrated by Camões, the sonnet, is highlighted in “Patrialíngua”, by the contemporary Brazilian writer Jacyntho Lins Brandão:
My homeland, my language. What language
This is what I have left and doesn't tell me and in
What do I say to silently kill myself without need?
Of a language that I neither have nor have?
If she speaks, speaking is pure struggle
It embarrasses me not to say I speak her.
Mother tongue, nothing! bitch tongue,
Impure, uncultured, stateless: so beautiful.
Wakefulness and insomnia fill me
In every denial, every assertion
That said with kindness, with acrimony,
She is my tongue, my Babylon,
The confusion that sets you adrift:
No homeland. Thus: colonial language.
Hence, we continually (and repeatedly) ask ourselves, guided by Caetano Veloso: what does this language want and what can it do?
2.
Canonical names such as Clarice Lispector, Jorge Amado, Machado de Assis, Guimarães Rosa, are side by side with studies of translation, hip hop and the effects of Covid on schools in southern Brazil in the programming of the XIV Congress of the International Association of Lusitanists. And this “confusion that arises”, as Jacyntho Brandão says in the aforementioned poem, is experienced in every session, at each updated table, on the days when the triennial meeting takes place.
In terms of effective participation of Brazilians in the management of this group, not only in the administrative form, the teacher of many generations must be highlighted: professor Cleonice Berardinelli. Cleô, as I grew up calling her, was vice-president of the International Association of Lusitanists and was present, with wisdom and lucidity, at almost all meetings.
A special session dedicated to her will be one of the most anticipated moments of the July meeting. Gentle soul who departed and who spread Portuguese languages for more than eighty years throughout the world, will be honored by those who were trained by the researcher.
Another important representative, to date the only president of Brazilian origin, is professor Regina Zilbermann, who ended her productive term in Congress on Madeira Island in 2010.
Currently, we are managing the magazine paths, researcher Frederico Fernandes (in the position that was once occupied by Regina Dalcastagnè, who made changes and renewed the periodical, with rigor and creativity in the past management), as well as many other members who help to build the history of this association that was created by a group of scholars of literature and Portuguese language in French territory, still in 1984.
In 2027, we will have the opportunity to host this event in Brazil for the second time in the forty years of existence of the International Association of Lusitanists. UnB (University of Brasília) will host the XV Congress, coordinated by professor Ana Clara Medeiros and all professors in the area of Portuguese Literature in partnership with the powerful research group led by professor Regina Dalcastagnè.
Finally, it is also worth placing, in quotation marks, the designation of “humanism” and “human” as drivers of the academic dissemination of the Portuguese language around the world. Rethink, in depth, the justifications of servitude and domination that Africa and Brazil suffered for more than three hundred years. As the critic Silvina Rodrigues Lopes pertinently invites: it is necessary to undo belongings and “navigate, translate, open to the unknown.” (Lopes, 2021, p.12)
Perhaps it is this crossing-joy that moves Brazilians. They move and travel with their knowledge and with the infinite expressions that the diaspora was able to produce for an intense week of plural meetings. Thinking and speaking in this Babylonian language, which is confusing, but, above all, is capable of creating in the margins, along with infinite narratives that have not yet been told.
*Sabrina Sedlmayer She is a professor at the Faculty of Arts at UFMG and president of the International Association of Lusitanists.
References
AGAMBEN, Giorgio. Prose idea. Translation, preface and notes João Barrento. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2012.
BRANDÃO, Jacyntho Lins. Harsiese. São Paulo: Patuá, 2023.
GALINDO, Caetano W. Powdered Latin: A walk through the formation of our Portuguese. 1 ed. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2022.
JORGE, Lídia. Synthesis. The Portuguese language: present and future. 3 ed. Lisbon: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2015.
LOPES, Silvina. Joy, Crossing. The birth of the world in its passages. Lisbon: Edições Saguão, 2021.
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