Books
Little Lands
There was a time when land was everything. Or almost. Today, it seems to be worth little, almost nothing. Many Portuguese people have ties to their ‘terrinha’, a rural home where land was livelihood.
They’ve moved away, are pursuing different lives, but return regularly, for brief visits that nourish their memories but do little to fertilise their roots. The next generations, those who never lived in the ‘terrinhas’ of their ancestors, know these places only superficially.
The novel centres on a woman of this younger generation, someone who appears entirely of the city. Her story illuminates the conflict between the urban and rural worlds. Potatoes, specifically the ‘family potatoes’ her parents bring back every year from their childhood village, become the means through which the protagonist confronts the distance between what she sees as her own world and that of her family.
The village of Arrô belongs for her in an archive of the past, until an unexpected inheritance challenges her views of her parents, who she’s always seen as a microcosm of the village and its ways; her grandmother, almost a stranger; and the grandfather who ‘died before his time’ and who she never met. She discovers that just few square metres of land can change everything.
«Whether I like it or not, whenever I sift through my earliest memories, I always dig up potatoes. I’ve always had an intimate connection with potatoes. In the house I grew up in, I was under the impression they even had rights.»
“Jury of the Agustina Bessa-Luís Revelation Literary Award
«We can be inside a memory and not even realise it. We never know at the time what it is that’s going to go down in our history.»
«Memories of her parents, with their almost religious pilgrimages to their ancestral land to bring back potatoes, invade the narrator’s imagination and also her kitchen, providing the ironic, often comic lens through which she evaluates her childhood and confronts the trials and tribulations of adulthood. The joy and tenderness with which this novel explores life and death, along with its poised and fluid prose, give it an undeniable literary scope that demands appreciation and attention.»
«Little Lands, by Catarina Gomes, is a novel in a minor and safe tone. An auspicious debut.”
Mário Santos, Público newspaper
«City and countryside are not, here, the binomial arranged by Eça de Queirós in “A Cidade e as Serras”, but rather the psychological, social and cultural places that sometimes profoundly clash and other times overlap, whether through the memories brought, or by the roots where you stumble even if you want to ignore them.”
Sara Figueiredo Costa, Ponto Final
«With the book’s protagonist, an interior designer, he shares Catarina Gomes’ fictional writing, fluid, well-designed and of a markedly sober quality, constructive care and reflective capacity.»
Teresa Carvalho, I newspaper
The Stuff of Madness: left in the asylum
A box of forgotten personal objects in the Miguel Bombarda Psychiatric Hospital provides the clues to rescue from oblivion the lives of patients who were confined there for decades. Coisas de Loucos grew out of the accidental discovery of a box of objects that once belonged to patients at Portugal’s first psychiatric hospital. Catarina Gomes sets out to find the ‘lunatics’ to whom the abandoned objects once belonged. All born between the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, they’d been admitted to an asylum where neither psychotropic drugs nor occupational therapy were on offer: the only ‘treatment’ they received was isolation. Before they were locked away, though, these people had families, romantic lives, jobs, plans for the future. It is these forgotten stories that Catarina Gomes sets out to tell.
«I’d accidentally discovered a time capsule. I’d gone there to look for stories of exceptional madness, and had instead been compelled by the utterly ordinary. The objects in the box reminded me that most people who suffer from mental illness are neither artists nor criminals, neither brilliant nor dangerous. They’re like all of us. They are all of us.
These were objects anyone might carry with them, the same ones I had in my handbag: a bunch of keys, a pen, a pencil, a pair of glasses, a wallet, pieces of paper with notes scribbled on them, an ID card… What might someone conclude about me if they found these things of mine in a box in the attic of a psychiatric hospital?»
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, from the foreword to the book
«Catarina Gomes never imposes herself on the people she writes about; she takes her time, approaches her topics with a fresh eye and no preconceptions. The ‘lunatics’ in her book do not appear as ghosts or blurred images glimpsed in a daguerreotype, but people of flesh and blood. Gomes explores their worlds without condescension: she writes not like someone undertaking an investigation into others from a position of safety and sanity, but someone making their way down a steep staircase, aware that she could slip at any time. I read Coisas de Loucos as if I were reading a novel, one full of mystery and intrigue, about living people, my brothers and sisters, lost in time.»
«The stories of Miguel Bombarda hospital users and the professionals who looked after them, told by Catarina Gomes with remarkable depth.»
João Pedro Vala, Observador newspaper
«Catarina Gomes is an expert at erasing stories in order to bring to life the objects she has found through the stories of their owners. (…) Catarina Gomes’ book brings us closer to these people and their lives and humanises them with all the dignity they deserve and lacked in life.»
Gonçalo Mira, Público newspaper
BUY: TINTA DA CHINA | WOOK| BERTRAND| FNAC
Furriel is not a surname
People sometimes referred to Fernando Furriel as ‘resto de tuga’ [Portuguese offcast]. He had no idea why until he discovered he was the son of a Portuguese man who’d come to fight in Guinea-Bissau. He embarked on a search for his father, using the surname his mother had given him, which he assumed came from his father. He discovered Furriel was not in fact a surname, just a military rank. Fernando did not give up.
Óscar was often beaten up by his stepfather for being light-skinned. At 40 years of age, the twins Celestina and Celestino still keep a faded photograph of a young soldier who doesn’t want to know who they are.
Catarina Gomes travelled to Africa to explore one of the Portuguese military’s biggest taboos: the children of war, left behind in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau at the end of the colonial wars. They grew up condemned not to know their fathers, and to be seen by those around them as the progeny of the enemy. Not only did the military close ranks to distance itself from them; the Portuguese state also declined to recognise the extent of the situation or to accord them any rights. Many of these children have been searching for the lost parts of their identities for years. This is the first time their story has been told.
«It was some time before Fernando Hedgar da Silva grasped the significance of his skin-tone: he thought it normal for some children of a black mother and a black father to be lighter in colour than their parents. His own two boys, Artur and José Evaristo, had, from a young age, asked him why one of them was lighter than the other. He’d plucked an answer from the air, saying, ‘You, Artur, are lighter because you were born with the sun; you, José Evaristo, are darker because you were born at night.’ That had kept the boys quiet for a while. Fernando had never asked his own parents any such questions. One day he knew he’d have to tell his children the story of how he finally discovered the secret of his own light skin; ‘an explanation’, he said, ‘that’s a little less magical.»
«This book demands to be read: it draws us in, despite its painful subject matter, through the power of Catarina Gomes’s writing and the dignity with which she approaches her themes. The stories she tells are full of history, of sweeping and changing winds, and she guides us through them with her journalist’s instinct for context. Alongside the pain, there is luminosity, never more so than in the pages that tell the story of António and Esperança, of the eastern Angola savanna.»
FERREIRA FERNANDES, DIÁRIO DE NOTÍCIAS NEWSPAPER
A finger smudged with ink: Stories of people who never learned to read
What’s it like to live in a village where many of the inhabitants never learned to read or write? When Conceição receives an unexpected letter, she has to ‘go to Beatriz’, a woman who has the skill of deciphering the code of the abc. When he goes on his rounds in the village of Casteleiro, Rui, the postman, must remember his ink pad, for those who can only ‘sign’ using their right index finger. Thinking back to their childhoods, people here refer to what happened ‘over at the school’, even if the school was close to their homes: their sense of separation from that institution is not measured in the number of physical steps they had to take to get there.
«I follow the slow movements of his hand. Sometimes there’s a slight tremor. The pencil stump, held loosely in his right hand, seems like a foreign body. It takes a while before Horácio starts to write, a while longer for each letter to take shape on the blank page. He says, ‘I used to do it like this. I used to do my name really well.’ Then he contradicts himself: ‘It didn’t look very good.’
An ‘H’ finally appears on the paper, and Horácio moves on to the remaining letters of his first name: ‘First is an ‘h’, which you don’t hear, you hear the ‘o’ first. I always knew I had an ‘o’ here, I learned that at school; then I made an ‘r’, like this; then an ‘a’, and it had an accent on it; then a ‘c’, then an ‘i’, and then I did another ‘o’. Made, had, did. These are letters plucked from the past.»
Were you scared, Dad?
Can a child have memories of a war they didn’t live through? Long after the end of the Portuguese colonial wars (1961-1974), the memory of conflict remained alive in many homes. For the children of soldiers, the wars they’d known about since they were small existed in photo albums, where their fathers appeared in uniform, smiling, almost as if they’d gone on holiday; in fragments of stories; in the spaces and silences that their childhood questions and imaginations attempted to fill.
«Those who have children have fears that tend to appear, fear that they will get sick, that they will be run over. Alexandra is above all afraid that her children won’t understand her, her daily mission is that they never think their mother is inexplicable. Just like your father was for so long.”