Someone else's glories

As he wanders the streets of Porto one night, the hero of Ilse Losa’s novel thinks about the relationship between a foreigner and the buildings that they find themselves amongst. He thinks about how buildings link people to history. And he thinks about the struggles and the glories that a nation waves about like banners: the foreigner may ... like them, find them curious, but the foreigner is not moved or proud.

When it’s your own country reciting its struggles and glories, you feel moved, or you feel riled. The public statues to villain-heroes, the songs about the fight for decent working conditions, the noise made about some wars, the silence around others. It’s like family – every discussion has been worked through before. It takes persistence to shift the well-worn patterns, to find new responses to the old arguments.

 

But when the glories held up before you are those of another country, their power fades away. For the foreigner, the immigrant, these glories are not the re-apparition of things heard repeatedly since childhood. For the foreigner, the host nation’s stories can seem flimsy and contingent, like ghosts when the light is turned back on.

 

Losa's hero muses that the foreigner may, at most admire the glories of the host country, or find them curious. Watching a nation trying to hold itself together is certainly curious: the struggles which are venerated and those which are forgotten. Being among it and not quite part of it lends the foreigner an analytic power.

 

We have been part of two immigrant communities in Portugal. Both Anglophone. Both fairly welcoming to other immigrants arriving. And both composed mostly of people who found the opportunity or the wealth to move. They liked Portugal so much they settled here. 

 

These elective migrants like the place but also keep their distance. Language is the most obvious sign of this: many live here without learning much Portuguese. Another sign is schooling. When we lived in the hilly central part of Portugal we knew people whose children went to an alternative school where play and child-led exploration was a key part of learning. 

 

The school’s response to the national holiday on the 1st December was noticeable. This holiday commemorates the break-up of the Iberian Union in 1640. In some constructions of the national narrative, it’s a crucial date. On the day it seemed to us that every shop and public building was shut and every village was hanging out its bunting. The alternative school carried on as normal. I asked a parent why – they shrugged. 

 

This indifference to, or separateness from, national events is not just down to language skills or disposition. It’s structural. Many of the Anglophone immigrants we've met don’t rely on Portugal. They don’t need the country for their income. They work online or they have a pension or they sold a house in the south of England. When your income is independent of the national economy, then the urgency of debates around the minimum wage, the unemployment rate, all this recedes and blurs like the sound of a surf on a sunlit beach.