Overnight flight out of Boston to Cape Verde and then Lisbon.  Flight attendants served tabouli salad, bread and butter, meat, potatoes, broccoli, red cake, coffee, and cookies. We ate this three-course meal at 1:30 in the morning, with two hours of flight still to go. The coffee woke everyone up, and a lively conversation ensued in the Cape Verdean Creole.

Portugal colonized these islands and used them as a way station for the Atlantic Slave Trade. They started plantations here, and enslaved people from West Africa on them, until 1858. The islands gained their independence from Portugal during the Carnation Revolution in 1975. Today, the local economy is primarily “service” — tourism and remittances. More Cape Verdeans live off island than on. Many reside in Massachusetts. I learned about their life on Cape Cod at the Zion Heritage Museum in Hyannis.  Many came to New England to work the cranberry harvest and clean hotels in the region. The people who cared for my mother during the last years of her life in a nursing home in Brewster, Massachusetts, were from Cape Verde.

Conversation lulled until someone from the seat ahead of us collapsed in the aisle.  Every flight attendant and many passengers rushed to our area.  Everyone worked together, improvising. Since most people on the plane were older folks, I assumed one of us elders had fallen. All the dangers that I could imagine might befall two travelers in their 60s rushed through my head. However, the man who eventually came up from the floor was young. He had hurt his head, so a committee of passengers and flight attendants watched over him. When it seemed clear he was ok, they began joking about getting him a life vest and parachute and letting him fend for himself. Lots of laughter, no sleep. We all clapped when the plane landed in the Azores. The sun was rising – a red stripe on the horizon.

At the airport, we have time before our next flight to Lisbon to drink chamomile tea and plug in our phones. This is the first month of our new life as retired people, living on the road.I wrote a list of lifestyle goals.  Many were the same as at home: walking, writing, social justice, and yoga.   Some were different—socializing with strangers, trying new things, and not worrying about looking stupid.  I looked forward to being a neophyte.

 Lisbon  

Coming into Lisbon, we passed the crowd of drivers and cabs and found the bus stop, got on the right bus, proud that on this first day of the rest of our lives, we stuck with our goal to take mass transit.  We rode past Ciudad University, tagged with fresh FREE GAZA graffiti. A ninety-foot Nelson Mandela graced the side of a building. We got off at Mq Pompeo with a 1.5-mile walk to our apartment. We were wearing too many layers, and though our packs were as light as we could make them, by the time we reached our neighborhood, our phones were dead, and so were we. We fell into a restaurant with an open door. The staff were so kind, helping us to crawl onto the floor to plug in phones. Two US women in their 60s, comparing the age deficits of Trump and Biden, sneered at me.  Granted, we were a sight, and probably a smell, too, with our backpacks, multiple layers, and sleepless, unshowered bodies.

We attempted to break into the wrong room, waking up a young man in his boxers. The apartment was advertised as having a river view. In front of the river were construction sites. We amused ourselves watching their rapid progress. We did laundry three times during our thirty-six-hour stay, bringing pants and shirts in and out of the balcony as the rain came and went.

Our time in Lisbon was task-oriented – purchasing European adapters, and practicing our walk to the city bus stop that would take us to the terminal for our bus trip to Albufiera the next day.  We got lost and exhausted, climbing Lisbon hills past blue-tiled buildings on white stone sidewalks.

The city was covered in graffiti. Most of the tags were not understandable to me. I saw a small Jewish star and the words in English: “Bring home the hostages.”  I recognized April 25, 1974, as the date of the “Carnation Revolution,” which overthrew half a century of dictatorship. In an undergraduate course in African History, I learned about the independence movement in Mozambique that overthrew Portuguese colonial rule.  What impressed me then were the Portuguese youth protesting their dictatorship, who learned from and then supported decolonization movements in Mozambique. 

On the 31^st, we fell asleep early and then woke up at midnight. I walked onto the balcony.  The roads were teaming with adult witches and warlocks.

We caught the right buses. The atmosphere in Albufeira was 100% touristy, but the air was lovely,  easing our uphill walk to the bus station, for our final destination: Armação de Pêra.

 

 

Making Armação de Pêra. home. 

We walked 9.5 miles and climbed 25 flights of stairs,  tramping back and forth from our apartment to the farmer’s market, the shoe store for sandals, and a large discount store where we found foldable yoga mats! Our walks were repetitive.  The emotional effect was to make us feel at home here, in our neighborhood, for this month. For supper, we made a salad with our farmer’s market purchases: dried beans, avocado, tomato, purple sweet potato, almonds, pomegranate, and oranges that tasted like flowers. We walked into the town, through residential alleys barely big enough for a car, passing mid-sized apartment buildings, some with old tiles, others new.

Our apartment was a small one-bedroom. The building reminded me of a New York City apartment high-rise. An elderly man would sit downstairs in the afternoon. Sometimes his son shows up with groceries. An elderly woman would laugh at us taking the stairs, patting our backs. The hallway on our floor was dark, but when I opened the door to the apartment, a large window let in the light. Opened wide, it filled the tiny room with sea air and a faint smell of the garbage containers below. No screens, no mosquitoes. We left the windows open all night. I am claustrophobic.  Assaulted in my apartment when I was young, I feel safer with escape valves. As long as I have an open window, I feel great. I slept well in our little apartment.

 

 

Contemplating disaster from this peaceful Mediterranean shore.  

On November 4th, we stopped at a tienda for a drink. The TV  news had an extensive report on air pollution in Indiana, USA. I looked online in vain for any notice of a pollution event in Indiana. Disaster reporting is not only a US phenomenon.

That evening, we listened to a teach-in in New York on Gaza with Rashid Khalidi, author of The 100 Years War Against Palestine, Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Author of Between the World and Me.

I was most taken by the self-revelations of Coates, coming to understand and embrace King’s non-violence as a way of avoiding becoming one’s oppressor. He had been to Palestine with Kahlidi on a five-day educational tour. He compared Palestine to the Old Jim Crow. No, not the same, but enough that he understood what was wrong. I don’t know why some Jews can’t make that connection.  Of course, the apartheid experienced by Palestinians is not exactly the same as the oppression of Jews in Europe, but it is similar enough that empathy should be automatic. Something happens to us when we swallow nationalist ideas that keep us from seeing someone else as less human.

Coates had written about Israel as an example of a form of reparations, and now, he said, he had amends to pay for that. Michele Alexander said she had a friend who organized to end South African apartheid, who had visited in the 1980s, and then went to Palestine, and said conditions were worse in Palestine.  Kahlidi damned the US and gave an analysis of why the US supports Israel: “Nothing to do with their love for the brown-eyed Jews of Israel.”

Kahlidi, whose eyes are blue, looks and sounds Jewish to me.

Hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated on November 4 in European capitals, Asian capitals, and all over the United States. Biden said the words ceasefire. Something is happening, I thought. The coalition is broadening. I hoped this news was reaching the people of Gaza.

Trying to be an inhabitant, not a guest.

On Saturday, the city-owned square in Armação de Pêra was filled with 50 market stalls. The farmers did not speak English to us, which was lovely. Olives in jars, almonds, walnuts, dried chickpeas and butter beans, avocados, figs, dried and fresh, every kind of vegetable, grapes, oranges, blackberries, pomegranates, sweet potatoes, sheep and goat cheese, hard and soft: a feast. We went twice, heading home when our bags were full, and then returning with a list of what we missed: lettuce, cabbage, and peppers. Each time we stopped at the seafood tienda for oysters and fish. They filleted it for us and charged two euros less than labeled. No bargaining at the market. Farmers were patient with our struggles recognizing Euro coins. Is that 20 centavos or two euros? We had oyster salad for lunch, with sheep cheese, sweet potatoes, and walnuts.

We watched a Spanish cooking show. The theme was open-face toasts with various toppings. Dave was inspired. One day he made us tapas with goat cheese and apples on rice cakes, the next day, sheep cheese, dark chocolate, walnuts, and dried figs.  We made a friend.  A seagull came to the open window this morning. She did not come in, but stayed on the ledge for a long while, while we did yoga. She returned several times during the day. I sang Beatles songs to her. She sang along.

On a Sunday, we walked the beach to a lunch destination. The waves were gigantic and so fun to watch and dodge.  We arrived at 11 AM when the restaurant opened its patio.  Half of the customers spoke languages other than Portuguese. The menu was pre-lunch. We had tuna on baguettes and pastel de nata, the Portuguese dessert specialty. The pastry was delicious, the sandwich fine, and the view fantastic. The walk was six miles of soft sand. We were quite tired, but soon after returning, we went out again in a vain search for a Sunday newspaper.

We have been picking up garbage. My thought: we are not guests, but inhabitants here, and we need to contribute. In emotional terms, it worked.  A few minutes each day, and we felt like we belonged. Plus, we made our view from the window much nicer. The seagull had become a member of the family.  They tap on the window to let us know they are there. It is open enough for them to come in, but they don’t try.

Conflation and Proportionality

CNN Portugal reported that 50 Palestinians were killed by Israel. My head was full of seagulls and conflation. Conflating is when the Israeli government massacres over 10,000 Palestinians, including over 5,000 children, and then says killing innocents is justified because of Hamas’s October 7 massacre. Conflating is when people say criticizing Israel is antisemitic. Conflating is when Israeli government terrorism is seen as representing all Jewry. Racist conflation happens anytime we assume a government represents the sentiments of a people. Conflating the actions of people of a race/ethnicity/religion with all those in that socialized category is racism.

Not conflating is hard. Emotional resentment toward a people can pass from generation to generation. But who said anti-racism is easy? Fighting conflation is half of antiracism 101. The other half is understanding that racism plus power is an existential danger. We were seeing this in real-time. When a government as powerful as the United States gives its firepower to a regime like Israel, bent on a racist massacre, then we have the conditions for genocide.  Then the world population must stand together to be a collective superpower, saying No. Not in humanity’s name. Remove the bombs and guns first, entonces quedar recursos básicos para todos. Then tell me about your identity and your ideas. Then I want to hear your poetry.

The seagull flew away.  We watched the sunset.

 

Portuguese Past is Present 

We went to Lagos by bus—a good way to see the countryside. No Iowa-size farms, just small ones on hillsides: orange and lemon groves, sheep, a few cows—not many. Grape arbors. We climbed the hill to the top of the cliffs and went to the beach.

There is a Lagos museum that marks the spot where a slave market operated. It opened in 2016. We could not find it. We considered returning on another day, but the reviews of the museum were so bad: no context, describing slavery as a mixing of cultures, use of passive voice as though no one is responsible, and no discussion of slavery as an economic system with great consequences for West Africa, Portugal, and the world. No suffering, no profits.

Portugal is debating how to deal with its colonial past. This is the first nation in Europe to exploit Africa, trading goods and then human beings. The embrace of discovery is as strong here as the US myths of the Wild West and Manifest Destiny.  If they apologize for slavery and colonization, it will erase their cherished narrative of being the first scientists and navigators who found and conquered before Columbus.  There is a project to create a monument in Lisbon to enslaved people who resisted in the Portuguese colonies. It began in 2017. Iron stalks of burned sugar cane symbolize slave rebellions. But it has stalled mid-project. The president and others are dragging their feet.

 

Sardine Capitalism 

In Portimão, we learned about the Sardine industry.  They had a film (with English translation) made by the bosses in the 1930s, during the dictatorship.  It showed the entire process from fishing to the creation of sardine cans. Workers were segregated by gender; women were responsible for repetitive tasks like pulling the heads of each fish. The town had a statue of women with sardine baskets and babies that reminded me of the statue of Chinese railworkers in a square in San Luis Obispo, California. There is a fine line between celebrating workers, dignifying the work, and papering over labor abuse. I think of the nostalgia for company towns and plantation life in the US South.

The Portuguese Sardine heyday was the 1980s. By 2010, the stock was nearly depleted. Today, 20,000 people are employed in the industry as fishers or canners. A cannery in the city of Porto is worked entirely by women. The fish is still in dangerous waters. Efforts to change the dominant seafood in Portugal have been difficult. The sardine is a metaphor for the little country that could. “It’s a Fado,”  Earth Journal says, as tied to Portuguese identity as the unique soulful guitarra music.

We bought sardines at the fish market. I cut off the heads and tails and removed the innards, and Dave cooked them. The first time, he burned the tops because he didn’t know how hot the oven could get. The second time, we cooked them up in the frying pan. They were delicious, I thought. Dave was not so enthusiastic.  We removed bones as we ate—the ultimate slow food.

 

 

Gorados.

We passed the Socialist Party headquarters in Portimão. There did not appear to be anyone there. Portugal was in the middle of a major political crisis. I read in the Diario Noticias that the Prime Minister and many other people beneath him have been forced to resign due to corrupt investment in lithium mining and the right wing was poised to take advantage of this corruption within the Socialist Party. For Portuguese people, there was a more pressing crisis in housing – not a shortage, but prices— the newspaper said— are too high for 6 out of 10 people. Rent is subsidized. The 2024 budget will include rises in both subsidies and the rent ceiling. The president has disbanded parliament, but they will reconstitute to pass the 2024 budget. Government stripped down to its essentials.

Diario de Noticias says the Portuguese people have gorados: a feeling they are in for more and more bad luck. Most of the coverage of the removal of political leadership focuses not on concerns about democracy, corruption, or energy ( the crime committed by the Prime Minister concerned a lithium mining operation), but on economic issues: the budget, salaries, minimum wage, and rents.

Every Interaction counts.

We listened to music at the bar near the market for a few minutes. The people ate, drank, and smoked, and swayed in the noonday sun to music in English that said nothing.  We left and walked on the beach, thinking that making a connection is hard here. Do we really need to?

We built a dragon out of sand in the rocky crags among the cliffs, with shells for scales and claws. Got in the water in swimsuits but just played with the waves. I asked Dave what was going on inside. He talked of Gaza, feeling helpless, not missing Minneapolis, of loving our plan, of loving me. I told him about rethinking our social goal, that any encounter counts, and that we can take our time.

At the snack bar below our apartment building, frequented by workers and tourists, I felt more in tune with humanity. We smiled with a gay couple, as their two little dogs acted like human companions.  We laughed with a table from Belgium, having coffee and sweets, as one man faced his phallic-shaped chocolate dessert by licking the top. I exchanged glances with a woman, about 40, who wore a T-shirt that said Bonjour Bitches.

We are getting to know a woman at the market. She knows we don’t want plastic bags, helps us fill our two bags evenly, and always stuffs in something extra, a lemon, some verbena for chai, a tangerine. The relationship is mercantile, but also genuine.

 

 

 

Bones and Barbs 

I had an earache and no energy. We stayed in most of the day, though the sun and surf beckoned. When we went to see the sunset, I felt dizzy, however, the next day,  we climbed the cliff and found a secluded beach filled with shells. I foraged cactus paddles and we had them for lunch, supper, and breakfast.

We listened and read the news while removing cacti barbs. New York Times reporter quit over Gaza.  A 92^nd Street Y speaker series was canceled in response to a boycott protesting their censorship of pro-Palestinian speakers. Jews supporting Israel had a rally at the US Capitol, addressed by Christian nationalist with a record of antisemitic and Islamophobic hate speech. In London, 300,000 marched for Palestine. The mainstream newspaper in Portugal searched for space between Israel and the US, mining the language of Blinken and Biden for any possible movement away from unconditional support for Netanyahu.

Walking shaded streets away from the beach, and in 30 minutes, we were out of town with a farm between us and the beach. Bought a coffee (me) and an orange juice (Dave)and read a different paper, more sensational, your typical yellow journalism. So much is the same here. What is different is how this small town provides everything we need without a car.  What is different is the slow pace I am adapting, a little more each day.

At the market, we bought the cheapest fish, and I tried to de-bone them with my fingers. Dave was triggered – memories of his parents arguing over fish that no one wanted to debone or eat, but that cost too much in fishing gear to not give it a try. From now on, it is the $14 a kilo prawns, not the $4.50 a kilo fish of unknown name with a thousand bones, eyes, fins, and triggers.

The German Doctor 

Today, a doctor came to the apartment. He is German. He asked if I was, too, with the Winkler name. I told him my father was German Jewish. He asked if I was a practicing Jew. I said it was my identity, and right now I am speaking up against Israeli atrocities. We agreed on Gaza. He also said antisemitism is up in Germany. In another breath, he mentioned that Germany has a problem with diversity. “Soon we will have terrorism, with so many Muslims coming,” I asked him how long he had been living in Portugal, trying to make a point he doesn’t get.

I wondered about his Holocaust education. If he didn’t learn that Never Again is for everyone. Have the German people just found a new scapegoat, this time Muslims? If so, what is the point of all those concentration camp museums? He gave me a prescription for two non-antibiotic meds and charged me 60 Euros. We paid in cash.

 

Portugal and immigrants. 

We walked the beach three miles again, for tea and a tuna sandwich. The ocean was calm, but my mind was a storm, thinking about Portugal’s immigration system, what it means to be a Jew in Europe at this moment. The brain stream was interrupted by naked bodies frolicking in the waveless ocean.

Portugal, until this spring, had a two-pronged immigration system to encourage rich people and poor people to emigrate. Rich people needed to invest 500,000 Euros into a business or real estate, and they would be offered citizenship. Poor people were recruited through the labor market to work low-wage jobs. They could come without documents, and as soon as they had work, they would be eligible for citizenship. The recruitment of immigrants without resources was de facto, not de jure, to avoid censorship by other European powers, who do not want a flood of immigrants. The plan was to import wealth and poverty as a form of economic stimulus while maintaining some semblance of equity for themselves. But the plan backfired. The wealthy drove up housing prices, and the poor people drove down wages. The new rich are mostly from Germany, Britain, Russia, and China.  A few are from the US. The new low-wage workers are mostly from  India, Nepal, and Bangladesh. In Armação de Pêra, we saw Northern Europeans drinking lunches at the British-themed cafe. In the evening, we saw South Asian men playing volleyball in the sandpit below our apartment.

In October 2023, they revamped the immigration system. The paper listed fifteen goals. Most involved the surveillance of immigrants. Only one goal addressed racism. None addressed the historic relationship of Portugal as an empire.

There are about 4,000 Jews in Portugal, in a country of 10 million. This is my home for the month. Do I belong here? I reject the idea that we need homelands, especially if they require the genocide of others to protect them. We all need a place to be. The people from India and Pakistan who come here to work belong here and deserve all of the labor and cultural rights of every other human here, including me.

Yesterday we walked along the ridge and then took the road to an exclusive resort community, home to the rich immigrants Portugal recruited. But not completely. We stopped at the grocery store for a bathroom. Working-class Portuguese families sat at the outdoor snack bar. It was smoky with cigarettes and car exhaust. Other restaurants were closed on Sunday. We ended up at a British Blues Bar, where English women served up turkey and lamb dinners with all the trimmings (canned peas and carrots, a spot of cabbage, two kinds of potatoes, and popovers. The food was dull, the patio lovely, and the novelty of popping over to England for lunch was fun. They had no tea, however. I had decaf, and Dave had a beer. Walking back on a public path that descended to a pristine beach cove.  On the other side was a private entrance for those who lived on the beach. 

As we rounded the corner and saw Armação de Pêra with its line of apartment buildings jutting in slightly different directions, I felt grateful to be staying in this town with its open promenade and inclusive feel. Its beach is not pristine, but it is welcoming and mesmerizing. I love watching how it changes, the tides, the weather, the time of day. It does not get boring.

Silves 

To get to Silves, we joined high school students riding the public bus to the regional high school. The students were so quiet. We figured they were tired in the morning. But then we took the school bus back in the afternoon, and they were still silent. A few teenage couples quietly made out. Others softly greeted each other on and off the bus. The radio played 80s US music. Stressless young people?  We admired orange groves on the mountainside.

The Silves anthropology museum is built around a Moorish cistern uncovered during a construction project. Rather than try to move it, they built an exhibit around it, filled with artifacts from the Muslim era: 8th–13th centuries. The city is proud of its Muslim roots. In the center of town, there is a statue of the conquistadors trampling people whose heads lie on the ground, depicting the Christian missions as genocidal. A Cathedral was built on top of the Mosque.  We lit three candles, for Palestinians, for Israelis, for a loved one in crisis.

The city of Silves had few tourists. I bought a Communist Party paper to see how their coverage differed. They see the fall of the Socialist Party as an opportunity, but their focus is on economic issues, not corruption, which nobody seems too concerned about. They also covered the protests around the world and in Portugal against the war in Gaza. There was one in Faro, in the Algarve region.

We passed an elementary school. Kindergartners were climbing on slides and swings to the sounds of Staying Alive by the Bee Gees … I’ve been kicked around since I was born….We can try to understand the New York Times’ effect on man…

I walked the rest of the hill to the rhythm, Ah, ah, ah, ah Staying Alive, Staying Alive.  In our apartment, I looked for Fado on my phone and found a Tiny Desk concert on National Public Radio in the US, from November 15. Marta Pereira da Costa strumed a wordless song about the river traveling to the sea. The music was sweet. The river flows to the sea in an easy rhythm, without people on its banks struggling to stay alive.

Portuguese fishing town Church 

On U.S. Thanksgiving, we walked the beach to the next town. The waves turned my brain on, yet when the walk was done, my thoughts went out with the tide. We found a small Indian-owned market, bought a bottle of Tikka Masala, and some hot peppers.  Fish from the farmer’s market. We eat it on a salad. Our harvest feast.

 The Armação de Pêra church was a humble building by Catholic standards, with little ornamentation. The stained glass and sculptures depicted Mother Mary standing in the ocean protecting fishers. The music was haunting and unrecognizable. The service was entirely in Portuguese. I understood nothing. The priest’s voice was soothing. No fire. No Brimstone, just beautiful singing.

Proportionality

I feel as though my brow has been furrowed since 1979. The lines are deep. The muscles do not easily relax. I will –slowly – work to let them go. I do not stop wars with my eyebrows. We begin our day with yoga. David makes a three-course breakfast: eggs with vegetables and goat cheese,  oatmeal with chia seeds, almonds, and walnuts, and a bowl of fresh fruit. We take a walk—the town, the beach, the ridge. A cup of tea at an outdoor café in the afternoon, where I sit and write. If there ever was a recipe for unfurling brows, this is it.

At lunch, we listen to Democracy Now and check social media for news of Gaza. We have tiny things we can do: post, write our representatives, and donate. We go from one to the other. I know it is not much, and also not nothing.  Doing this from Portugal, a place with 3,500 Jews and 65,000 Muslims—where both were banished centuries ago, I am thinking about this concept of homeland. I want to believe that everyone belongs everywhere. No borders. But wherever we make a home, we need to ask, do we displace? engage? enhance? horde? contribute? The power we bring to each place is what is important.

 

This essay about a one-month visit to Portugal in November 2023, is the first of a series. In October 2023, my spouse and I sold our house in Minneapolis, MN. USA. Since then, we have been traveling the world. I write a blog about each place, with a historian’s eye and an internationalist lens, wondering how memory can liberate the present.