On Family Histories

Over the centuries, Portuguese literature has made a lasting impact on world literature. It began as verse, with indigenous oral poetry—often sung—among its earliest manifestations. From the prominent poetic movements of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Portuguese literature gradually expanded to embrace other literary forms, particularly prose. The earliest Portuguese prose works included religious writings, brief annals of the early kings, and moral tales. Since then, it has evolved into a rich and diverse body of work that includes some of the most influential voices in world literature. With their varied oeuvres spanning multiple genres and forms, Fernando Pessoa, Luís de Camões, Eça de Queirós, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Almeida Garrett, and Florbela Espanca stand as defining figures in Portuguese literary canon.

In contemporary Portuguese literature, one of the most prominent names is José Saramago who, in 1998, was awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature. The path to the zenith of literary success he had to take, however, was not flowery. Born on November 16, 1922, in Azinhaga in the Portuguese countryside, Saramago grew up in great poverty in Lisbon. He held a series of jobs as a mechanic and metalworker. In the two years he worked menial jobs, he acquired a taste for reading. During his free time, he would frequent a public library in Lisbon. Eventually, he was accepted into a Lisbon publishing firm, which opened the door to opportunities for him to work as a journalist and translator. In 1947, he published his first novel, Terra do Pecado (Land of Sin). However, what ensued was a period of literary silence.

His next work, a poetry collection, would only be published in 1966. For most of his literary career, Saramago was an obscure name. It was only in his sixties, following the publication of his fourth novel, Memorial do Convento, in 1982 that he became a household name. The rest, they say, is history. Memorial do Convento’s translation into English in 1988 as Baltasar and Blimunda further catapulted Saramago to global recognition. His succeeding works received global acclaim. His works won him the 1980 Prémio Cidade de Lisboa, the Prémio PEN Club Português in 1983 for Memorial do Convento and in 1984 for O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis, the 1986 Prémio da Crítica da Associação Portuguesa, the 19191 Grande Prémio de Romance e Novela, the 1993 Prémio Vida Literária, and the 1995 Prémio Camões. The Prémio Camões is the most prestigious prize for literature in the Portuguese language.

There’s never been any shortage of landscape in the world. Whatever else may be lacking, that’s one thing that has never been in short supply, indeed its sheer abundance can only be explained by some tireless miracle, because the landscape clearly pre-dates man, and despite its long, long existence, it has still not yet expired. That’s probably because it’s constantly changing: at certain times of the year, the land is green, at others, yellow or brown, or black. And in certain places it is red, the colour of clay or spilled blood. This, however, depends on what has been planted or what has not yet been planted, or what has sprung up unaided and died simply because it reached its natural end.

José Saramago, Raised from the Ground

In a career that spanned decades, Saramago produced a plethora of works that spanned genres. However, his bread and butter was his novels, including Levantado do Chão. Originally published in 1980, it is among his earlier novels. However, it would take decades before it would be made available for Anglophone readers. In 2012 — 14 years after Saramago’s Nobel Prize in Literature recognition and two years after his death — the novel was released in English for the first time as Raised from the Ground. The novel transports the readers to the early twentieth century. It opens with an impoverished family plying a dusty road in Portugal’s rural Alentejo region with plodding steps. Led by the patriarch, Domingos Mau-Tempo, and accompanied by his stoic wife Sara de Conceição, and their baby João, the family set out to search for a new home where they could have a fresh start.

A series of setbacks prompted them to seek the proverbial greener pasture. However, the family’s destitution was the result of Domingos’ feckless actions. He was a shoemaker who burnt the money he earned in alcohol. He was also an abusive husband; Sara, having had enough of the abuse, would eventually desert her husband. Over the horizon, the family’s journey was greeted by the looming bad weather. It was as if the weather provided an ominous sign of what fate had in store for the family. Interestingly, the family surname literally translates to bad weather. This then lays out the tone for the rest of the story which technically starts with blue-eyed João. His compelling eyes were the result of an atrocity committed in the fifteenth century when his German ancestor raped a local peasant girl. Indeed, grinding poverty permeates the story of the Mau-Tempo family.

Because of poverty, João’s education was limited to a year of schooling. At a young age, he was forced to join the workforce to support himself and his family, starting under the employ of a brutal overseer. With his eyes opened to the realities of his social station, João had to shed his innocence. He had no recourse but to toil the soil to earn a living for his mother and siblings. When he became an adult, he married Faustina and together they had two children: António and Gracinda. The heft of the novel then charts the fortune of the three generations of the Mau-tempo family, with the story capturing João’s until he became a grandfather. The novel captures how these three generations of Mau-Tempos navigate a world and a society that favors the rich and looks down on the poor.

Indeed, poverty was ubiquitous in the story. At its heart, Saramago’s sophomore novel, which he worked on after retiring from journalism, vividly paints an evocative portrait of peasant life in twentieth-century Portugal, with the Mau-Tempo family serving as the crucible. Poverty was a subject with which Saramago was familiar, having grown up in a world of abject poverty that he evokes in this novel. His familiarity with this world was one of the novel’s finer facets as he was able to conjure a world that is at once believable and intimate. What makes Raised from the Ground even more personal is the source of its inspiration. Having lived and worked with them, the Nobel laureate drew inspiration from his grandparents who, like the novel’s main characters, were landless peasants who had to endure in rural Portugal.

Sometimes, a physical impatience, not to say exasperation, is required for sous finally to move, and when we say soul, we mean that thing with no real name, which is perhaps merely the body, the whole body. One day, if we don’t give up, we will all know what these things are and how far they are from the words that attempt to explain them, and how far those words are from the things themselves. But this looks far more complicated when you try to write it down.

José Saramago, Raised from the Ground

Raised from the Ground, however, does not reduce itself to being a mere portrait of poverty. In capturing the story of the Mau-Tempo family, Saramago examines the elements and the factors that have given rise to their circumstances. He captures a profound reality that persists even in the contemporary: the poor are constantly being exploited. The poor are unable to get out of their station because they are oppressed, even by the systems and institutions that are supposed to assist them and safeguard their welfare. They are unable to make ends meet and they also cannot own any property. The Portuguese countryside is divided into latifundios, vast, landed estates, much like the Spanish haciendas. The latifundios are passed down from one generation to another while the landowners conspire in cartels.

The cartels ensure that the poor remain poor, keeping them ill-fed and not earning enough to make it through. Their employees as dispensable. Their basic rights and needs are dismissed. Further, the landowners have no qualms persecuting, even to the brink of violence, those who choose to raise their voices and objections against a system that oppresses them. For instance, when four workers decided to quit their temporary jobs due to inhumane conditions, they found themselves being arrested for inciting a strike. They were arrested even before they reached their village, underscoring the great reach of the landowners’ influence; they also held control of the police defenders who served as their brutal enforcers. Any calls for genuine reforming of the system are immediately quelled. The inequity allows the rich to keep getting richer while the poor are stuck in the quagmires of poverty.

Exacerbating the situation of the peasants was the Catholic Church. It was neither charitable nor empathetic to the peasant’s plight. They provided neither solace nor support for those who were in dire need. The complicity of the Church made some of the denizens turn their back on them. This is a heritage that trickles into the contemporary as the Portuguese church, despite being a Catholic-majority country, has one of the lowest attendance in the world. Rather than offering support to the needy, the Church kowtowed to the wealthy landowners, even conducting private masses in the homes of the affluent. The Church was as contemptible as the landowners. In Raised from the Ground, the local priest, who was also an alcoholic, further took advantage of the poor by running the local grocery store.

Meanwhile, radical changes were sweeping across the nation. The monarchy was overthrown and replaced by a democracy, which was soon supplanted by a dictatorship. Saramago astutely weaves politics into the narrative, showing how it inevitably encroaches upon the lives of the Mau-Tempo family. At one point, João is hauled off to a prison in Lisbon after being betrayed by a fellow villager who falsely accuses him of distributing political pamphlets—ironically, João cannot even read. He is beaten and tortured, imprisoned without trial, and then, as abruptly as he was arrested, released without explanation. Workers, stripped of agency, are also forced onto trucks to attend anti-Communist rallies in support of Salazar and the Spanish nationalists. Violence ensues. Yet ultimately, politics and the sweeping changes across the country prove inconsequential to the peasants in the countryside. Without meaningful reform, their circumstances remain virtually unchanged. Regardless of who holds power, they must continue to toil endlessly.

The family grows, even though many children die of diarrhoea, dissolving in their own shit, poor little angels, snuffed out like candles, with arms and legs more like twigs than anything else, their bellies distended, until the moment comes and they open their eyes for the last time to see the light of day, unless they die in the dark, in the silence of the hovel, and when the mother wakes and finds her child dead, she starts to scream, always the same scream, these women whose children have died aren’t capable of inventing anything, they’re speechless.  As for the fathers, they say nothing and, the following night, go to the taberna looking as if they’re ready to kill someone or something.  They come back drunk, having killed nothing and no one.

José Saramago, Raised from the Ground

Beyond the political and historical contexts, it was palpable how the characters were in constant interaction with the crops, the wildlife, and the earth itself. The fields and woods that surround the tiny village in which the novel is primarily set are vividly and deftly captured by Saramago. It is from this proximity and intimate connection with the land that the novel derives its title. This bond with the land—and how it sustains those who rely on it before those who toil upon it eventually rise to seize their freedom and dignity—is reminiscent of fellow Nobel Laureate in Literature Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth. Still, Raised from the Ground, with Saramago’s flair for irony, is a distinctly unique work, containing the strokes of brilliance that would be further developed in his later works.

Raised from the Ground is indeed a unique literary experience that invites readers into the world of Saramago. The autobiographical details add depth and nuance, further complemented by the lyrical beauty of Saramago’s prose. While it was inspired by his family, in the story of João Mau-Tempo, Saramago offers readers an intimate glimpse into his nation and its tumultuous contemporary history. By integrating elements of politics, history, and rural life, he paints a vivid portrait of peasant life in twentieth-century Portugal while examining the forces that produce such atrocious conditions and the barriers that have long prevented social mobility. What makes the novel soar, however, is the resilience of its characters. Despite the oppression, they manage to rise above it. Their indomitable spirit—grounded in the very soil that binds them—is what ultimately elevates Raised from the Ground.

Since they were born to work, it would be a contradiction in terms for them to have too much rest.  The best machine is always the one most capable of continuous work, properly lubricated so that it doesn’t jam up, frugally fed and, if possible, given only as much fuel as mere maintenance requires, and, in case of breakdown or old age, it must, above all, be easily replaceable, that’s what those human scrapyards known as cemeteries are for, or else the machine simply sits, rusting and creaking at its front door, watching nothing at all pass by or else gazing down at its own sad hands, who would have thought it would come to this.

José Saramago, Raised from the Ground
Book Specs

Author: José Saramago
Translator (from Portuguese): Margaret Jull Costa
Publisher: Vintage
Publishing Date: 2013 (1980)
Number of Pages: 387
Genre: Historical

Synopsis

This early work is deeply personal and Jose Saramago’s most autobiographical, following the changing fortunes of the Mau-Tempo family – poor, landless peasants not unlike the author’s own grandparents. Saramago charts the family’s lives in Alentejo, southern Portugal, as national and international events rumble on in the background – the coming of the republic in Portugal, the First and Second World Wars and an attempt on the dictator Salazar’s life. Yet nothing really impinges on the farm labourer’s lives until the first strings of communism.

About the Author

To learn more about the awardee of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature, José Saramago, click here.