What we, Azoreans have known!

Posted by Ric Oliveira on Feb 7, 2012 in Blog Posts, Ric's Rants | 4 comments

There are many things primal about Azorean culture.

Shortly after their discovery, they began to be populated. For centuries, the islands were marked by agrarian and the oceanic ways. It was by the graces and torments of the Mid Atlantic Gulf Stream that they were found, bound and called home.

Over the years, many kinds of people settled in the islands, Genoan, Portuguese, Jewish, Swiss, French, African, Bermudan refugees, and anyone else who traveled halfway across the Atlantic and decided to call it home. For some it was a chance at a new life. We don’t know too much about why they all went there. We know they brought influences from all around the world to the islands and they over time were melded into the culture we know as Mid-Atlantic Islanders.

The land and the sea play pivotal backdrops throughout this culture. Whether it is the green islands flora – a constant reminder of the richness of the volcanic land, or the never-ending ocean that surrounds and remind everyone how small the islands really are.

The land and sea were the basis of survival for generation of Azoreans, who farmed, milked, and fished  to exist.

One of my mom’s sayings always struck me. I was maybe 8 or 9, but upon frolicking at Goosewing beach, my mother cautioned me in her best Azorean, “when you enter the ocean , you enter the foodchain.”

It was one of those things that stuck to me like glue. I don’t know how far back, that line goes, but it gave me the sense of ancient islander experience.

My father, who was not one for many words, always spoke of plants as those which rob the soil and those which “da” or give.

“Like people, you have to deal with the ones that rob,” he would say muttering the Portuguese word for potatoes.

I know my father never took chemistry (LOL), not unless they offered it in second grade. He didn’t read it in a book. He knew the land.

And while he taught me much about land and animals, I will struggle to pass on all of the Azorean wisdom of the land and seas to my children.

For our children, who call our moms and dads, Avo or Vavo, how much of the knowledge that we have carried in our genes for centuries will die with us?  We, become the last one’s standing holding the age old sail of knowledge, all rolled up in a ball of dust.

I will give it a good try and I will take them hiking and fishing, but I can’t offer them even as much as I had to learn from.  I have no farm (for them to experience how to raise every barnyard animal known to man) on my block.

They will never have the language well enough to hear and understand my mom’s old songs about the ups and downs of the village.

Yet, this goes beyond language. It goes to the primal knowledge of what people a hundred years ago all knew how to do, and few of us, or our kids, will even know -what it is that could have been known.