Modernity and Martyrdom

Abstract

Pascoaes was fond of talking about saudade as if it was something divinely bestowed. Explicit in his fashioning of Saudosismo along religious lines, he went as far as to describe it as: ‘the name I give to the Religion of Saudade.’² In so doing, the poet’s aim was to convert unbelievers to the redemptive, re-animating and resurrectionary program of Saudosismo. Yet for all Pascoaes’ attempts to cast saudade as a divine mix of cultures and ethnicities, it was to the tropes of Christianity that he kept returning. Moreover, despite his exhortations that Catholicism was a foreign evil, it is impossible to separate his saudade from the long history of Catholicism in the Iberian Peninsula. Pascoaes was not antireligious, but rather espoused an esoteric and pantheistic brand of spiritualism. Although his evocation of godliness was unspecific, however, his saudade does seem to be related to the ‘God willing’ school of fatalism. This is the one that has given birth to similar expressions like the Hebrew Im Yirtzeh Hashem (if God wills it), Arabic Insh’allah, Tagalog Bahala Na (come what may — it’s up to God) and Japanese shikata ga nai ‘it couldn’t be helped’.³

Saudosismo isn’t a creation: it’s a revelation!¹

— Pascoaes