An empire of affection
A 34-year-old Portuguese designer has decided to leave the comforts of
his home in Lisbon and travel the world for five years. Everywhere he
sees things that captivate his imagination and he stops to draw, filling
notebooks with landscapes and portraits.
After two years of wandering, Luís Simões is stopping for a while in Hong Kong, where the quality of his artworks doesn’t go unnoticed. South China Morning Post did a story on his World Sketching Tour project (www.worldsketchingtour.com) and consequently he was offered a part-time job as an illustrator.
Simões has also visited Macau and spent time here drawing. Interviewed by Ponto Final, he beautifully described details of the worldwide journey. The story I particularly liked happened in Russia, where he was drawing in a back alleyway. An old lady passed by and suggested that he could draw the city’s churches instead. He replied that he had chosen the alley, where a timeworn Russian car stood, because that place ‘told’ him a story. The woman invited the artist to taste the soup she was cooking in her nearby house. After the lunch, she showed him a poster, upon which she portrayed aspects of her youth. But something was missing there. She hadn’t been able to draw a statue that she kept in her home and asked Luís if he could fill the empty space in the poster. Whilst he drew the statue, the woman started crying and told him: “Finally, I have got this done.” “She felt that the circle of all the things she needed to have in the poster was closed,” he commented. It was a moving moment.
The Portuguese that I most admire are like Luís Simões – adventurers and generous people - and history provides us with numerous examples of that kind. One of them is Jorge Álvares, a Portuguese explorer, who is believed to have arrived at the Pearl River Delta 500 years ago, and whose statue we can see in front of the Old Court building.
Despite the fact that Álvares was essential to the beginning of the relations between China and the West, no official ceremonies were held in Macau to mark the occasion until now. In December, around 40 residents gathered in front of the statue, holding a symbolic ceremony and stressing the importance of the sailor to Macau. It is sad to see the 500 years of the Portuguese presence in China marked only with this extremely simple ceremony, when we are permanently confronted with an official discourse that stresses the strategic relevance of Macau to the friendship between China and the Portuguese-speaking countries.
Making it clear that I’m not a chauvinist (I believe that no country is intrinsically better than another), the official coldness toward the 500th anniversary of the Portuguese arrival here puzzles me. Macau wouldn’t be more than a small Chinese city if that arrival hadn’t taken place, and if the Portuguese and other Westerners hadn’t been generously allowed to stay over the centuries.
I also disagree with the view of a certain Portuguese “intelligentsia” that devalues the feats of the Portuguese discoveries. Journalist and writer Alexandra Lucas Coelho recently dubbed the Portuguese “empire” as something “ridiculous.” I understand that all empires can be seen as vain, but it just so happens that Portugal never had an “empire” in the organized and methodical sense of the word. To exemplify what I’m trying to say, allow me to cite a letter from the Dutch governor of Batavia (nowadays Jakarta) written to his superiors in Holland: “One hundred years have passed since we expelled the Portuguese. If you think that we finished them through the strength of guns and ships, systematically destroying their fortresses, churches, monuments and pursuing the Catholic faith they brought, you are mistaken, because they are present everywhere through the language and culture they spread. We should change our system. We came here to make money and leave as soon as possible, they came also to make money but also to stay and at a certain stage they were not part of Europe anymore, they belonged to these lands.”
Huge mistakes have obviously been made by all the colonial potencies (slavery and racial segregation are the worst), but I have traveled to places where the Portuguese settled since the discoveries – like Salvador da Baía, Goa, Malacca, and Angola – and what I saw is a deep affection toward the Portuguese culture. In Angola, where the Portuguese were involved in a bitter and stupid war during the 1960s and early ‘70s, people said that they were only fighting “a system.” Nowadays, Angolans watch the Portuguese TV channels and cheer when Lisbon football teams grab a title. A taxi driver in Luanda commented on the trend of Portuguese and Brazilian people returning to Luanda: “It’s very good; they will help to develop the country. We are all brothers and cousins.” Let me be idealistic: If there was ever an empire made by Portuguese like Luís Simões, it was an empire of affection.
(By PB, published in MDT)
After two years of wandering, Luís Simões is stopping for a while in Hong Kong, where the quality of his artworks doesn’t go unnoticed. South China Morning Post did a story on his World Sketching Tour project (www.worldsketchingtour.com) and consequently he was offered a part-time job as an illustrator.
Simões has also visited Macau and spent time here drawing. Interviewed by Ponto Final, he beautifully described details of the worldwide journey. The story I particularly liked happened in Russia, where he was drawing in a back alleyway. An old lady passed by and suggested that he could draw the city’s churches instead. He replied that he had chosen the alley, where a timeworn Russian car stood, because that place ‘told’ him a story. The woman invited the artist to taste the soup she was cooking in her nearby house. After the lunch, she showed him a poster, upon which she portrayed aspects of her youth. But something was missing there. She hadn’t been able to draw a statue that she kept in her home and asked Luís if he could fill the empty space in the poster. Whilst he drew the statue, the woman started crying and told him: “Finally, I have got this done.” “She felt that the circle of all the things she needed to have in the poster was closed,” he commented. It was a moving moment.
The Portuguese that I most admire are like Luís Simões – adventurers and generous people - and history provides us with numerous examples of that kind. One of them is Jorge Álvares, a Portuguese explorer, who is believed to have arrived at the Pearl River Delta 500 years ago, and whose statue we can see in front of the Old Court building.
Despite the fact that Álvares was essential to the beginning of the relations between China and the West, no official ceremonies were held in Macau to mark the occasion until now. In December, around 40 residents gathered in front of the statue, holding a symbolic ceremony and stressing the importance of the sailor to Macau. It is sad to see the 500 years of the Portuguese presence in China marked only with this extremely simple ceremony, when we are permanently confronted with an official discourse that stresses the strategic relevance of Macau to the friendship between China and the Portuguese-speaking countries.
Making it clear that I’m not a chauvinist (I believe that no country is intrinsically better than another), the official coldness toward the 500th anniversary of the Portuguese arrival here puzzles me. Macau wouldn’t be more than a small Chinese city if that arrival hadn’t taken place, and if the Portuguese and other Westerners hadn’t been generously allowed to stay over the centuries.
I also disagree with the view of a certain Portuguese “intelligentsia” that devalues the feats of the Portuguese discoveries. Journalist and writer Alexandra Lucas Coelho recently dubbed the Portuguese “empire” as something “ridiculous.” I understand that all empires can be seen as vain, but it just so happens that Portugal never had an “empire” in the organized and methodical sense of the word. To exemplify what I’m trying to say, allow me to cite a letter from the Dutch governor of Batavia (nowadays Jakarta) written to his superiors in Holland: “One hundred years have passed since we expelled the Portuguese. If you think that we finished them through the strength of guns and ships, systematically destroying their fortresses, churches, monuments and pursuing the Catholic faith they brought, you are mistaken, because they are present everywhere through the language and culture they spread. We should change our system. We came here to make money and leave as soon as possible, they came also to make money but also to stay and at a certain stage they were not part of Europe anymore, they belonged to these lands.”
Huge mistakes have obviously been made by all the colonial potencies (slavery and racial segregation are the worst), but I have traveled to places where the Portuguese settled since the discoveries – like Salvador da Baía, Goa, Malacca, and Angola – and what I saw is a deep affection toward the Portuguese culture. In Angola, where the Portuguese were involved in a bitter and stupid war during the 1960s and early ‘70s, people said that they were only fighting “a system.” Nowadays, Angolans watch the Portuguese TV channels and cheer when Lisbon football teams grab a title. A taxi driver in Luanda commented on the trend of Portuguese and Brazilian people returning to Luanda: “It’s very good; they will help to develop the country. We are all brothers and cousins.” Let me be idealistic: If there was ever an empire made by Portuguese like Luís Simões, it was an empire of affection.
(By PB, published in MDT)
Etiquetas: Crónica
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