Whose Camões?

Abstract

On 10 June 2008 the conservative President of the Portuguese Republic, Cavaco Silva, turned to the reporters pressing him on the truckers’ strike going on and exclaimed, with visible irritation, that what he had ‘to underline above all on [that] day was the Race, the Day of the Race, the Day of Portugal, of Camões, and of the Portuguese communities’ (SIC ‘Jornal das 7’ 2008). Perhaps one can think of this incident as a mere slip, as the President reverted to the usage common during the fascist period, of celebrating the Day of Camões after Lisbon’s city holiday had become a national one, as the Day of Portugal, and indeed, as the Day of the Portuguese Race, whatever that might have meant. Or perhaps it is symptomatic of the current political climate in a beleaguered Portugal, in which, four decades after democracy was reinstalled, the financial crisis has many looking back towards the past with a misplaced, even dangerous, nostalgia. What the President’s remarks make amply clear is how the name of Luiz Vaz de Camões (c.1524–1580) has been co-opted by politics and how it can, seemingly without any difficulty, be interchangeable with the national community, with the large number of expatriates, and with the most nefarious forms of politics and racism. In other words, Cavaco Silva, rather than committing a public indiscretion, merely revealed how problematic the use of the name Camões is and how it has been, for the most part, appropriated by the state and other political forces under the guise of appealing to a sentiment of national unity.