(…cont.)

John Joseph and Josie’s story is the single most symbolic element in the novel. Clearly, the grandfather’s obsession with the myth of origin and his identification with the ancestor who supposedly discovered Cape Cod for the Portuguese, is something that predates the summer over which the novel takes place. But what happens at this time is that Josie becomes involved in the story, and ultimately its outcome, as his grandfather tries to take the boy’s mind off the turbulent relationships at home (in particular the spat between his mother and Great Aunt Theophila), while also grooming him to take over the role as guardian of the myth, by identifying Josie with his real or invented ancestor. The act of storytelling is therefore designed to occupy Josie’s mind by taking him on a journey, which is improvised as they go along. Indeed, when they discuss the story, they do so as if they were negotiating a path through physical space (“… we’ll lose our way with this. This won’t get us to the rest of the story. If I can’t show what happened to him, then we lose him” – 159). More than anything, John Joseph’s role in the novel is to win his grandson over in the struggle between what Jackson alludes to as “the social and the extrasocial”. According to this anthropologist, “any social system tends towards stasis, entropy, and death, unless its field of bound energy (…) is periodically reinvigorated by the ‘wild energies’ and fecund powers that are associated with extrasocial space and deep subjectivity” (Jackson, 2002: 29). Storytelling, according to Jackson, is an expression of this wild energy, and stories themselves are like journeys in their capacity to ally physical with emotional movement (30), away from the blind acceptance of authority towards independence (31). The journey which Josie is taken on is a journey of self-knowledge, which is why his grandfather has to make it as relevant as he possibly can to his grandson’s experience, by meshing a hypothetical past with a more known present. Thus, the Carvalho of John Joseph’s story , like Josie, is an orphan. The Flemish landowner on the island of Pico who takes him in is called Van Horten, the same name as the proprietor of the Bluefish Inn. The suggestion that Carvalho was in fact the son of Van Horten and a servant woman, hints at the possibility that Josie, whose father is unknown, might well be the son of the owner of the inn, which in turn might also explain why Josie’s mother wants to work there. Like Josie, the ancestor is swayed between the influence of the Church and his attraction to the sea and his eventual encounter with the various mariners under whom he gains experience of navigation.

   John Joseph’s tale also contains what might otherwise be termed a postmodern re-reading of history, in which the accepted, monolithic truth of establishment history is countered by another type of fiction representing other alternative truths that have either never been acknowledged or have been discarded. Western European historiography, for example, accords Christopher Columbus with the unassailable truth of having ‘discovered’ America in 1492. The same historical convention emphasises the role of Vasco da Gama in completing the first direct maritime voyage between Western Europe and India in 1498. Historians have, however, speculated on the possibility that the Portuguese, operating out of the Azores, which had been discovered and settled ever since the 1420s, visited North America before 1492[i]. What Gaspar does, therefore, is to foreground that tradition. In this sense, Gaspar (or his storytellers), can be seen as “unwriting the nation”, to use Rosemary Marangoly George’s term., by making the Azorean Portuguese the true ‘discoverers’ of New England, several years before Columbus made landfall in Cuba (thinking that he had reached the outer islands of Asia), before Cabot reached Newfoundland, and long before the Pilgrim Fathers began English colonisation in the New World[ii]. But the adventures of Joaquim Carvalho also deconstruct Portuguese history. Both Vasco da Gama and Columbus play cameo roles in the story woven by John Joseph and Josie, the former portrayed as a petty tyrant and exploiter of his crew and officers, very different from the noble figure of courage and discretion paid homage to in Portugal’s national epic. But perhaps most importantly, the rivalry between ‘Picos’ and ‘Lisbons’ dates from that very period, for it becomes apparent that the potential Azorean explorations of the North American continent and the secrets they hold, are betrayed to Columbus and the Spanish by the Church and the Portuguese Crown in the interests of Rome’s religious sanction of the Iberian discoveries and Iberian geo-politics: Portugal agrees to give Spain a free hand in the west in return for Spain’s acceptance of Portuguese discoveries down the African coast and round the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean. The lesson of history is one which John Joseph imparts to his grandson: Joaquim Carvalho was betrayed by precisely that force, the Church, which is adversely ruling Josie, his own mother, and even Great Aunt Theophila. Fittingly, it is Josie himself who works out the climax of his ancestor’s tale, for by that time John Joseph has been lost: Carvalho is tracked across the Atlantic by those who are in the pay of Lisbon, led by the priest who, in a final skirmish, kills him to ensure that neither he nor anyone else will return to Europe with news of a Portuguese discovery in a hemisphere that has been ceded to Spain.

   It is entirely appropriate that Josie should complete the ancestral tale, for it seems to prove the growing awareness that he appears to have achieved. Leaving Pico is, after all, his bildungsroman. Under his grandfather’s guidance, he has learnt about the past and the notion of roots, but he has also gained an insight into the origins of ancient rivalries and resentments that, in a different set of circumstances, have re-emerged in the modern Portuguese community in Gaspar’s corner of New England. But if he has learnt about roots, he has also become aware of change, and above all, of those structures, such as the Church that, in the name of preserving core values, stand in the way of change and freedom of choice. Like many novels of apprenticeship, then, Leaving Pico connects with the past but looks to the future.

         
David Brookshaw was born in London. He is Professor of Luso-Brazilian Studies at Bristol University, UK, with a specialist interest in postcolonial literatures in Portuguese, comparative literature, literature and migration, and literary translation. He is the author, among others, of Race and Color in Brazilian Literature (1986), Paradise Betrayed: Brazilian Literature of the Indian (1989), Perceptions of China in Modern Portuguese Literature (2002), and co-author of The Postcolonial Literature of Lusophone Africa (1995). He has translated a number of books by Mia Couto, including most recently, Sleepwalking Land (2006), and River of Time (2008). He has also compiled an anthology of stories by the Portuguese writer, José Rodrigues Miguéis, who lived for many years in New York City (The Polyhedric Mirror: Tales of American Life), as well as translating stories of immigrant life in North America by the Portuguese/Azorean/New England writer, Onésimo Almeida (Tales from the Tenth Island), both of which were published in 2006.

[i] Debate has centered on whether João Vaz Corte-Real and Álvaro Martins Homem explored the coastline north of Florida in 1474. There has also been speculation that Fernão Dulmo may have reached New England in 1486. All these navigators were based in Terceira (Peres, 1983: 169-1777, 258-261).

[ii] Warrin cites a similar case of a re-writing of history through literature, namely an epic poem by Guilherme Glória (1863-1943), celebrating the ‘discovery’ of California by the sixteenth-century Portuguese mariner, João Rodrigues Cabrilho. Cabrilho is an epic poem, in which the reality of the modern Portuguese immigrant community in California is evoked (Warrin, 1983: 228).