“No one ever said it was gonna to be easy…”

I Want You by Inspiral Carpets

So, my Portuguese residency card finally arrived on a moped after several weeks of concerned waiting and some hunting. Emails to SEF that got mildly more insistent, constant checking of the letterbox, even getting a friend to visit the post office and ask her acquaintance who works there to interrogate the system and postman – who remembered delivering Michelle’s, and was equally clear mine had made no appearance. Two weeks later it arrives, but with the same issue and renewal dates as Michelle’s, which is oddly annoying.

Visiting the immigration office in Porto before Xmas for our Stage Two residency interview that approved our stay and generated our biometric cards was an interesting experience. The diversity of people awaiting interviews or guidance made it feel like the world was coming to Portugal. Besides ourselves there were families from Ukraine and Hong Kong, individuals from Nepal, a young couple from South Africa – he had Portuguese heritage – who were wanting to escape what they said was the increasing instability and violence in that country; a smattering from South America, and many people from Portugal’s former colonies in Africa.

What struck me when we got into the office to have our interview was how open and public it all was. Just desks crammed in, applicants shoulder to shoulder, an IT system that kept going down with a resigned shrug and patience from the staff, and a convivial atmosphere of assistance. There was a sense of wanting to make things happen, not to put up barriers. A welcoming, helpful, problem-solving supportiveness. Indeed, during one of the IT outages I got into a conversation with the guy processing us about football and trying to get tickets online, so he took me through the process for FCP on his phone. Strangely more affordable than Braga. What he did say, without prompting, was that the process is simpler for us because we are European, and there remains an historical connection between Portugal and Britain. In plain language, he was clear that coming from the Americas (though I don’t think he meant the USA, there is almost an exodus from there to here for stated reasons of safety, quality of life and healthcare, and tolerance and acceptance of identity) or anywhere in Africa made getting residency harder. This had ripples of fortress Europe about it, a hierarchy of immigration, a version of white privilege, of being in a throng but also prioritised through it. An immigrant, yes, but not that kind of immigrant. So, the colonial connections of history and shared language – the people from Africa were all able to operate in Portuguese – were placed beneath being European. An assumed connection because of continent, country, culture about the self. There is an echo here of the Brexit obsession with the Anglosphere and Empire 2.0.

Inevitably this process throws up questions about the personal. Migration can question whether you know who you are, and tests the self against external criteria. Is how you think you see the world viable? Will it need to change, Reprioritise? Can it? Indeed, do you want it to? Does migration, living in another culture, lose or grow who you are? Does it divide or complement you? How much of your identity is an imagined thing? Both Antunes, in his writing about his experiences of dislocation and loss of self upon returning to Portugal after fighting in the colonies, and Cardoso and her work on being a returnee from Angola post-revolution and having that sense of not being accepted nor belonging, explore the issues poignantly. To be fair, arguments and debates about these things have been banging around my head for decades, and I remain in confusion so don’t expect any clarity here!

Identity and belonging. Immigrant status questions both. Are you an outsider, adjacent? Being here raises issues around how you sense community and access, at the ground level, daily culture. That is a lived experience, not an easily purchased life accessory. But then this isn’t a new feeling, it’s a constant so being in Portugal merely reprises what was felt being in England. Being Welsh in England never created a sense of belonging, always a sense of being out of place. And always the underlying atmosphere of being there on sufferance. Wherever I worked I was met with dismissive negative comments, jibes and barbs about Wales and the Welsh. Initially these would be made to me in the belief I was English – I can certainly pass for English- and when my response made it clear I was not then the comments became both more ‘jokey’ and pointed. The Welsh are untrustworthy, Wales is backward, a region not a nation, with a ridiculous culture and unevolved language, deservedly poor. A country of few achievements, and fewer victories. But then Wales was England’s first – and longest-held – colony. The language banned; the culture ridiculed. And with thinkers both dismissed and denigrated, as the example of Richard Price emblematically shows ( a man who stands at the heart of the modern, progressive world but who was a threat to the English establishment and so had to be disappeared). The economic strength spun into English hands, the population deliberately and structurally impoverished. In such circumstances you can get particular responses. You generate a sense of the collective for survival that expresses itself through communal togetherness and sharing via religious nonconformity and radical, progressive politics. Wales as a working-class nation in all its positive meanings. It’s no surprise that from the Welsh valleys came the NHS. The other response is to migrate, mainly to England where both the money and the opportunities have gone. The very embodiment of Wallenstein’s core/periphery underdevelopment model. That of course brings dislocation on an individual and general level, personal and socio-economic. And rather obviously, victim blaming from the colonizers. Either way, that collective identity sticks with you, it is the lived experience from birth, and it is that fundamental, elemental thing that gives the sense that my orientation is not that of so many of the English I have encountered. And to be fair, I am really talking about the Midlands downwards, and yes this is open to accusations of generalisation. Naturally I know many English people to whom none of this applies, but the sense is that they are honourable exceptions rather than the norm. After all, it is only England that elects the right. And my understanding of my experience is not unique. When I gather with other Welsh people I know living in England, we have a similarity of encounter, story and perception and a recognition of the historical and continuing treatment of the Irish in England. It’s like being an outsider, looking in, or perhaps more accurately like being at an interactive play in the round where you are required to participate without knowing the lines, in a plot and narrative that is already set, where you are a transient tool for the real cast to play with and off you. Given the impression of a role in the action while the truth is otherwise.

But then, aren’t all nations and their identities generalisations? As Benedict Anderson says, aren’t they all imagined communities, and if imagined then they are open to interpretation, selectivity and myth? The patterns and experiences of Wales are similar to both Scotland and Ireland (interestingly recent debate has focussed on why Ireland isn’t considered worthy of reparations like other countries are given its lethal exploitation by England, to which I respond, and Wales?!). Is language a marker of nation? You can go back through political philosophy around nations and nationalism and come out of it none the wiser on that one. Certainly, Fichte and Herder would say language is key, as did Mazzini later on. Hobsbawn sees the imposition of a particular language form by the state as a precondition for the elites that control the state to seek to control others through the prism of nationalism. In Wales, it seems to me, language preservation and teaching is more a form of cultural defence and defiance – we are still here! – and a vehicle for what are considered to be the associated artistic endeavours that somehow define Welshness. In recent times the Football Association of Wales and the international squad has learnt Welsh and sing the national anthem in Welsh. As does the crowd. At the recent European championships, Ben Davies gave an entire press conference in the language, the first time to my knowledge this has happened. The FAW is indeed in the process of applying to the international authorities to change the name of the team to Cymru, because Wales isn’t the name of the country. It’s Cymru, from the old Briton language meaning ‘comrades’. There’s a message in that. The language is Cymraeg, not Welsh. Wales and Welsh are from Germanic origin (and have a distinctly different meaning) imposed by the invaders and usurpers who presently squat on the lands to the east of the current border. How do you understand yourself if the language you use is pejorative about your identity? Language seems defining then, so can I be Welsh with my monolingual English? Well, recent research shows that once again Welsh is in decline with around 19% speaking it. If an individual can be dislocated from their culture or nation because of language, can’t an entire people? Indeed, isn’t this what the English tried in Wales, did in Ireland, exported via colonialism and empire? And isn’t this ongoing elsewhere? In Myanmar, with the Kurds, indeed in many areas contested by states that wish to exploit nationalism. Russian, anyone. The Castilian states attitudes towards Catalunya and Euskadi. It’s a constant from Arctic to Antarctic.

However, Scotland. The lack of a functioning distinct language there has not impeded a sense of belonging, identity or patriotism. Perhaps that is why – despite its origins in 1930’s nationalism – the SNP version can present itself as more inclusive than exclusive, civic rather than ethnic. Not entirely, obviously.

All of which returns me to now, in Portugal. If I am in a Welsh-imagined community, can I be in a Portuguese one? Or would that simply make me a citizen of nowhere, as the right-wing jibe goes? Thing is, being international and outward in outlook does not negate attachment. Indeed, it is those who utilise the jibe who appear to have the least attachment, both in terms of moving their financial affairs away from the beloved country, getting themselves residency and citizenship elsewhere, and being willing to take both money and talking points from other states. We know who they are. A true patriot pays their taxes to maintain their country.

Portugal and Wales seem to share some things to me. Both on the western fringes, a sense of being on the edge. Both with a larger and patronising neighbour. Both with a language dismissed as primitive or undeveloped. Both relatively small, both geographically and by population. Both with a migration drain as poverty was at home and opportunity abroad. An acceptance that the young and able had to leave to get on. Both with a sense of community, the collective, and the importance of the lives of all people – you can see this in Portugal through the statues that are everywhere – but both also somewhat subdued in how they value themselves. Both with distinctions in culture and peoples from north to south. Both with a literature largely ignored by others, certainly in England. Both underestimated, but both still here and distinct. Perhaps the undemonstrative nature of Portuguese pride, and its openness comes from a quiet knowing of self. Is that why so much of England is so loud and belligerently, emptily bullish?

Perhaps feeling at home can be less a product of time and more a sense of fit. Portugal does not feel angry like England. It seems to me that England as an entity does not know itself, something made very clear by Grayson Perry’s recent series. Perhaps that is what happens when a nation/country refuses to have an honest reckoning with self and history. Perhaps that is why migration to England has failed to create cultural collaboration and sharing beyond the obvious consumerist elements. If you are not clear on what is English you might just go for knee-jerk superficial reaction. That of course makes you easy meat for those who wish to exploit nations and nationalism for gain or power. If you are unclear about who you are, you have to define yourself against others. Internal hollowness. In such circumstances to what does the heart attach? If it is the concept of a nation, doesn’t that denote some kind of emptiness of the soul, an absence at the core? Is that why so many nationalists are busy externalising anger, constantly agitated and dissatisfied, seeking antagonism and deriding others? And frequently end up fighting amongst themselves and corroding, corrupting and poisoning that which they venerate in an inane spiral? It is here that nationalism becomes dangerous, and the imagined community a thing invented by elites rather than grown by the people. That is when lines on the map, the delineation of state power, the subjugation of all peoples trapped within boundaries, the casting of some as the enemy within and those outside as dehumanized threats, create a destructive us and them mentality. Always to the benefit of those who control the state and can whip you into line.

Still, if a nation is an imagined community isn’t an individual also an imagined creation? Do we imagine ourselves and then construct a reality to fit it? Does migrating remove the constructs that sustain us? And what if you have always felt adjacent? That is an existential issue. I guess we are in the process of discovering some answers to these questions, at least on a personal level. If I imagined myself Welsh, can it not be sustained in Portugal as much as, if not more easily than, in England? Or will my imagined self take on a differing hue, my Welshness be quietly reframed by Portuguese context? Will swapping my British driving licence for a Portuguese one undermine my sense of self? Indeed, will I actually be able to manage yet another administrative labyrinth, or as of the moment, feel defeated by the bureaucrats?

Told you there were confusions and possible offence. No one ever said it was going to be easy.

Adrian, February 2023

#imaginedcommunities #nationalism #immigration #identity #beingwelsh