From Clyro to Porto: what a Portuguese poet taught us about living as 'foreigners'
Emma Balch reflects on the personas of the Portuguese writer Fernando de Pessoa and the complexities of living as a foreigner
By Emma Balch
Six years ago, my two sons, then aged nine and eight years old, landed at Porto airport. It was well past midnight, the flight having been delayed due to a wild electric storm. The following morning, at 8am, they were standing outside a tall, narrow building on Praça Carlos Alberto, with other children and parents, waiting for their first day at a new school. Their only Portuguese was a handful of words and phrases picked up via DuoLingo over the summer.
Until then they had been happily installed in Clyro Church in Wales Primary, a small, family-feel village school near Powys’ border with Herefordshire. They had a smattering of Welsh. Weekends were for making dens in the Tump, lazy messing about in the Wye, stomping on the Begwyns and walking up Hay Bluff. But Brexit was looming, and we wanted them to have an experience of life in continental Europe before the border closed down. We could work anywhere, Portugal was fairly unknown to us – so we thought we’d head off on an adventure for six months.
The school in Porto was small and shabby. My sons had to learn the language quickly. In the classroom, piecing it together, those first days were tough, but they got on with it. The weeks passed, their Portuguese developed. It was only for six months, they’d be back with their pals in Clyro soon. Then Easter came around and it seemed silly not to complete the year… then their Portuguese was becoming fluent, so we decided on another year, and… well, here we are – six years on. My eldest is three years off finishing school, so it makes sense to stay.
Both boys were born in Argentina, so their country of birth is even further away. They belong in different places, some where we’ve been for a while, some where we’ve put down roots, and they feel a ‘home’ of sorts. Are they Argentine? Welsh? English? Portuguese? Or all and none? It’s a familiar and not unsettling state to be. My grandmother’s parents were Armenian and Greek who lived in Eastern Turkey. My grandmother was born a refugee baby in Aleppo, but grew up in Lebanon, with stints in Cyprus, England, and Syria. From 1945 she lived in England. Perhaps this is why I feel relaxed about raising sons who don’t identify strongly with any one place. Perhaps, too, why I was drawn to the Portuguese writer, Fernando Pessoa.
Around the corner from the little school in Porto is a bookshop, Livraria Poetria. It specialises in poetry and drama and has a few shelves of books in English. I picked up an anthology of Portuguese Poets, and found that several of the greatest Portuguese poets were versions of the same poet: Fernando Pessoa. He created many personas, pessoas, and wrote under these names. Some he developed, giving them detailed biographical profiles, backstories and opinions. These ‘heteronyms’ live on after his death. The names of Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Alvaro de Campos are familiar in the canon of Portuguese modern literature. José Saramago, another of the country’s literary giants, even wrote a novel about one of Pessoa’s pessoas, The Death of Ricardo Reis.
Where did this invention come from? How was Pessoa so at ease in these different, fully formed identities? Each one an incomplete version of himself, yet together making up Fernando Pessoa as a whole. The answer is his own experience as a young boy of being displaced from his homeland.
His widowed mother remarried and they moved to South Africa, where the young Pessoa would spend his formative years. A child, in a foreign land, with a new language and culture to absorb and adapt to. It was there that he began writing, in English. Then they returned to Lisbon, a place no longer his own, where he began creating.
Ricardo Reis:
Then take it from an exile. From someone who has lived beyond the country of his birth. It changes you. To live as a foreigner. To look upon landscapes not your own.
To know the light of other latitudes. And at such a young age! … a boy abroad, becoming a man beyond his home.*
I learned about Fernando Pessoa as I observed my own sons living as foreigners here in Porto. It felt like Pessoa’s story was one for these times, when identity is being interrogated and challenged. Who are we, and why are we who we are? Do we create our identities or are they given to us? Where can we belong? Do we get to choose? Pessoa was writing ahead of his time, yet, restricted by norms of the day, he explored his identity through his pen and inventions.
Wanting to explore and share Fernando Pessoa – his writings and his story – with a wider audience, I pitched a one-hour drama to BBC Radio 3 and was thrilled that they commissioned it. The script has been written by Owen Sheers. It was produced and recorded here in Porto, directed by John Retallack, with sound design by Jon Nicholls. It will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in December 2023.
Brexit has closed the doors to other families like ours. It is now far less possible to freely and easily spend six months, a year or more in other European countries. Thanks to the timing of our arrival, we now have permanent residency in Portugal, and the right to apply for citizenships, then passports, which we will do. Our eldest son is hoping to go to university in the Netherlands. To him, the borders of nations and their cultural identities are not something that intimidates him. A boy abroad, becoming a man beyond his home.
If I had known we would stay six years, perhaps a decade, here in Porto, would I have made the move we did? I can’t say. It is not always easy, living in exile, but where we are is who we are. To live as a foreigner, to look upon landscapes not your own, it changes you.
Emma Balch is the producer of All I Was When I Wasn’t Anyone for The Story of Books. It was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in December 2023 and is available to listen again here. The extract from All I Was When I Wasn’t Anyone is by Owen Sheers.