Missing, or ‘saudade’, is a popular word in Portuguese. You see it on the logos of pastel de nata brands, cafés, credit cards, poems, postcards, instagram reels. It is certainly a pathos, an attitude towards time straddled between yearning and longing. Some claim it as exclusively Portuguese. A whole country, in a way: music, war, food, gloom; a Weltanschauung. Anything that a past-leaning route may encompass - an horizon made of perpetual yesterdays, and happily ever after. I wonder if that says anything about the tension between flight and return.
What is ‘saudade’, anyway? And “how can the Portuguese, with their colonial perpetrations, as well as their constant migrations, claim a word as exclusively theirs?”, Rita de Matos asks in ‘Das Saudades sem Dono’ (Of Saudade without an Owner). As she notes, the first records of ‘saudade’ in written Portuguese date back to the 13th century, long after the Muslim conquest of Persia in 7 Century AD that also spread the words ‘suad’, ‘saudá’ and ‘suaidá’, already part of the Arabic lexicon back then.
In the early 1900s, the poet Teixeira de Pascoaes sought to stress the connection between an alleged ‘Portuguese soul’ and ‘saudade’. This eventually led to the creation of the Saudosist Movement, based on a nationalist theory that argued for an intimate string between the word and the essence of “the Lusitan people”. Its founding elements resonate with the myth of ‘Sebastianism’, which is grounded in the belief that Sebastian - a Portuguese king who was coronated at the age of 3 and vanished 21 years later in a battle against the Saadi Sultanate of Morocco in Ksar el-Kebir in 1578 - will eventually return to Portugal to gloriously restitute the country all its lost glory.
Devoid of a glorious present, Pascoaes’ resorted to the past - an ever idealized scenario - to formulate a promise that ought to be delivered in the future. He certainly had a point: this slant towards the past was not new. If anything, there is a pattern. Eventually, Portugal would be saved by an osmosis in the form of return, a formula accurately synthesized by Fernando Pessoa, a writer who also made his way (again) to logos of pastel de nata brands, credit cards, instagram reels, etc.: “Sebastian is Portugal: Portugal lost its greatness with Sebastian, and will only regain it with his return”.
This blend of pastism and messianism makes for an interesting endeavour. Then again, what exactly is a whole country trying to go back to? Is it rather running away? For the most part, the past is never over. A return is perpetual as long as it is framed as part of a future, a project to be completed, a wish that must be fulfilled. If anything, a departure is a sort of possible-arrival-at. The same flux holds retrospectively: a possible-arrival-at always entails a departure (thus saudade?). A good-bye may be a threshold, a point where flight and encounter come across. Still, is a longing for the past not also a sign of a present full of sorrow?