March 12, 2006
The Streets of Lisbon
Whenever I can, I go in the Gulbenkian's Modern Art Center and just stand there looking at this.
Anna Hatherly, The Streets of Lisbon 1977
I always get a bit emotional looking at this collage. When I was a child, the walls of the streets of Lisbon were covered by political propaganda. Beautiful murals, walls crammed with posters glued one on top of another.This reminds me of my childhood and of a brand new country, born out of a revolution. It reminds me when the future was open and everything seemed possible. It reminds me of a people who were once euphoric because they felt they were finally free. Of how lucky I am for not being born under a dictatorship but, instead, being born on one of the happiest moments of a nation. A moment when, as the slogan stated, "poetry is in the streets".
And I'm not making any judgements about the political choices made back then. These are emotional memories which I have chosen not to critically review. I am just grateful to be born into a time where ideals were taken seriously, whatever form they took. I felt that I was born into a prison whose doors were opened. Everyone was running wild. Music and poetry everywhere. Old people were being alphabetized. Women could vote. There were never ending lines of people to see movies that had been censored before.
I particularly remember how children's day was a big event. How April was a synonym of freedom. How a red carnation was really more than just a flower. How there was this wave of solidarity towards countries under dictatorships or going though wars. Especially Chile - which may explain why I have this hate for Pinochet; Neruda's poems were finally read out loud. How my parents would tell me that, just a couple years ago, the books that sat on our shelves would be reason enough for them to go to jail. How my mother remembered that, as a child, the whole family secretly and silently gathered round the radio set and my grandfather would tune the BBC - the only way to know what was really happening in the world as the news outlets were controlled by the government. How my father remembered that the family of his best childhood friend vanished one night, how he got to their house in the morning and there was broken furniture everywhere - the police had taken them all for opposing the regime. How some of their friends were killed on a stupid war in Africa which was the last pathetic attempt to maintain the colonies of that moribund Portuguese Empire. How my father discovered that he was under surveillance by the regime's police and how he would probably have been - if not worse - interrogated if there hadn't been a coup.
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Ok. Historical context ahead (have to keep in mind that 2/3 of my visitors are not Portuguese):
More on the Carnation Revolution on the Wikipedia.
More on the regime's police - PIDE - here.
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25 DE ABRIL
Esta é a madrugada que eu esperava
O dia inicial inteiro e limpo
Onde emergimos da noite e do silêncio
E livres habitamos a substância do tempo
April, 25th
This is the dawn that I longed for
The first day whole and clean
when we emerge from the night and from the silence
and free we inhabit the substance of time
Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen
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Assorted stickers; obscure little parties that were mushrooming everywhere; the newly born unions;new cultural centers; the agrarian reform and so on, and so on.
Posted by claudia