Emanuel Melo torontonian azorean writer

When I was a little boy, around the age of six or seven, I would spend quiet Sunday afternoons lying in bed with my grandfather, reading.

I can still see the Louis XV style bedroom set in our house in Ponta Delgada, the dark ornate wood against the stark white walls, and me under crisp ironed white sheets, resting on cozy pillows, all embroidered with lace made by my grandmother.

My grandfather sat up in bed, under the sheets, too. We did not talk nor acknowledge one another. Instead, we read quietly to ourselves. I browsed through my comics and story books. My grandfather read the newspaper and the Imitation of Christ.

My maternal grandfather was a blacksmith by profession and his fingers were permanently blackened. I remember once, my mother asking me to show him my caderno, my school assignment book, and I panicked at the thought that he would leave a stain on the pages. Memory tells me that I guarded the book zealously against his touch, despite my mother’s anger. To this day, I have the habit of wanting my book pages to remain pristine and new.

I have a few of my grandfather’s prayer books. They are worn and brittle with age and were used by him until his death. The pages are smudged on the bottom right hand side with deep black thumb prints, a testament to his assiduous reading and prayer.

One day, in the 1940s, during the visit of Our Lady of Fatima to the island, he experienced a miracle as the statue was carried by our house and he prayed for healing. My grandfather had been suffering from a deep wound in his chest that refused to heal, despite constant treatment.

The next day, he went for his daily cleansing of the wound at the doctor’s office. But the doctor was surprised when he saw clear fluid where just the day before pus had filled the wound. “Mestre Duarte,” he said, “How is this possible?” and upon my grandfather telling him how he prayed while the statue of the Virgin passed by his house, his good Jewish doctor replied, “Go and thank your Lady of Fatima. She has cured you.”

My grandfather’s case was documented as an authentic miracle, made the more credible because it was pronounced by a doctor of another faith.

I did not know this story about my grandfather during those quiet Sunday afternoons when we sat in bed, side by side with our books. I only found out years later, as an adult, well after his death, one afternoon in Toronto, so far away from that house and that bedroom of childhood.

Those Sunday afternoons are the memories that sustained me at a time when my father had already left for Canada and I needed the presence of someone strong and silent who made me feel safe.

Today, I treasure the black stains that mark his prayer books, a lasting reminder of the man who used them. If I could go back in time to those Sunday afternoons, I would let him touch my school book and hope that his finger imprint of black would stay on the pages.

At sixty, Tiago (or Mr. James da Silva, his name on the official Staff Directory) had left his job at Crescent School, where he’d taught boys to interpret the beauty of the world through paint on canvas. When a sudden loss of mental equilibrium shattered his mind, leaving him unfit to continue his teaching duties, Tiago had agreed to an early retirement package.

Perhaps what sparked the instability that spiraled and crashed, unfixable, in his brain was the night Martin had not returned home.

Read the rest of my short story in Cleaver (Philadelphia’s International Literary Magazine 

                               Toronto’s new City Hall 1965. Photo by Antonio de Melo

My father came to Canada from the Azores, an archipelago of nine small islands in the North Atlantic, when I was just six years old. It wasn’t until three years later that I saw him again when my mother and I joined him in Toronto. During the years of his absence, my father wrote every week.

Along with his letters, he sent black and white photographs of Toronto landmarks: Lake Ontario; Exhibition Place; University Avenue; the Toronto Dominion Towers. My father documented everything he saw through the lens of his small Kodak pocket camera, and wrote meticulous handwritten explanations on the back of each photograph so that I would become familiar with the city.

The photograph that filled me with awe was one that showed what looked like a flying saucer with two towers on either side. My father wrote that this was the recently completed Toronto City Hall. It was considered an innovative structure at the time and had won international acclaim.

It is amusing to note that what impressed my father most about this amazing building, were the three levels of underground parking! But then my father loved cars. So the subterranean car park proved to be more interesting to him than the actual award-winning building.

Still, I felt scared and worried for my father’s safety. I truly believed that he was going to be abducted by space monsters who would take him away on their flying saucer, and I prayed every night that he might return home unharmed from this futurist alien city.

When I finally arrived in Toronto, my father showed me the places I recognized from his photographs. The two dimensional black and white images were now fully real as I gazed in wonder at the tall buildings in front of me. And the flying saucer was really there for all citizens to climb on board and fly away; concrete magic that still scared me as I held my father’s hand the day he took me on a tour of City Hall.

As I look back across the decades, I am grateful that my father had found a way to remain connected to me. Through these photographs, he brought the city of Toronto in 1965, to my small insular island world. In doing so, my father was showing me the rich, new life he was preparing for me in my new home, Toronto.

Originally entered in the CBC contest, Your Bloodlines: Stories from the Public, 2013

March 6, 1834, Toronto is incorporated as a city. Today is Toronto’s 182nd Birthday!

        Nordeste coast, island of S. Miguel, Azores

“My relationship with Italian takes place in exile, in a state of separation.” So starts Jhumpa Lahiri in her achingly profound and beautiful essay on identity, language and belonging, “Teach Yourself Italian.”

By the time she referenced the Portuguese writer and poet, Fernando Pessoa, I was convinced that my own journey into finding home through language, mattered. It’s not the specific language that is of significance; rather, the reality that for some of us, living through language and geography, makes us whole. I wish I had Jhumpa’s ability and eloquence to articulate my own feelings on this issue of Language and Belonging. I try, but it always feels like there’s something crucial missing in my attempts to convey the same experiences she wrote about. But she got it.

She expressed the emotional journey I’ve travelled since visiting Ponta Delgada sixteen years ago where I experienced a visceral reaction to my birthplace and found myself doubting my own identity and its connection to my mother tongue.

My experience of cultural and linguistic fracture has been profound; and my recent attempts to somehow return myself to myself, has been a heart wrenching, solitary journey. But I still feel like some incomplete being, scattered and tossed about by the cold Atlantic waves, only to realize that a lifesaving raft waits for me near the shores of Lake Ontario, a place far more “at home” for me than the ocean waters I stubbornly long to swim in.

I would love to spend a month or more in the Azores, working out my inadequate language skills, but like a child, learning and taking it all in until the words become a part of me and the old language flowed effortlessly with each sound. The only shortcoming to this immersion plunge is the knowledge that English will, inevitably, be pushed aside, sent away from my brain, for Language is like a jealous lover and does not want to share its sounds and conjugations, verbs and syntax with another. This is why I will never be able to flow easily from Portuguese into English and back. There is only room for one lover at a time.

I came upon the Monumento ao Emigrante in Ponta Delgada, across Avenida Infante Dom Henrique, close to Forte S. Brás and Campo de São Francisco: a bronze family in a permanent act of immigrating. The father, with one arm lifted high, points towards the future, his other hand holds fast to his wife’s hand as she stands behind him, holding the hand of their little son. Neither parent acknowledges the child’s intense plea to stay.

This homage to Azorean immigrants left me stunned when I first saw it in the year 2000. The statues were a visual symbol of me and my parents and all the thousands of families who left the islands for other worlds. It captured the grief and tearing apart I had felt decades earlier when, one rainy dark morning, I walked down the street with my parents, against my will, to a foreign country.

I had traveled to the Azores with my Anglo-Canadian partner, excited to show him the place of my birth and early childhood. For over six years he had heard my stories of immigration. The statue revealed for him our lives as emigrantes in ways I could not have anticipated. He wept with heartfelt sorrow as he finally understood the meaning of saudade.

It also frightened him to witness my visceral reaction to the island of my birth. The encounter provoked shock waves of emotion through me right from the moment I spotted the presépio landscape from my airplane window. The smells, the sounds, the humidity and the scent of ocean clinging to walls, awoke all my dormant longing and desire for my childhood home after such a long absence.

He saw me raptured into a world of mythical magnitude as my Canadian “self” slipped away. I could not even bear his presence pulling me back to exile. It upset me to speak English as I no longer wanted to be in translation. I wanted to immerse myself in the Portuguese language. This was the key to entering and losing myself again in my boyhood world. The trip almost ended our relationship, so violent were my emotions of reconnecting with home.

We survived the trauma that our vacation triggered in us, and we are still together, partly because the statues allowed my partner to feel a lasting kindness for my fractured, ambivalent soul: half Canadian; half Azorean; and in many ways still the confused little boy who wondered for so long why he had to leave his island home.

I have returned to the Azores several times since then and each new visit feels like a homecoming. There is less saudade and more healing with each visit, and the pain of my immigration is fading away. Now I stand again in front of the “Emigrantes” wishing that the bronze family might move beyond that captured moment of leaving. I wish I could embrace the boy and tell him that it will be alright.

I hope that we, who have experienced the Azorean diaspora, can be freed, too, knowing that we can belong to our islands again, even though home has become elsewhere.

Originally in Mundo Açoriano, July 24, 2014 and in Twas, Fall-Winter 2014.

 Today is the 48th anniversary of my arrival in Toronto on February 4, 1968

    Bowie mural near Bloor and Bathurst, Toronto

I first saw Bowie in 1976 when he performed at Maple Leafs Gardens on February 26. I was excited about finally going to see the flashy elaborate stage shows of Ziggy Stardust and the recent, then, Diamond Dogs, elaborate set. I had read all about it in great detail in all the fan magazines of the time. In an internetless age, music writers wrote lengthy articles describing concerts in detail and I expected to see, in person, all the glamour and sophisticated daring of a musician I had come to identify with as a symbol of those who dared to be different.

Instead of the glam rock idol coming on stage, after we listened to Kraftwerk’s eerily beautiful Radioactivity album and watched the surreal short Bunuel film, Un Chien Andalou, Bowie appeared on a black stage, with a single spotlight on his Thin White Duke persona, dressed in tuxedo pants, a white shirt, and a black vest. The sombre heavy riffs of Station to Station filled the stadium, as the song built and built into further frenzy and a new Bowie, stripped down to essentials, commanded my soul. The disappointment of not witnessing a grand stage set and glamorous costumes and funky hairdos was quickly forgotten as his new music took me to new places. The power of his voice, theatrical and commanding, sung new words and, as with every new album, expanded the music landscape.

I was just 17. I had bought extra tickets for the show and invited my older cousins to come with me. Angelo and Berta were old enough but Rita was still a minor and the only way my aunt would allow her to come with us was if my father chaperoned us. And so, after much begging and pleading, the family agreed that 15 year old Rita could come.

It’s the only rock concert my father ever went to. He sat quietly, emotionless, bearing the loud music, the haze of heavily scented pot around us, but he came, nonetheless. He was cool because of this and my cousins respected him for his daring. I am sure my mother, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles were petrified. Everything they heard about these concerts was probably true, but rather than deny my young cousin from coming along, they took a chance. That’s how much they trusted and respected my father.

I have always remembered this connection between my father and me and Bowie. It showed real love for him to get out of his Portuguese Fado concerts at the local parish hall and come see Bowie. I am sure he didn’t like it, but he never said so.

Over those early years of youth, my parents would shake their heads in bewilderment when they’d walk by the living room and watch me go crazy watching Bowie on TV, but they never complained. What they did not understand was that by drawing attention to Bowie on our TV screen, I was really trying to say to them, look, this is me, this is who I am.

Bowie was the most influential musician/pop/rock star of my young life. I discovered him probably by the time I was 15, at first attracted to the hype around his sexuality and androgyny, finding a symbol in him for who I was, this painted man who dared to be so different in 1973. But it was his music, ultimately, that fed my young soul, saw me through adolescence, the teenaged years, young adulthood, and even up to my life today, only 12 years younger than Bowie’s. I still go to his music from time to time: for emotional support, for hope, for commiseration, for a friend. In Rock and Roll Suicide, he sang, Oh, no love, you’re not alone, no matter what or who you’ve been, I’ll help you with the pain…give me your hand, because you’re wonderful, wonderful. He sang hope and courage to my mixed up youth and continued to do so until today and, I suspect, until my end, too.

Today, I was the first to enter HMV to get his latest and last album. It reminded me of those days of long ago when I would line up to buy concert tickets or get the latest Bowie release. Today I am 17 again.

David Bowie, January 8, 1947 – January 10, 2016