Drifting Through Lisbon
Lisbon seemed to me a city of countless origin stories, a momentary stop turned home for so many, a place to appease your placelessness even if just for a little while.
Images by Julian Dik (left) and Annie Spratt (right) via Unsplash.
When you don’t know where to go next, the answer could be nowhere or anywhere. My answer for the time being, I recently discovered, is Lisbon.
A city of seven hills, innumerable colours, and half a million faces from near and far away, Lisbon’s beauty is hardly subtle or undiscovered. But after spending a few days of walking the steep cobblestones, scouting out the city’s best views, admiring its architecture, and talking to enough strangers, I came to the conclusion that the special fondness I felt for the city had less to do with its facade of intricate tiles and pastel paint, and largely to do with the sense that it serves as an anchor point for both diversity and community alike. It seemed as though people and strands of arts and culture that once floated around the world had stopped in their tracks when they reached beautiful, cheap, lively Lisbon, where they mingle still.
An international community of expats makes up a small part of Lisbon’s demographic mosaic; the rest is tiled with European, African and mixed heritage that changed entirely my understanding of Portuguese nationality. Speaking to Portugal’s central role in colonial exploration and exploitation of the people and lands they came upon, Lisbon is embedded with an African presence, not just in the ethnicity of its people but in its music and its food, its languages and dialects, its art and culture. The city bears Portugal’s colonial history on its sleeve, in its noise and smells and colours; the roots of those influences cannot be extricated, so Lisbon’s identity as a European city must be understood as something categorically geographical.
As a traveller briefly passing through, something about Lisbon’s diversity, expressed through both its African heritage and its expat community, more than intrigued me; it made me feel at home. In migrations both forced and chosen, a sense of groundlessness is a common trait; as well as intimately knowing a recurring feeling of instability in my own life, I have always taken an interest in the cultural impressions that result from migration, the fossils of peoples’ movements through the world. Between historical and contemporary narratives of diaspora and displacement, Lisbon seemed to me a city of countless origin stories, a momentary stop turned home for so many, a place to appease your placelessness even if just for a little while.
I know little about the experiences of people of African descent in Portugal today, and feel compelled to collect more stories and perspectives about the colonial and cultural legacies that Lisbon houses upon my next visit in order to learn more. Nor do I mean to utilise the phenomena of displacement or diaspora as a scapegoat to project my own experiences or scratch an intellectual itch by exploring the theme of diaspora mostly second-hand is a rather self-centred take on a phenomenon that is by definition a relentless and painful lived experience for so many people, throughout history and at this very moment. But I wonder as I write this how we can best heal the wounds of the past – the ones that leave us aimless and baseless, the ones that shatter our foundations – and whether finding common threads between our own histories and the brutal ones that exist outside of us might be productive in understanding their weight, their potence, their magnitude to living people.
Image by Natalia Y via Unsplash.
One thing can be said for certain: we can’t heal the past by ignoring it. Hiding ugly truths beneath a shiny veneer, a more acceptable façade that communicates that ‘everything’s all right now’ just doesn’t work; when it comes to individuals, cities, countries, maybe the whole world, I believe our traumas will manifest themselves in other, far more detrimental ways if we do not dare to look them in the face. Maybe there is something to be said about salting the wound, if you will; a practise of attending to the stories that we fear might be too painful to ask about or tell, of allowing them to spark creativity, community, connection in spite of the soreness of that process. Salt is used to disinfect, after all, even though it stings.
Lisbon left me musing about what it means to face the past, and how it shapes a city, a culture, a people, right down to each individual person. No one is exempt from this process, and so digging into a more honest, holistic story of the destinations we visit, despite their often airbrushed reputations, along with a little sober self-reflection might connect us more intimately to the places we visit than ever before.
Delving into Lisbon’s African Heritage
For others similarly interested in Lisbon’s African heritage, the following resources make far better and more detailed signposts than my observations from only a brief visit. Should you wish to dive deeper, check out:
Image by Eleanora Gianetto via Unsplash.
Take an African heritage-based tour next time you’re in Lisbon
Contemporary artist René Tavares, born in the African country and former Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Príncipe, explores colonialism and the meeting of past and present in his recent exhibition, ‘In Memory We Trust’.
Prioritise exploring Black-owned Lisbon at your own pace following these recommendations