The roadmap of the initiatives celebrating the Centenary of the birth of José Saramago, Nobel Prize in Literature, under the motto “Universal writer, intellectual of April, communist militant ”, with which the PCP proposed to mark with its own programme and throughout the country, is a long one.
The day has come to celebrate this creator of a vast and unique literary work that was José Saramago, here, in Azinhaga, in this land that saw his birth, that he always loved and never forgot. This land that he took to Stockholm, for that Nobel award ceremony, so significant for him, for Portuguese literature and for the country and in it or within it the hard life of its people, in the person of his closest relatives, who differed very little from the lives of others, from those, and they were the majority, who had very little of their own, only the force of their arms to work. In this Azinhaga, whose land was a lot for a few - for the wealthy rural bourgeoisie of the Agricultural or Manor Houses - is rare and very scarce for most of the people.
This world that he left at the age of 2 to go with his parents to Lisbon and to which he returned, as he said, to “finish being born”. Here he walked, coming and going, until the early years of his teens and completing, then, his coming of age.
Times lived enough, to look at life through the lens of those who see and do not ignore the injustices of a world divided into classes, where he lived, in a humble home that so many times sheltered him, his grandmother Josefa and his grandfather Jerónimo, and that his later condition as a communist militant opened to see better, further and deeper the causes of these injustices and the path and solutions to defeat them.
In fact, nothing human is alien to José Saramago's creative process. A work where the painful, the tragic, the exhilarating, the contradictory, the bright and the dark inhabit, and which José Saramago described with the mastery of our best.
This world that he describes in Small Memories and that, from there and from what life would show him beyond the horizon of his village, project and question in his writing with a sensitive and deeply human look the evils of this world and the great questions of humanity, doing the same, in a different note, in his life as a politically active subject of a collective that, a year before he came into the world, had emerged determined to transform it, with the aim of putting an end to the exploitation of man by man—his long-lasting and ever-lasting Party.
This condition was clearly assumed and never concealed, but it did not mean any link to a non-existent party aesthetic in the conduct of his remarkable and recognised work.
Enough time to recognise in grandfather Jerónimo, the wisest man in the world, not only because he knew how to take care of himself and his small and modest cosmos with the lucidity of knowledge of life, but because it made him dream and build with his stories other real and imagined worlds.
Time lived enough to create this deep and unforgettable relationship with the waters of the Almonda and Tagus [rivers]. Those clear waters of then, where he had bathed and sailed. Those waters that meet and converge here and that the still teenager Saramago would sing in his poem, or rather in his Protopoem about the river, which his village knows is also its own.
Enough time to experience the thorny paths of that time of hard walks and short overnight stays, so that with his Uncle Manuel he could take half a dozen piglets - his great and, perhaps, only treasure - to the Santarém fair.
Enough time to learn lessons about being and living, like that lesson that Aunt Elvira had given him and that would carve him throughout his life. That aunt who, faced with a threatening situation coming from outside that made the young man tremble, taught him to face it head on, telling him “don't you back down,” don't run away. Saramago did not back down, facing the threat and overcoming fear. We will not back down, as we have never backed down in the face of the greatest dangers and blackmail, always fighting and not giving up our greatest fight for a fairer and more humane land.
Courage that has never been lacking, nor will it be lacking, and today it is so necessary to groom and multiply the combatants ready to face the lords of power and wealth, the new inquisitors of the single thought whose aim is to ostracise all those who do not follow them and do not serve them in their action of plundering the people. Courage, too, in the struggle we face for the right to culture, in these dangerous times that we live in, where new censorships are being raised, harassing whoever dares to go against the handbook dictated and imposed by these supposed authorities or who was simply born as people or in a territory that their selfish interests claim and branded with the irons of stigmatisation and hatred.
A worrying situation that has as a background the acute structural crisis of capitalism and the deepening of its exploitative, oppressive, aggressive, predatory, but also reactionary, character.
Courage that is not lacking, nor can it be lacking, to overcome the many and insulting silences and the abusive and insidious caricatures with which they intend to hit those who present themselves, like the PCP, with an alternative to their domination and power.
Yes, courage to face the lords of power and wealth and the dominant political power that serves them. This power that José Saramago clearly identified when he denounced what remains today impressively topical: “someone is not fulfilling his duty. Governments are not fulfilling it, because they do not know, because they cannot, or because they do not want to. Or because those who effectively govern the world do not allow it, the multinational and pluricontinental companies whose power, absolutely undemocratic, has reduced to almost nothing what was still left of the ideal of democracy.” Or when he explained: “Actually, to say today 'socialist government', or 'social democrat', or 'christian democrat', or 'conservative' or 'liberal' and to call it 'power', is like a cosmetic surgery, is to try to name something that is not found where we are led to believe, but in another and unreachable place - that of economic power”.
Whoever looks at our country does not see a different reality. It has not been seen during decades of alternating rotation without an alternative between PSD and PS in a leadership in turn. It is not seen today in the government that calls itself socialist, but actually at the service of the same interests as always – those of big capital.
But enough time also lived by José Saramago to know, by hearsay here, in Azinhaga, and later to establish with his work and study, that seventy or eighty years before the promised distribution of the lands of the Infantado and that were to be meant for the people, were never given to them, they only served to give free rein to the existing latifundia, adding wealth to those who were already rich.
Here, in the flatlands of the Tagus and in the plains of Alentejo, where large estates reign, this enormous mass of territorial wealth, resulting from the suppression of religious orders and other feudal privileges and which would fall into the hands of a handful of opulent men - big capitalists and financiers, turned into large landowners - in exchange for very little.
The writer José Saramago knew where he came from and did not forget it. And if he wanted to be, as he was and confirmed in that solemn and formal act of the Nobel ceremony, the echo of the joint voices of the characters that run through his work, is seen in that epic novel Raised from the Ground and heard in the lands of the Alentejo latifundium.
Those lands populated with the imagined, but so real, Domingos Mau-Tempo, João and António, Gracinda and Amélia Mau-Tempo or the "Canastro" like Segismundo, who knew the comrade on the bicycle well, that man who linked the fighters and the struggle in the novel, but also in life, and Joana or also Manuel Espada, the first known striker from Monte Lavre, who we could find with other and very real names, coming up here, treading on the ground of centuries-old deprivation and humiliation.
This epic novel that tells the struggles, the sufferings, the hunger, the courage of the people of the Alentejo, but that the Ribatejo also experienced, in the face of usury and the murderous violence of the landowners and fascism, sometimes fighting a fight that led to memorable victories, as happened with the historic achievement of the eight-hour work, 60 years ago, or erecting by hand from this ground of plains and dreams, of sun and distance, the most beautiful achievement of April – the Agrarian Reform.
This dream that momentarily became reality with the April Revolution, under the slogan “the land to the tiller.”
In Raised from the Ground, Saramago, besides denouncing the more sinister side of fascism, transports to literature, in a time of struggles for the dignity of rural workers, a writing that is both beautiful and engaging, combative, based on reality and inquisitive.
This struggle for dignity that women and men of Ribatejo from several generations, on this side and on the other side of the river, so often fought and dared to win.
Those who are committed to seeing this heritage of struggle removed from our memory and the history of our people are not only confronted with the determination of this Party not to let it go forgotten, but also with the indestructible desire for justice that springs from Raised from the Ground and the words of José Saramago: “From the ground we know that the crops and trees rise, the animals that run the fields or fly over them rise, men and their hopes rise. A book can also be raised from the ground, like an ear of wheat or wildflower. Or a bird. Or a banner.”
Yes, that banner can be raised, which for us will always be the banner of hope and of the struggle for a better world. This banner that we have always carried generation after generation and continue to carry, keeping it high and waving in the front line of the combats that we continue to fight for the right to have a future for those who work and for an egalitarian and progressive Portugal.
It is with great pleasure that we evoke and celebrate here, in his land, the writer of this vast and unique work of universal value, José Saramago.
A work that, being universal, does not deny national roots, which also seeks inspiration in the best Portuguese Literature produced over time.
A work that projected and honoured Portuguese culture across borders, helping to make our Literature a respected and permanent reference, in the context of universal literary culture.
A work that portrays the country we are and the world we are in, which analyses in a critical and dialectical way, through which pervade the fears and qualities of the human that lives in us, but also the shortcomings, whether this analysis focuses on the historical or the contemporary.
In fact, nothing human is alien to José Saramago's creative process. A work where the painful, the tragic, the exhilarating, the contradictory, the bright and the dark inhabit, and which José Saramago described with the mastery of our best.
This vast work includes titles as diverse as Manual of Painting and Calligraphy that inaugurates Saramago's reflection on our times, Baltazar and Blimunda, that novel in which José Saramago will once again bring to the fictional spotlight, after Raised from the Ground, popular protagonists Baltazar and Blimunda who lived in the midst of a “crowd of thousands and thousands of men with dirty, calloused hands and exhausted bodies will build “years on end, stone upon stone”, the great walls of the monumental work. These protagonists who bring to the centre of the novel “the voice of the people,” their feelings and aspirations, in which the People, despite their fears of the royal powers and the Inquisition, manage to have their own and affirmative voice.
Titles joined by many others, such as The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis which talks about those dark times of the advance of Nazi-fascism, The Stone Raft, the great floating island that is the Iberian Peninsula that detaches towards the South to meet other cultures.
The History of the Siege of Lisbon and that disturbing novel The Cave, in which progressive thinking, justice and the social are exposed with striking evidence. It is in it that he confronts us with the real problems of the so-called digital and robotics technological revolution and the announced “end of labour.” A book about “those who are no longer needed by the world,” those who are subject to the options of the exclusive interests of dominant capitalism, where the very right to work is annulled. A libel against segregation and the transformation of man into a kind of robot, secondary and disposable, being transformed into a “prisoner of the system”, but essentially an intense look at the conscience and freedom of man, of the man who has the courage to say no, not wanting to be transformed into a “prisoner of the system”, who has the courage to leave, to emancipate himself, to leave the cave!
Yes, nothing human is alien to Saramago's creative process, as will be seen in other brilliant titles such as when skeptically describing the usury and abjection that the human also carries in works such as Blindness, or Seeing. Works with which he reaches, through his amazing narrative art, through the humanism of his vision of the world, the highest level of universal literature, as contemporary literary criticism highlights and shows us.
We know how vast the work of José Saramago is and how much is left out of these words of recognition and celebration. How many novels, from Skylight to All the Names, from The Double to The Elephant’s Journey, so many short stories, so much poetry, plays and chronicles of a unique work could have been remembered here.
Here we evoke and celebrate the writer, but also the intellectual and the man who, in life, took sides with his people, in their struggle against fascism and later for the April democracy and in its defence, which was not just political, but wanted to be economic, social and cultural, that is, a democracy in its entirety and entirely at the service of the workers, the people and the development of the country.
The intellectual who wrote literary criticism at Seara Nova, translates works by great names in universal culture. Who directs the Cultural Supplement of Diário de Lisboa and will be Deputy Director of Diário de Notícias. The intellectual who travelled and covered the four corners of the world talking about Portuguese literature and culture, making an invaluable contribution to the affirmation of Portuguese literature and the recognition of Portuguese as an important reference language in world culture.
The intellectual who, at a very young age, began his anti-fascist activity, participating in the activities of Resistance to the dictatorship, having been a supporter and active participant in the candidacy of Norton de Matos and present in many of the activities in the following years.
The committed and attentive intellectual who managed, through words, to rise to the ranks of the people, to share with them the hardships of life and the struggles and, in this affirmative and courageous condition, faced those who desperately tried, in the April Revolution, to return to the sinister past of the dictatorship and assumed himself as a builder of April, serving the workers, the people and the country.
The intellectual and writer who proudly displayed his condition as a communist militant.
We do not forget that day when, on his way back from Stockholm with the Nobel, and effusively, in a room full of comrades and friends, as happy as him and eager to receive him, he said to us: “Today, with the prize, I can say that to win the prize I didn't have to stop being a communist”!
Saramago came to the Party at a time when the general crisis of the fascist regime was deepening. It was already as a communist militant that in the sixties he carried out an intense activity within the framework of the activities of the Democratic Opposition and within the framework of the CDE during the periods of the “electoral” farces of the dictatorship, in 1969 and 73.
After the 25th of April he joins the organisation of writers of the Intellectual Sector of Lisbon and is part of the Leadership of the Arts and Letters Sector and will be in important and diversified actions in the labour and popular movement during the revolutionary process and with an important and dedicated party intervention. We will see him at the Avante! Festival giving its contribution to the valorisation of the cultural dimension that our Festival always entails.
Alongside the continuation of an intense activity of literary creation, he also fought important political and electoral battles, joined the slate of the “Por Lisboa” Coalition, having been elected President of the Municipal Assembly and as a candidate of the CDU, nominated by the PCP, participated in all the elections to the European Parliament between 1987 and 2009.
José Saramago was a writer who came from the working people, whom he loved and to whom he was faithful.
Saramago was that man who, loving his people, loved April, with all that it entailed in terms of dreams, transformation and progressive advancement! This man, who is not just a major writer in Portuguese Literature, but the man who was committed to the exploited, wronged and humiliated of the land, who assumed ethical values and a political ideal that he did not abdicate until the end of his life!
His work is and will always be a source of inspiration for our struggle, which continues to be guided by its values of freedom, democracy, social emancipation, development and national independence and the future of a new, fairer, more solidary and more fraternal society, for a better world.
