Fado and Portuguese identity

With articles by Brazilian and Portuguese researchers, a new book shows how the genre makes it possible for thousands of immigrants throughout the diaspora to see themselves as Portuguese.

By José Tadeu Arantes

Agência FAPESP – In a world where millions of people live outside of their countries of origin, music is a powerful identity factor that helps to recover lost identities and build new ones. This is especially true for a genre of music that can be called the song of exile, emigration, nomadism, or the diaspora.

In the last few decades, fado has allowed thousands of immigrants to see themselves as Portuguese and has allowed their children and grandchildren, born outside of Portugal, to recover some of their lost roots. Residents of the countries where they settled, many without Portuguese connections, end up identifying with this genre of music, which the United Nations Education, Science, and Culture Organization (UNESCO) called an “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity” in 2011.

Recently published with FAPESP funding, the book, Trago o fado nos sentidos, is a way of entering the world of the admirers and followers of this music, which is charged with reminiscence and nostalgia.

Heloísa de Araújo Duarte Valente, lecturer at the Post-graduate Music Program at Universidade de São Paulo (USP) and full professor at Universidade Paulista’s Post-graduate Program in Communication and Media Culture, organized the book. It is a collection of articles from several researchers and is the product of an international exchange between the Music and Media Studies Center (MusiMid), linked to the USP’s Graduate Program at School of Communication and Arts (ECA), and the Institute of Ethnomusicology – Center of Music and Dance Studies (Inet-MD) at the Aveiro University Hub in Portugal.

In the book’s preface, Martha Tupinambá de Ulhôa, full professor at Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (Unirio) and a member of the Board of Directors at Carlos Chagas Filho Research Foundation (Faperj), emphasizes fado’s role in creating identity.

“Fado was the link that allowed thousands of Portuguese immigrants in Brazil to see themselves as Portuguese and not as farmers or fishermen from isolated, rural areas. In Portugal, the majority of these people were unfamiliar with fado; it was only after arriving in Brazil and having access to radio programs dedicated to the overseas musical genre that they rediscovered Portugal as their nation and sang and felt a nostalgic longing,” she wrote.

Born or reborn in the Lisbon neighborhoods of Mouraria and Alfama, which were then the haunts of criminals and prostitutes, fado was initially stigmatized by the conservative intellectual classes, notes Universidade de Aveiro researcher Maria do Rosário Pestana in the chapter she authored (“O fado: destinos e oportunidades do ‘ser’ português” – Fado: the destinies and opportunities of being Portuguese).
 
For this segment of high society, which intended to regenerate the Portuguese nation, fado represented the opposite of its ideal. Its musical paradigm was folklore songs of rural origins with sunny celebrations of work or religion. Dark, sentimental, melancholy, and associated with the “lazy and unruly” life, fado represented the opposite.

The media fought in the trenches of this battle between conservative intellectuality and fado. However, the emergence of new media – albums, radio, and cinema – completely changed this scenario. The defenders of the genre perceived that the anticonventional, sometimes ironic, and critical nature of fado established a direct line of communication with the audience. They bet on the genre, which rapidly spread in the country and with emigration.

“A Severa”, the first talkie movie in Portuguese produced by Leitão de Barros in 1931 and based on the eponymous novella of Júlio Dantas, exalted the figure of the first known fado singer, prostitute Maria Severa Onofriana (1820-1846), who died of tuberculosis at just 26.

Her romantic involvement with Dom Francisco de Paula Portugal e Castro, Count Vimioso, was, to a certain degree, a revision of the famous prohibited romance between Dona Inês de Castro (who died in 1355) and the heir to the Portuguese crown, the future king Dom Pedro I of Portugal – a romance celebrated by Camões in Os Lusíadas. In the hearts of her listeners, young Severa took on an aura of sainthood. Fado, which was also consecrated, was able to switch from suspect venues to family homes.

“Pain in the soul”

The height of fado came through two main actors:  Alfredo Marceneiro (Alfredo Rodrigo Duarte, 1891-1982) and Amália Rodrigues (1920-1999), epigones of fado castiço (proper fado) and fado canção (fado song), respectively. Amália Rodrigues, nicknamed the “the highest expression of fado” during a Brazilian tour, recorded her first album in 1945.

The resulting saga is intertwined with the history of Portuguese immigration in Brazil, recalls Heloísa de Araújo Duarte Valente. It was also in Rio de Janeiro that Portuguese composer Frederico Valério (1913-1982) wrote one of the most famous fados of all time for Amália, “Ai Mouraria” (I’d live there).
 
“Portuguese immigrants came largely from the North, from rural and less developed areas of Portugal. What they really liked was simple music from the village, old ballads, square dancing songs. But here, they incorporated fado as an identity factor because it had become synonymous with ‘Portuguese music,’” said Valente.

“For many Portuguese residents in Brazil, there is an emotional longing oftentimes due to distance from their native land, where historical roots run deep. This explains the need to remember their origins, the village left on the other side of the Atlantic, and eventually to adopt the Lisbonian genre with the same emotional attachment to music typical of their place of origin,” she added.

The researcher agrees that fado has occupied a space in the immigrant’s imagination for a purely circumstantial reason: it was the popular musical genre. If there were another genre, it would have played the same role because a cohesive, equalizing cultural element was necessary.

However, there is also another, much deeper reason, which is the largely sentimental, melancholic, and nostalgic nature of fado. This “pained soul” fits the feelings of people who are outside of their context of origin. Not all fados are sad; there are also happy fados. However, few genres sing about longing as well as fado does.

Historian Heloisa Helena de Jesus Paulo of Universidade de Coimbra wrote, “Portugal is one of the biggest people exporters.” Geographer Jorge Carvalho Arroteia, Universidade de Aveiro, calculated the amount of this “exportation” at more than 2 million people from 1900 to 1975, the year when Portugal’s African colonies received emancipation. The figure corresponds to 20% of Portugal’s total population. If the numbers from previous centuries are added, the Portuguese in diaspora more than doubles.

The majority of this emigration was concentrated in Brazil. However, significant Portuguese communities were also established in the United States, Venezuela, Canada, South Africa, and, most recently, in France, Switzerland, and Germany.

Before the impact of separation and departure, music played an important role in the construction or reconstruction of individuals and society, stresses Maria do Rosário Pestana in the book. “One finds that there are still mechanisms that function as substitutes for real shared experiences. Music can be a conduit for updated memories as well as feelings of belonging and connection, even for those whose trajectories and lineage do not have these specific memories. In fact, Luso descendants and non-Portuguese citizens can live through the music of an imagined Portugueseness,” wrote the researcher.

Trago o fado nos sentidos
Organized by: Heloísa de Araújo Duarte Valente
Release: 2013
Price: R$ 35
Pages: 248

More information: letraevoz.webstorelw.com.br/products/trago-o-fado-nos-sentidos-heloisa-de-araujo-d-valente-org-dot.