Tribute to Saramago

A young boy was spending his summer vacation at his grandfather’s house far away from the capital. Suddenly his grandfather fell sick and had to be transferred to the hospital, but before he was taken he did something very strange:

"He went into the yard of his house, where there were a few trees, fig trees, olive trees. And he went one by one, embracing the trees and crying, saying good-bye to them because he knew he would not return. To see this, to live this, if that doesn't mark you for the rest of your life, you have no feeling."

But it did mark the young Jose Saramago for the rest of his life, made him a writer, a political activist and the finest Portuguese writer of his generation.

Jose Saramago (1922-2010) was born in Azinagha, a small village in Portugal and although he was a clever pupil his parents were not able to afford his education and he had to work as a car mechanic at the age of 12, a period that made him close to the laboring community and shaped his political inclination towards communism, he joined the Portuguese Communist Party in 1969 and gave away his religious believes to be an atheist.

Noticing his intellectual talent, he worked as a journalist and translator and started wring and publishing novels in 1947, but his recognition did not come until the year 1982 when his novel Memorial Del Convento won the PEN club award Portuguese and started to attract attention to his style. The novel is a love story set in one of the major tourist attraction in Portugal, the Convent of Mafra, where the two lovers interact with each other and with famous historical figures.

In 1991, he published a very controversial novel titled O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo or The Gospel according to Jesus Christ, in which he portrays Jesus Christ as a human being with flaws, passions, and doubts, including a love affair with Mary Magdalene. The book gained public success and was immediately translated to many languages while provoking the rage of the Roman Catholic Church that accused Saramago of having anti-religion views.

Magical Realism became the most prevailing theme in Saramago’s works, in addition to his characteristic language, very long sentences (sometimes more than one page long) and surrealistic plots which continued in his novels like The Stone Raft, where the Iberian Peninsula breaks off Europe and sails on its own across the Atlantic, Death At Intervals, which tells the story of a village where no one dies, and Blindness which tells the story of a story where a mysterious blinding disease strikes its people.

In 1998 Saramgo won the Nobel prize in Literature for his body of works, he was genuinely shocked announcing that:”I was not born for all this glory”

Saramago was an avid critic of the European Union and the state of Israel. In 2002 he visited Ramallah, where he compared the Palestinians to the Holocaust victims, a statement that resulted in him being condemned by many intellectuals and he was accused of Anti-Semitism. In one of his newspaper articles he wrote:

"Intoxicated mentally by the messianic dream of a Greater Israel which will finally achieve the expansionist dreams of the most radical Zionism; contaminated by the monstrous and rooted 'certitude' that in this catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by God and that, consequently, all the actions of an obsessive, psychological and pathologically exclusivist racism are justified; educated and trained in the idea that any suffering that has been inflicted, or is being inflicted, or will be inflicted on everyone else, especially the Palestinians, will always be inferior to that which they themselves suffered in the Holocaust, the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner."

On another occasion he pointed out that:

"The Jews are unworthy of any more sympathy for their sufferings during the second World War. Living under the shadows of the Holocaust and expecting to be forgiven for anything they do on behalf of what they have suffered seems abusive to me. They didn’t learn anything from the suffering of their parents and grandparents”

Yesterday in Lisbon, Saramago’s funeral took place; he died last Friday and 20,000 people participated in his funeral but with the absence of the right-winged Portuguese president who was vacationing very close to the capital. Many of Saramago’s works are banned in Portugal.